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Police

Of all the fatuous points that the Minister has made so far, that was one of the most fatuous. Of course the police precept is an element of council tax, and it is absurd to claim otherwise. The Minister raised the specific issue of the neighbourhood policing fund. I have here a letter sent by the head of the Association of Chief Police Officers, Ken Jones, when the Minister announced the so-called flexibilities in the fund. He wrote:"““The Home Office have now decided that only £35 million of the £105 million is to be returned to us. I am urgently seeking clarity as to the destination of the £70 million and whether the £35 million is available year on year or is a one off grant.””" Where has that £70 million gone? It has been cut from the neighbourhood policing fund; if the Minister can tell me where it has gone, I shall be grateful. As for the £35 million that remains, as I told the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood), the Home Office has decided to allocate £20 million to the Metropolitan Police Service. That leaves just £15 million to be distributed to forces across England and Wales. The Government like to dress this up as flexibility, but in the words of the president of ACPO,"““Being given the flexibility to manage decline is not a position we have sought.””" In the same way, the Government announced changes in the crime fighting fund and said that those amounted to new flexibilities. Actually, ““announced”” is not the right word, because the Government have signally failed to make that announcement to the House despite repeated requests from Conservative Members. The Association of Police Authorities instructed its members not to obtain any publicity for the change. As a consequence of this ““flexibility””, it is possible that police numbers will fall in the future, something that would have been prevented in the past by the tight operation of the crime fighting fund. Conservative Members welcome flexibility if it is to be used sensibly, for instance to release front-line police officers from administrative tasks that they should not be performing and return them to the beat where the public want to see them. The fear is, however, that as a result of the freezing of the Home Office budget and tight future financial settlements, that will not happen. Only yesterday, we learnt that police officer numbers had fallen by 173 between March and September last year. The significant element is not that they fell by that small amount, but that this may be the beginning of a worrying trend. As the president of the Police Superintendents’ Association has said,"““This is a trend we will see continue because the financial position for forces is very serious. The only way they can balance the books is to lose staff.””" That echoes concerns expressed by forces and by ACPO.