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Police Restructuring

My hon. Friend is precisely on the mark. It is important to establish what underlies all these different proposals to reform different parts of public services: they are all relentlessly driving towards the regional level. It is ironic that the Home Secretary is now promising extra funding to forces that agree to the mergers early, while refusing to guarantee funding to the county forces that understandably remain wary of these reforms. I recall that, when the Conservative Government promised extra funding to schools that were keen to apply for grant-maintained status, the Labour party accused us of bribing schools to follow our agenda, yet the Home Secretary is content to use the threat of withholding funding to bully county forces into mergers about which they have grave reservations. The only difference between then and now is that schools were then only too enthusiastic to take control of their own affairs and secure grant-maintained status. If Conservative policy had stayed in place, every school would have had control of itself through grant-maintained status. That seems rather similar to what is in the recent White Paper, but it has taken a long time to get there. While I believe that the restructuring of police forces along regional lines is foolhardy in terms of financing and operational effectiveness, my greatest concern remains the impact on accountability and recognition of the police force for the people it serves. The reform will affect the relationship between my constituents and their local police. We bemoan the fact that the police are seldom face to face with the public. Over the past 30 years, the personal relationship between the police and the people they serve has been undermined. There is absolutely no way that the proposals will help to overcome that problem. There are arguments in favour of assuming responsibilities at the national level, and the example of soccer was mentioned earlier. There are also arguments for having smaller borough units with specific local duties: to their credit, the Government are making progress on that. There is no argument, however, to justify vast regional forces that have no emotional or logical connection with the populace that they serve. A south-east regional force would not be responsive to the huge range of challenges faced in areas as different as Reigate or Redhill in my constituency, the outer suburbs of the capital, the ports of Sussex and Kent, our nation’s two busiest airports or the vast swathe of rural areas in the south-east. Nor will my constituents recognise a regional force as one directly responsible to a body that they either elected or could identify with. We are entitled to conclude that another agenda beyond the mere restructuring of the police is behind the proposals. The Government are set on regionalising the United Kingdom, taking powers from historic counties and granting them to new regional assemblies. The happy failure of the people of the north-east to support a regional assembly, despite an acknowledged strong sense of regional identity there, does not seem to have deterred the Government at all. In Surrey, the Government are moving the police force, fire service, hospitals and ambulance services to a regional level away from county structures. If the Government’s reforms remove the local education authorities, the county council will become a largely redundant body—and it is surely no coincidence that county councils are rarely in the hands of Labour administrations. The counties are being emasculated to make way for bodies even more beholden to central Government, with no thought for the traditional elected bodies of the old counties and the people who identify with them. The police restructuring is but a part of that agenda and the cost will not be substantial only in monetary terms, because it will make our police even more remote from the people that they serve.