Police Grant Report

Nigel Mills Excerpts

Wednesday 14th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe). I seem to have spent most of my short career as a Member listening to him in the Identity Documents Public Bill Committee and in the Chamber—his tones are deceptively Birmingham-sounding.

I shall confine my remarks to the amending report on the police budget and the reasons why I am prepared to support it, despite Derbyshire’s police funding problems. I campaigned on the need to tackle this country’s humungous budget deficit, and we cannot escape the fact that the Home Office will have to do its fair share of dealing with the problem. As much as we would like the savings to be found from admin costs in the Home Office—and perhaps by addressing the 6,500 pages of national guidance about which we have heard—we must accept that police forces will have to find their share of the cost.

My worry about the approach that has been adopted is that a straight-line saving is to be applied to each and every police force throughout the country, despite the different funding that those forces enjoyed—if I can use that word—under the previous Government. Following my discussions with the Minister about this point, I accept that if he was to bring about in-year funding, he had no alternative but to take such an approach. However, if we are to achieve value-for-money, efficient and effective police forces in the long term, we will need to ensure that each force receives fair funding and to implement the existing funding formula fully, instead of showing what each force needs and then giving it a vastly different amount, perhaps to help more preferred regions.

It is easy for a Back Bencher to accept the need for cuts in theory but then to demand that those cuts do not affect their own force and constituency. As a Derbyshire Member, I would find it particularly easy to cite facts to support that argument—I shall talk about them later—but I assure the Minister that I am not asking him to increase the police budget. I even accept that he cannot maintain the current budget for forces, but I hope that he will implement the funding formula properly so that forces such as Derbyshire get the funding that the formula says they need, rather than a significantly smaller amount.

The Derbyshire force is the 10th lowest spending force per head. The previous Government’s failure to implement the funding formula has cost Derbyshire £26 million over the past five years, and £4.5 million in this year alone. That money could give Derbyshire an extra 200 police officers, perhaps 20 of whom would be in my constituency, with seven for each town. Hon. Members can imagine the improvement that that would make to my constituents’ lives.

The cause of the lack of funding is not that Derbyshire is a low-crime area; I am comparing the funding given by the previous Government with the amount for which the funding formula should provide on the basis of Derbyshire’s crime needs. We have heard a lot about how forces could collaborate to save money, but the problem affects not just Derbyshire, because forces throughout the whole east midlands are significantly underfunded. East midlands police forces receive the lowest grant per crime in the country—£1,459—while the Met and north-east forces receive more than £2,400 per crime. That is not fair to the people of the east midlands, Derbyshire or Amber Valley.

I urge the Minister to address the problem. I am not saying that the east midlands and Derbyshire forces cannot make efficiency savings or do things better—the forces themselves would not say that—but surely it cannot be right that we expect the Derbyshire force to make efficiency savings on its grant of £1,459 per crime when other forces receive an extra £1,000 a crime. Such forces must find it easier to make efficiency savings than those that already receive less funding.

I am asking not for a wholesale, lengthy and expensive review of the funding formula, just that it is implemented properly. I am not asking the Minister to do that today, or even in full from next year. However, he needs to accelerate the progress towards removing the damping process so that, by the end of this Parliament, the police receive their fair share of the funding and can therefore do their fair share of tackling crime.