Police

Tobias Ellwood Excerpts

Wednesday 12th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Richard Drax (South Dorset) (Con)]

I am grateful to be called to speak in this debate, and it is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears). My tone will be as balanced as hers and that of the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), who made a very thoughtful speech, as he always does.

The Minister, who has kindly sat through all the speeches, has heard me speak before about the issue I am going to raise. I hope he does not raise his eyebrows to the roof and say, “Oh dear, here comes Drax again”, but I am afraid I am going to raise it anyway because my job is to stand up for my constituents and for my police force in Dorset, which does an outstanding job. I pay credit to the outgoing chief constable, Martin Baker, who has been replaced by an another outstanding chief constable, Debbie Simpson. They have both galvanised Dorset police. They have collaborated and they have saved: they have done everything they could in the years before this spending review came in and since. We are now down to the bone. I will be parochial in the sense that I will focus my comments on Dorset police and not the police nationally.

I am grateful to our new police and crime commissioner, Martyn Underhill, for a lot of the information that I am going to give—I say “a lot”, but it is not that much and I will not take long—and I concur with his views and concerns. First, it is only fair that I praise the brave men and women of Dorset police; everyone who has spoken has done likewise. We cannot overestimate the courage that these men and women continually show to keep us safe on the streets and at home. While we are all tucked up in bed, many of them are out patrolling the streets at night and tackling some pretty ferocious people while armed with not much more than a protective jacket and occasionally with a Taser if needed.

The comprehensive spending review indicated or demanded savings of 20%. As we have heard, savings across all forces in 2014-15 will be 3.3%. For Dorset, that means a loss of £3.1 million. As has also been mentioned, taking into account the top-slicing in such areas as the police innovation fund and the Independent Police Complaints Commission, Dorset must make savings of 4.8%, which equates to well over £4 million. The point for the Minister is that that will once again place Dorset at the bottom of the pile. I simply cannot repeat it enough. I shall say it again—at the bottom of the pile.

Last year, the formula funding per head in Dorset was the lowest in the land. The needs-based funding formula for policing, which is supposed to determine how much each area receives, has never been properly implemented. Since 2010, Dorset police has been short-changed to the tune of £11 million. In real terms, the figure is a lot more. Last year, Dorset lost more officers and staff in proportion to other forces across the country—a full 6%. During the entire period of the CSR, Dorset will have lost 400 posts.

Whenever I mention or hear the dreadful word “damping”, I cannot help thinking of that awful thing that creeps up from the floor, ruins the walls and costs people a fortune in redecorating their house, but that is the technical jargon. Under damping, each force faces the same reduction in core Government funding in 2014-15, which will exacerbate the inequities that already exist in Dorset.

Let me say to the Minister—if he will stop talking to his Whips—that this situation in Dorset simply cannot go on for ever. Because of its size, topography and population centres, Dorset faces unique police challenges. The county is almost evenly split, with one half living in a large conurbation, and the other half scattered across rural communities. The two halves require substantially different forms of policing. In addition, we have tourism and the night-time economy. I know that many other constituencies have them too, but I am proud to say that Dorset is one of the most beautiful counties in the country. We attract 14 million tourists every year. The thriving night-time economy has grown, as it has in so many other parts of the country, and it requires a significant police presence all year round. One would have thought that those two aspects would be included in a common-sense funding formula, but they are not.

I was a journalist at the BBC in Dorset for some 10 years and I have spoken—often off the record—to the police wearing a different hat. From talking to officers on a busy Friday night, I know that they are very thin on the ground. There is no doubt about that. Although crime is down, which I of course welcome, the reality away from this place—we are sitting very comfortably on green Benches—is that brave men and women are out there at 3 o’clock in the morning facing the thousands of people, who are often out of control and drunk, coming out of nightclubs and bars. There are very few officers to tackle those thousands of people.

Over the years, I have been told that because there are so few police officers, they dare not get too involved in many incidents, as that would require two or three officers to go back to the cells, and they simply cannot afford to reduce their numbers on the ground. The logical conclusion is that a situation must get very bad before the police will physically intervene, because they do not have the numbers to deal with it. That is not their fault; in such situations, they simply do not have the numbers on the ground.

