Budget Resolutions

Ronnie Campbell Excerpts

Monday 27th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Ronnie Campbell (Blyth Valley) (Lab)]

As a Labour MP who wants to leave Europe, I am a rare animal. I am a non-believer in the undemocratic way that the European Union has been run for many years, but I do get a bit worried when I think about how we are going to pay £40 billion to leave the place. It beggars belief, and I wonder what is going to come next. Are we going to agree to the rules for another two years? Things keep on coming along.

I want to talk about my constituency and what is happening there, especially to the police. We have had seven years of austerity, and I do not believe that it has come to an end, as the hon. Member for Mid Worcestershire (Nigel Huddleston) said. We are not getting any further forward with austerity; we are in the same place as we were before the Budget was presented.

Northumbria police have had the biggest slice taken out of their budget of any police force. It has been reduced by 37%, or £124 million, and any authority that takes that sort of cut—be it the police or whatever—will lose. Its reserves have been reduced from £71 million to £11.9 million. I hear a lot about authorities having to use their reserves, local government in particular, but they cannot use them all the time. Reserves have to be kept for a reason. The number of police officers in Northumberland has fallen by 900, from 4,187 to 3,283—a reduction of 22%.

The number of police community support officers has been reduced by 244 over the same period. The number of police staff has been reduced by 279, and police stations have closed. It is worrying. We are taking the biggest police cut in the country, and we are getting concerned. I am sure that all the other Members for the area would agree with me, and I hope that they will get up and mention it. We cannot take any more cuts, but I understand that another £51 million of cuts is to come by 2020, when I should imagine we will have no police at all.

On housing, the situation is interesting in Northumberland. We had a core strategy that was put through by the previous Labour council before the elections in May this year. The plan took six years, and we got it in place, but then the Conservatives got in power and scrapped it. It is now a free-for-all in Northumberland, and people can build anywhere they want. When the Conservatives said that they were going to build so many houses in Northumberland, we asked the question and, lo and behold, they are only going to build them on the green-belt areas in my constituency and in that of my hon. Friend the Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery). As for Berwick, Alnwick, Hexham or Ponteland, they are not going to build on the green belt there—oh no—just on the green belt in our constituencies. They will have to start building more schools if they want that many houses built in my area, because we do not have any room in our schools, so I do not know what they are going to do for the pupils in my area.