Police Funding Formula

Richard Fuller Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gavin Shuker (Luton South) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this important debate and it is not lost on me that quite a self-selecting group of MPs has turned out today, all of whom will probably try to follow a similar formula of saying that the funding formula does not respond well to the challenges of their communities. The cumulative nature of the speeches, however, should not necessarily detract from the veracity of their argument. Clearly, across this House, many of us have deep concerns about our police forces and about how they are treated under the current regime. There are winners and losers and, dare I say it, in the Chamber today there are more losers than usual.

I am no different from other Members. For me, the acid test of whether a funding formula is truly fair is Bedfordshire. We have lost 171 officers since 2010, and the number of police community support officers has halved from 108 to 53 in that period. In my community in Luton, where we face all sorts of challenges, the effect of those cuts is that neighbourhood policing is practically non-existent. In 2012 we had PCs working alongside PCSOs in Luton. In other words, we had proper neighbourhood policing. That was true of many other parts of the county too.

The old police authority, looking at the scale of cuts coming through, proposed to remove those officers and to cut PCSOs. When the police and crime commissioner was elected in 2012 he put a halt to that process and protected numbers, but, with £20 million of cuts defined, they had to go. The police and crime commissioner in Bedfordshire has said:

“The impact in Luton is no different from the rest of the county. We’ve had no choice other than to strip away preventative, problem-solving neighbourhood policing everywhere to the barest minimum because the alternative is even worse. But current projections mean we need to find £11 million savings and this may mean reducing the establishment by 44”

in the next three years.

The chief constable, Jon Boutcher, estimates that Bedfordshire needs another 300 officers even to reach the average number in police forces in the country. Why? We are the county with the fourth highest gun crime, the fifth highest serious acquisitive crime and the seventh highest knife crime figures in the country, but we get by on just 169 officers per 100,000 population. To put that in context, the average is 232 across all forces, rural and urban, and the Metropolitan police, about which we have already heard, has 388 officers per 100,000. In simple terms—it is easy to get lost in the numbers—the residents in Luton whom I represent, if treated as though they were, say, 20 minutes down the train line in north London, could expect an additional 482 officers protecting them. That is the scale of the gap.

[Richard Fuller (Bedford) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman echo the fact that the demand for policing in Luton is not restricted to the people of Luton? It is felt by the rest of the people of Bedfordshire, including in my town, Bedford. Bedfordshire is just not large enough for the rest of the county to chip in for those additional requirements in Luton, as the hon. Gentleman is so clearly outlining. Will he emphasise to the Minister, who I am sure is hearing this, that this is not a partisan view of the funding for Bedfordshire police; this is a cross-party view of the specific needs of Bedfordshire police in the future.

[Mr Shuker]

I am extremely glad I took the intervention, because the hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point, which he has made alongside me and the four other Bedfordshire MPs, both Conservative and Labour, to the Policing Minister, who has kindly given us an audience in the past and, I hope, will do so in the future to make the point that ours is essentially an urban force that is funded as a rural one. The nature of Luton in particular and of Bedford and some of the smaller areas to the north of the county, means that there is a huge disparity in levels of crime, especially the crimes that I mentioned. I will continue to make this point.

This is not a dry argument about formulae. Last week I sat in the house of my constituent Mrs Patel. She is a shop owner. Just before Christmas she was attacked, dragged to the back of her shop and cut by a man wielding a knife. That vicious attack has robbed her of her work and her confidence, and has left deep scars not just mentally but physically. There is only one thing more horrendous than the attack on Mrs Patel in her shop: it is the fact that just a few short years ago, in the same shop and in the same way, her husband was violently attacked and stabbed to death. She wants to know why the officers who used to patrol the area where her shop is and where she lives are not patrolling any more. Her son wants to know why it took so long during this violent attack for a police car to respond. He wants to know why the man who subjected her to such a terrifying attack—who put a knife against her throat and who, it was clear to her, was attempting to send her to the same place as her husband—was not apprehended in the midst of it. The debate is not, therefore, just about a formulae; it is about my constituents’ safety and their ability to live their lives without fear of threat.

