Police Funding Formula
Debate between Sarah Champion and Gavin Shuker(8 years, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Sarah Champion
I wait for that day four years from now. If the hon. Gentleman gives us four years to plan for it, we will come back to him with a proper answer.
Mr Shuker
I can assure my hon. Friend that that was not at the forefront of my mind. She talked about the need for fair funding from the Government and at a local level. One issue I am aware of in Bedfordshire is that when people seek to introduce a referendum to make sure we have better funding locally, the police and crime commissioner must apparently be completely neutral. We could compare and contrast that with the situation in the European referendum, where the Government certainly are not neutral.
Sarah Champion
My hon. Friend makes a very fair point. I am not going to get involved in the EU debate at this point, but parity across all our systems is something we should be trying for.
The police and crime commissioner for my force, South Yorkshire, has said:
“The Government recently announced that there would be no cuts to police funding next year. This was a little misleading. What has now become clear is that the police grant will be reduced by £1 million and there will be no provision for inflation—such as increases in salaries and additional demand on police services, which comes to about £7-8 million.”
The Tory police and crime commissioner for Devon and Cornwall said:
“policing still faces considerable challenges and some tough decisions as we move forward. We estimate that, to break even, we will need to save £13million over the next four years; only then with further savings can we plan to invest in transformation to address the emerging threats with less resources.”
These cuts mean that thousands more officers, PCSOs and police staff will still go. The more serious and complex crimes seen in the 21st century are expensive and time-consuming to investigate, prosecute and prevent, such as child sexual exploitation, terrorism and cyber-crime. These 21st-century challenges demand a modernised, more responsive and better equipped police service, not a smaller one.
Equally crucial is co-operation with other agencies, yet as they too come under strain, the police yet again pick up the pieces. The Home Affairs Committee’s report emphasises that
“demands on the police were increasing due to cuts to other public services.”
As local authorities deal with relentless Government cuts, they are struggling to provide specialist support to victims, to engage in preventive work with communities, and to protect vulnerable groups, particularly out of hours. Sara Thornton of the NSPCC told the Committee that the police were being used
“more and more as society’s safety net”
and that
“after 4 o’clock on a Friday the police are around, but nobody is ever very clear about who else is around”.
In the face of these massive and growing challenges, not only are police budgets being cut, but cuts are being made with characteristic unfairness to less affluent regions. High-need, high-crime areas are shouldering the burden of cuts. West Midlands and Northumbria police forces, for example, have been hit twice as hard by cuts as Surrey. The current complex formula for funding the 42 police forces in England and Wales has been called
“unclear, unfair and out of date”
by Ministers. We therefore welcomed it when last year, under pressure from the police and from Labour, the Policing Minister finally agreed to change the formula. However, instead of improving the situation, what followed was a chaotic, opaque, unfair and ultimately completely discredited review of the existing formula. In the words of the Conservative police and crime commissioner for Devon and Cornwall, as quoted in the report,
“given the fundamental importance of this policy to the safety and security of communities across the country we do not feel that consultation has been carried out in a proper manner”.
The review faced two unprecedented threats of legal action by forces. It was roundly criticised by police and crime commissioners from across the political spectrum. Unbelievably, the shambolic review ultimately had to be totally abandoned because the Home Office miscalculated funding for forces, using the wrong figures. I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East for giving examples. The data error meant that funding for forces had been miscalculated by as much as £180 million for some areas. As the report says, the omnishambles
“would be amusing if it were not so serious”.
It goes on:
“It is deplorable that Home Office officials made errors in calculating the funding allocations for police force areas…As a result of the Home Office’s error, confidence in the process has been lost; time, effort, resources and energy have been wasted; and the reputation of the Home Office has been damaged with its principal stakeholders.”
The mistake meant not only that forces made budgets for the next financial year based on incorrect funding figures, but that they now only know their funding for just one year, unlike local government, which got a four-year settlement. As even Tory PCCs have pointed out, this makes it extremely difficult for forces to make long-term financial plans and innovate on the basis of an unusual single-year settlement, particularly in the context of further budget cuts. As the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee said, to call it a shambles would be charitable.
What have the Government done to rectify the situation? They have secretly consulted their own Tory PCCs, promising to channel funding to those PCCs, who get disproportionately more. Conservative police and crime commissioner Adam Simmons writes in his budget:
“The new funding formula proposals have been deferred to 2017-18…it is not clear at this stage how this will affect the government funding. However, it is expected that this will transfer funding from the urban areas to the more rural, and Northamptonshire may benefit”.
I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) for pointing that out. Will the Policing Minister confirm whether this will be the case? In addition, what commitments will he give to this House, and to the police, that they will never again be insulted with a sham consultation like that seen last year on something so important and so crucial to the safety of communities as police funding? Our police service needs a fair funding formula and a fair funding settlement. This Government have offered them nothing of the sort.