Oral Answers to Questions

Ian Lavery Excerpts

Monday 7th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

The hon. Lady has made an important point about the importance of tackling this problem across the board. In talking to the Metropolitan police and in the work that will be done by the ending gang and youth violence team that the Home office is setting up at a local community level, we will incorporate the need to ensure that this work does not simply move gangs on to other parts of London. Funding is being focused on areas where there are particular problems. Hackney is in receipt of several amounts of funding for such projects. I fully take on board the hon. Lady’s point and we will look at it in our further work.

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)]

19. Whether she plans to reassess the police funding settlement for 2012-13.

[The Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice (Nick Herbert)]

The spending review settlement for the police is challenging but manageable, and we will not reopen the debate on the overall level of reductions. As part of the provisional settlement process for 2012-13 we will provide provisional allocations for police authorities, which will be subject to consultation before parliamentary approval.

[Ian Lavery]

Some 16,000 jobs nationally and 627 in the Northumbria police force are to be slashed. Will the Minister look again at the police funding settlement to prevent those huge cuts in front-line services in the police force?

[Nick Herbert]

I have explained that we are not in a position to reconsider the four-year funding allocation that has been made, because we have to deal with the deficit. Opposition Members simply do not seem to understand that. The police can make savings in ways that protect front-line services, as we heard earlier, and we are committed to ensuring that that continues to be the case.