The formula originally evolved on the basis of a reasonably even level of council tax across the counties and parity in the policing that was delivered. It no longer works. It is perhaps blindingly obvious that a formula that gives one force 80% of its money from central Government and others, such as Dorset, less than half does not stand up to scrutiny.

[Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)]

I apologise for joining the debate late, Madam Deputy Speaker.

My hon. Friend makes an important point about the effect of the manning formula in places such as our constituencies in Dorset. Does he agree that the manning formula needs to be reconsidered to take account of the number of visitors who come to a place? Bournemouth swells by 15,000 or 20,000 people on a Friday night. That is not taken into consideration, and it places excess pressure on the limited number of police.

[Richard Drax]

I concur entirely with my hon. Friend. Because there is a demand for more officers at busy times, such as weekends, those officers are not available on other days of the week. Although there is less crime during the day and in the week, it is equally important that police officers are seen at those times.

Council tax can no longer be increased to pay for grant shortfalls. The recent changes by the Department for Communities and Local Government capped increases at 2%. Due to the shortfall in moneys from central Government, Dorset police has set its precept at 1.96% for 2014-15. Surveys of the public show that they generally support that. Mr Underhill and the chief constable are trying to maintain a balance between sustaining a viable police force and not overburdening the taxpayer. The rise will cover essential expenditure, including on 16 extra police officers, seven rural community vehicles, 300 body-worn cameras and a campaign to make people more aware of cybercrime.

The right hon. Member for Leicester East mentioned technology. Although everyone in this House recognises the value of technology, I have some advice for the Minister. I have many friends in the armed services who went to Iraq. There was a huge reliance on the technology that we and the Americans had, but there was no intelligence from people on the ground or “human int.”, as it is called. The result is there for all to see. The west did not understand what was happening on the ground or the consequences of invading a country such as Iraq.

I am sure that there is no intention to invade Dorset, but I draw the comparison because human int. is the key to a successful police force and, more importantly, to tackling crime. Nothing beats seeing police officers on the ground in our constituencies. It happens too rarely, but through no fault of the officers. In the Army, we patrolled around Northern Ireland in groups of 12, day and night. Like police officers, my soldiers brought back valuable information about what they had seen or heard and about what the local hoods were doing, who they were with, what pubs they were visiting and whether they were happy or sad. Such information is crucial in everyday policing.

Unlike the rest of local government, which received a two-year settlement, the police have a provisional finance settlement only for 2014-15. We thought that that would be the last year of savings. I am concerned that they are now likely to continue until 2017-18. It is estimated that Dorset will have to make savings of 3.7% in 2015-16 and 3.5% in each of the following two years, so annual funding will fall from £114.3 million last year to £108.7 million in 2017-18.

The future is bleak in Dorset. I do not like to be negative because I am an optimist. Dorset police is doing everything that it can, but we have been at the bottom of the pile for a long time and the funding formula is grossly unfair to us. Dorset police has identified potentially serious funding problems in 2016-17. Mr Underhill arrived in post and immediately had to face savings of £10 million. He described Dorset police as

“already stripped to the bone.”

Crime figures have fallen nationally and I welcome that—we all do—but calls for assistance and the number of incidents have risen. Despite those pressures, Dorset police has still earned one of the highest levels of public confidence of any police force in the country. But, Minister, enough is enough. For too long, Dorset police has been expected to do more with less. Dorset residents pay the same as, or more than, everyone else in the country, yet they are rewarded with gratuitously low levels of funding for their police. It is to the force’s enduring credit that they have managed so well for so long on so little.

I do not necessarily like speaking so bluntly to the Minister, and certainly not from the Government Benches, but I feel that I have no choice because the situation is so concerning. Dorset police has done all it can, and it continues to look at every possible avenue to provide a better service and better value for money. I agree, in part, with the phrase “value for money”, but if that comes at the cost of losing what I and my constituents want, which is to see police officers on the beat doing the job we want them to do, perhaps value for money should be looked at in a different way. Finally, I ask the Minister to rectify our situation now, before it is too late.