The argument I advance—that fair funding for Bedfordshire is the acid test for the new police funding formula—is backed up by the context. As I said in response to the hon. Member for Bedford (Richard Fuller), Bedfordshire is an urban force funded in a rural way. Luton and, to a lesser extent, Bedford face vastly different challenges from the rest of this rural county. Despite the obvious electoral benefit of moving significant resources into urban areas, it is to the credit of the Labour police and crime commissioner, Olly Martins, that he has, given the challenges, been able to move forward with plans that still provide for a significant rural presence.

As a community, we face all sorts of challenges. We face down extremism daily. The far right—the English Defence League, Britain First and associated groups—regularly target our town. At just one protest last year, a group of about 150 or 200 drunken men led to a policing bill of £320,000, which had to be picked up locally. Of course, there is also the ongoing challenge of infiltration by extremists of the Muslim community.

We also have to defend major transport infrastructure, with London Luton airport, which is in my constituency, carrying upwards of 10 million passengers a year. The east midlands and west coast main lines pass through the constituency, as do the two principal roads between London and the north. Despite all that, Bedfordshire has to get by on similar police funding and, therefore, with similar police strength as Dorset—we have heard about that already—Sussex and Hertfordshire.

Only one thing that could undermine my argument, so let me pre-empt it: a failure since 2010 to make significant changes, efficiencies and innovations in the way in which Bedfordshire operates. In other words, we could have buried our heads in the sand and said, “The problem is purely the Government cutting spending.” However, that is simply not true.

The force has already made £25 million of savings, and it expects to make another £11 million in the coming three years. Under the leadership of the police and crime commissioner, the tri-force alliance between Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire should produce about £10 million of savings for Bedfordshire alone. A bid is in with the Home Office police innovation fund to support blue-light collaboration with fire and ambulance services. There is increased use of special constables to support Community Watch, and new technology, including smartphones, slate personal computers, automotive telematics and even drones is being rolled out to save money and police time.

At the same time, we have seen increased transparency—for example, through the use of body-worn cameras—which is vital to maintain the community’s involvement and the sense in which they are protected by the police.

[Richard Fuller]

The hon. Gentleman talked about the cost savings between Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire. That is about cost sharing, but does he agree that there is still the revenue that accrues to Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire, which is significantly in excess of the financial resources that come into Bedfordshire? It is such a pity that we are not able to encourage those counties to draw together with us. Would he like to hear the Minister’s thoughts on whether there could be Home Office proposals to push forward greater collaboration and greater sharing of revenue as well as costs?

[Mr Shuker]

Absolutely. There is far greater space for collaboration. Equally, however, there are challenges for a force such as Bedfordshire, and I have not painted a particularly rosy picture of our finances and the challenges we face. There needs to be Government influence over these measures—these things cannot just be left at local level. Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire have had two good police and crime commissioners who have been keen to work with Bedfordshire and have made really decent strides in doing so. Ultimately, however, they are accountable to their own residents for making sure that they get the best deal possible.

I want to signal not only the innovation that has gone on in Bedfordshire but my own willingness to explore innovation on, dare I say it, a statesmanlike basis rather than merely withdrawing into oppositional politics. It is important that through this process we get the funding of Bedfordshire right, first and foremost, and then we can look at further collaboration down the line. The police and crime commissioner in this area has the third cheapest operation in the country. In his first three years in office, he saved more than £200,000 in comparison with the old police authority. This is not a case of a profligate police and crime commissioner trying to make a particular case to Government.

This issue has spanned the terms of Labour and Conservative Governments. Like the Home Affairs Committee, we welcome the Minister’s willingness to engage to get the funding formula right. We are doing all the things that we are being asked to do, and doing the right thing by our residents. Everything that would be expected of Bedfordshire is being done. The acid test of this police formula is whether Bedfordshire and other significantly disadvantaged forces are properly funded, alongside other police forces. It is now time for the formula, the Minister and the Government to do right by us.