Police Funding: Cambridgeshire

Patrick Spencer Excerpts

Monday 6th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Ben Obese-Jecty (Huntingdon) (Con)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for granting this important debate on police funding in Cambridgeshire. It has taken a number of attempts to secure this debate and I am extremely grateful that it will now be the first Adjournment debate of the year. I am extremely pleased to see so many of my fellow Cambridgeshire MPs in attendance and I welcome their timely interventions. Having spoken to several of them about the subject, I know that this is a topic that concerns us all and transcends party politics. Police funding continues to be an issue throughout the county. I made it a cornerstone of my election campaign and pledged to fight for a fairer funding solution.

Last year, Cambridgeshire experienced significant political change, not only in the make-up of its Members of Parliament but in the make-up of its constituencies, with the necessity to add a new parliamentary constituency owing to the increase in the county’s population. Cambridgeshire is the fastest-growing county and, as such, it is vital that its growing population is properly protected.

The subject of police funding in Cambridgeshire has been a growing issue in recent years. Indeed, the way in which our police forces are funded, via the Government core grant allocation and the policing precept element of the council tax bill, has long since led to an unequal distribution of funding across the police forces of England and Wales. Cambridgeshire is the fourth worst-funded police force. The discrepancies between the funding available to Cambridgeshire constabulary and other similar-sized forces becomes apparent when we look at their per capita allocation. In Cambridgeshire, it is only £217.80 per person, whereas in Durham it is £265.17. The national average is £275.20. Cambridgeshire currently receives a raw deal because the police allocation formula that underpins the funding is based on population data that is now hopelessly out of date.

The current formula was introduced in the 2013-14 financial year and is based on the population size of Cambridgeshire in 2012. The county has, as we all know, grown significantly in the intervening 13 years. When the figures are broken down they show that this year, 2024-25, the total budget for Cambridgeshire is £197.5 million. That is split between 56% Government funding and 44% precept. The national average is 66% Government funding and 34% precept. Why will Cambridgeshire residents continue to pick up the slack next year when there was an opportunity to change the formula to better balance that split and reduce the burden by 10%, which would have brought us in line with the national average? Indeed, that £197.5 million is Cambridgeshire’s share of the total budget for England and Wales of £16,575.7 million. It represents just 1.2% of total funding. That correlates with Cambridgeshire’s share of current police numbers. As of 31 March 2024, there were 147,746 full-time equivalent police officers in England and Wales. Of those, Cambridgeshire had just 1,757 police officers, or 1.2%.

The Government have pledged to restore neighbourhood policing via an uplift of 13,000 new neighbourhood police. The pledge was first made by the now Home Secretary in February 2023 but, as I understand it, the recruitment of those officers will not begin until the 2025-26 financial year, and they are set to be recruited over the remaining four years of the Parliament. Will the Minister clarify whether the 13,000 was on top of the police headcount in February 2023, or against the projected headcount in March 2029? If it was the latter, what is the projected headcount for police in England and Wales in March 2029? In November, the Home Secretary confirmed that those 13,000 neighbourhood police would be made up of only 3,000 FTE police, 4,000 police community support officers, 3,000 special constables and 3,000 officers reassigned from other duties.

On the basis of those numbers and the allocation that I established earlier, Cambridgeshire would, with just 1.2% of those numbers, receive 36 police officers, a figure which, spread over the remainder of this Parliament, amounts to just nine new officers per year. Given that we have eight constituencies in Cambridgeshire that is, realistically, just one new officer per constituency, and assuming that Peterborough and Cambridge, as our two cities, have an increased requirement compared with more rural constituencies, we could easily see zero new officers in some Cambridgeshire constituencies.

Additionally, the current plan includes the redistribution of 3,000 existing police officers. As the previous calculation showed, at just one officer per constituency, it is highly unlikely that there will be any discernible difference. While I appreciate that operational decisions are the responsibility of the chief constable, I gently ask the Minister where she thinks that those officers, in an already overstretched and under-resourced force, will be redistributed from?

Before Christmas, I spoke to Cambridgeshire constabulary about the impact the Government’s neighbourhood policing pledge would have. This provides a useful illustration of what the pledge looks like for the forces that have not been properly resourced. The Government have pledged that every neighbourhood will have a named officer. As things stand the town of St Ives—a town with a population of 17,000 residents—has a single named officer to cover it, who is also the named officer for the smaller market town of Ramsey in North West Cambridgeshire, 12 miles to the north and just outside my constituency, with a further 6,000 residents. That same officer is also responsible for all the villages that lie between those two towns: Warboys, Bury, Upwood, Wistow, Broughton, Old Hurst, Woodhurst, Pidley and, I believe, even Somersham, Bluntisham, Colne, Earith, Needingworth and Holywell. Conversely, the same area is covered by two Members of Parliament and more than a dozen councillors. How big an area should one officer be expected to cover?

