Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment she has made of the adequacy of police funding for rural forces in light of geographic scale, response times and organised criminal activity affecting farms and rural businesses.

This Government is introducing the most radical and comprehensive policing reforms in nearly 200 years. We will modernise policing in this country – equipping it to tackle more sophisticated, online, and cross-border crimes (like wildlife crime and organised equipment theft), while also restoring neighbourhood policing.

We are on track to hit 3,000 more neighbourhood officers in March – and our target remains 13k by the end of the parliament. With the Neighbourhood Policing Guarantee every neighbourhood, rural or urban, now gets a named contactable officer and a response to non-urgent queries in 72 hours. Every rural area will also be covered by a Local Policing Area under a commander responsible for emergency response, local crime investigation and neighbourhood policing. They will be set targets to ensure they answer 90% of 999 calls within 10 seconds and attend 90% of the most serious incidents within 20 minutes in rural areas.

This financial year (FY25/26) we are providing £800,000 of funding to the National Rural Crime Unit and the National Wildlife Crime Unit, and we will be providing the same level of funding in 26/27. These capabilities play key roles in helping police across the UK tackle organised theft and disrupt serious and organised crime groups, which can pose unique challenges for policing in large and isolated rural areas.

The Government recognises that there can be challenges in responding to rural crime, which is why we worked closely with the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) to deliver the next iteration of their Rural and Wildlife Crime strategy and sets out operational and organisational policing priorities in respect of tackling those crimes that predominantly affect our rural communities.