Police Presence on High Streets

Debate between Neil Coyle and Ben Obese-Jecty

Thursday 5th June 2025 Westminster Hall

[Ben Obese-Jecty (Huntingdon) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Furniss.

I have never seen so many police officers in Huntingdon high street as were on patrol the afternoon that the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary came to my constituency to announce the neighbourhood policing plan. Due to the police allocation formula, Cambridgeshire’s entire allocation of the 13,000 officers is just 30 new warranted officers over the remaining four years of this Parliament. Across eight constituencies, that is fewer than four officers each—one officer per constituency per year.

Presumably, the starting state for the 13,000 is the number of police officers in 2023, when the pledge was made. That was 141,760. In the year to March 2023, we recruited 16,300 officers; in the year to March 2024, we recruited 9,479 officers, a fluctuation of nearly 7,000. What are the intra-year recruitment figures, and how will recruitment targets fluctuate with natural churn?

In March, the Home Secretary stated to me that the redeployment of 3,000 officers from other duties would involve

“redeploying existing police officers and backfilling by recruiting other officers to take their posts.”—[Official Report, 10 March 2025; Vol. 763, c. 678.]

The Home Secretary does not have operational control of police officers, so when will she outline how that will work in practice? Which police forces will be forced to redeploy officers, and how many will each need to redeploy? What other services will suffer while new officers are recruited to take the place of more experienced officers?

In April, the Metropolitan police announced swingeing cuts as a result of pressures from the Chancellor’s Budget. The Royal Parks police is being disbanded, as are officers in schools; the dogs unit is being slashed by 7% and the mounted branch by 25%; the MO7 taskforce, which tackles moped and e-bike robbers as well as gang-related crime, is being reduced by 55%; and cold case investigations are to be cut by 11%. The Met is also cutting 20% of the flying squad and potentially removing its firearms capability.

Even after a £1 billion cash injection by the Mayor of London, the Met still has a £260 million shortfall and will cut 1,700 officers, staff and police community support officers. In December, Sir Mark Rowley suggested that it might have to cut 2,300 officers. The Mayor claims that his cash injection has saved 935 of those roles, so presumably the remaining 1,350-odd are frontline officers.

Last Friday, six police chiefs went over the head of the Home Secretary and appealed directly to the Prime Minister. They stated:

“A settlement that fails to address our inflation and pay pressures flat would entail stark choices about which crimes we no longer prioritise. The policing and NCA workforce would also shrink each year.”

[Neil Coyle]

I will start with a cheeky one: does the hon. Gentleman welcome the recruitment of PC Coyle to Durham constabulary? One of the new recruits under this Government is a family member—my brother— of whom I am very proud. Does he also welcome the combined £300 million of support from central Government and the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, to the Met to try to address some of the challenges he is outlining?

[Ben Obese-Jecty]

I absolutely welcome that additional funding, but the point that I would most like to make— I have made it previously—is that the police allocation formula, which determines how much funding each of our police forces receives, is grossly unfair. Constituencies like mine in Cambridgeshire do not receive a fair allocation of the overall pot. I will press the Policing Minister: as she well knows, because we have had a lot of conversations about this, I encourage her to revise that next year.

[Neil Coyle]

This Government inherited that formula from the Conservative Government. Does the hon. Gentleman think it is a bit naive to suggest that there is a fair balance in policing responsibilities when the capital’s police force runs counter-terrorism operations for the whole country?

[Ben Obese-Jecty]

I believe that it is remunerated budgetarily in order to cover that.

[Neil Coyle]

Not enough.

[Ben Obese-Jecty]

But, I agree, not enough, and the police allocation formula would do well to look at policing as a whole so that every constituency gets its fair share of police funding. As we all know, the population has grown, and the police allocation formula is from 2014. I met the last Government when I was still a candidate to ask them to review the formula, and I press the new Government to do the same.

[Neil Coyle]

How did that go?

[Ben Obese-Jecty]

They did as much work on it as the hon. Gentleman’s Government have.

That reduction in police strength comes before we consider the fact that the numbers that the Home Secretary based her calculations on were completely wrong in the first place, as the Government announced, very quietly, on 19 March. Of the 43 forces in England and Wales, 29 advised that their published combined neighbourhood officer and PCSO numbers should be revised down. That resulted in an overall downwards revision of 2,611 compared with the figures published last year. In total, that, plus the 1,350 from the Met and the 7,000 annual fluctuation, means that the 13,000 figure looks a lot more like 24,000. Can the Minister outline why the baseline figure of 13,000 has not been revised since it was first announced in February 2023—even to account for the shortfall caused by miscounting?

The general public deserve to have police that are resourced to protect the communities they serve. My constituents deserve to have their fair share of police officers, not a token amount based on a police allocation formula that is years out of date.