[Patrick Spencer (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making an interesting point about the reality of policing in a rural area. My constituency has one of the most consistently underfunded police forces in the country. Two misconceptions are that there is no crime in rural areas, and that if it does exist, it does not require the same manpower as other areas. Both those assumptions are absolutely wrong. The reality is that crime in rural areas is down to county lines, trafficking, cyber-crime and organised crime. Can my hon. Friend attest to the changing nature of crime in Cambridgeshire that we experience in Suffolk, and to the fact that rural crime is not easy to police?

[Ben Obese-Jecty]

I concur wholeheartedly with that assessment, and I will shortly go into more detail about the difficulties posed by rural crime, in terms of both manpower and the specifics that simply do not exist in other parts of the country.

No one would consider their neighbourhood to be the same as that of another town 12 miles away. When, in November, I asked the Minister for her definition of a community, I did not receive an answer; I was simply told that more detail would be set out in due course. I therefore hope she will now provide her definition of a community in the context of the size of community that a single officer should be expected to cover. Will she also tell us what additional resources the Government will provide in Cambridgeshire to ensure that their neighbourhood policing pledge can realistically be met by the St Ives safer neighbourhood team and, indeed, safer neighbourhood teams throughout the county?

When I speak to residents in some of our rural villages and communities, particularly those west of the A1 in my constituency, the lack of a visible police presence is a constant theme. Many residents complain that they never see a police officer in their community, and that chimes with the Government’s own findings. According to Labour, half the public have said that they never or almost never see an officer on patrol. Will the Minister explain how the Government’s neighbourhood policing pledge will address the paucity of visible policing in rural areas?

In villages such as Brington and Molesworth, residents benefit from the presence of Ministry of Defence Police. Nearby RAF Molesworth is operated by the United States Air Forces in Europe and, with the vast majority of United States air force personnel living in the local community rather than on base, the MOD Police patrol in the surrounding villages to ensure the safety of US personnel. While that provides a police presence of sorts, local residents should not have to rely on the nearby presence of the US military in order to see the presence of the police.

As a result of the lack of confidence felt by some residents given the lack of a visible police presence and deterrence, those in some local villages have turned to private security firms such as Blueline, which covers the area from Catworth to Hail Weston with monitoring and response to calls or alarm activations from those who pay for the service. For local residents who know that their village will be without any sort of visible police deterrent, that is a sensible option for the peace of mind that it brings, but it should not even be a consideration.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ben Obese-Jecty]

My question on funding specifically is about the way that Cambridgeshire is short-changed by the police allocation formula. I explained earlier that the nub of the issue in Cambridgeshire is the fact that the funding is so out of date. On the growth of Cambridgeshire, which was mentioned earlier, adjusting the police allocation formula would go some way towards filling the gap. It is not just about Cambridgeshire; I know that places such as Lincolnshire, which is even worse funded than Cambridgeshire, would also benefit from the formula being looked at.

[Patrick Spencer]

As we have just had a debate on child sexual exploitation, it is worth mentioning that we are seeing the nature of crime in rural areas change very quickly, and that the challenge faced by police forces five or 10 years ago is not the challenge that they face today. In Suffolk, the reality is that we have a massive problem with trafficking and a massive problem with prostitution. We have problems that were just not there 10 years ago. It is all very well for Labour Members to say, “What did you do about it?”, but we are debating how to meet the challenges of today, not yesterday. Will my hon. Friend speak to that for a moment?

[Ben Obese-Jecty]

I thank my hon. Friend for mentioning that, and he is right about the nature of the threat that is now faced. Aspects such as modern slavery go unseen in rural communities. I can think of countless examples in my own constituency, where individuals have been found in isolated warehouses and barns out in the countryside, usually at somewhere like a cannabis farm. I even attended a cannabis farm right in the middle of St Ives with members of Cambridgeshire constabulary. A number of individuals had been living and working there, presumably under duress. Such activity goes unseen, and increasing the police’s ability to reach unseen areas will be hugely important.

To that extent, I ask the Minister how the Government’s neighbourhood policing pledge will restore confidence in Cambridgeshire’s rural communities, who feel that their needs are not necessarily a priority. In April, the Prime Minister pledged that

“Britain’s rural communities will be protected with the first ever government-backed rural crime strategy.”

Will the Minister confirm when that rural crime strategy will be published and how it will benefit Cambridgeshire specifically, given that we have already established that there will be little in the way of additional resource for the county’s police force?