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Police

The Minister was benign and positive during his opening speech, and we were grateful for that, although he reverted to his more usual acerbic self during later interventions. It is perfectly reasonable to say that policing in general is of a high standard and that not everything has gone bad. In my constituency, which is in the borough of Elmbridge and thus in the county of Surrey, the police have a good record. Surrey police work hard and effectively, often in difficult circumstances, and I pay tribute to them and to Inspector Yearwood, who is based at Staines but covers north Surrey and, therefore, my constituency. They do an effective job in often stretched conditions. Policing has other impacts locally, not least through co-operation with the volunteers who man two police stations in my constituency and with the neighbourhood watch. I do not want to paint a bleak picture. Surrey is a safe county. The crime statistics have shown one or two worrying signs recently, but by and large, Surrey is one of the safest counties in the country and we want to keep it that way. Keeping Surrey safe means having an effective and well resourced police service, which is where some problems begin to emerge and where I pick up on some of the points made by the hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart). Part of my constituency used to be in the Met. Under the Labour Government, co-termination of boundaries meant that Cobham, Claygate and related areas in that part of the constituency left the Met and came under Surrey police. For a while, there were transitional payments, which helped. There was also some assistance for Met officers who wanted to transfer to the Surrey force, which was welcome because we received extra resources. However, the Minister should not ignore the fact that now that the transitional arrangements have ceased there are considerable problems. I shall take advantage of the speech made by the hon. Member for Slough and refer everybody to her remarks. I know about the problems and tensions she described, because our area, too, borders on the Metropolitan police area. Of course, some serving Met police officers live in my constituency. One of them recently drew attention to the fact that the Met police would have responded much more quickly to some of the local incidents in Surrey. I am not being critical of Surrey police, but we are beginning to worry about stretch and the ability to respond to emerging pressures. We have an excellent chief constable, Bob Quick—I am not saying that just because he is giving me lunch on Friday, but because there are undoubtedly problems and he is trying to deal with them. He is attempting to adjust services to the problems we face, which is not easy because the public like to see police on their streets. They have adapted to, and now admire, police community support officers; indeed, they expected more PCSOs. However, unfortunately, because the Government have reconfigured some of the budget for the current year, we will receive not the £1.7 million for CSOs that we were expecting but only about £450,000, which means a net reduction of 107 officers. I do not know how many CSOs there will now be in my constituency, but obviously the reduction will mean rationing in Surrey. In places such as Cobham, we have become dependent on the work of CSOs and we were expecting another officer. I paid tribute earlier to the work of the neighbourhood watch and the volunteers at Cobham police station, but they depend on CSOs, so if there are to be fewer of them I want to know how the Minister will protect the county of Surrey. The Minister is obviously a master of the funding formulae, but that does not mean that they are right—only that he understands what they are at the moment. The problem for Surrey is that the formulae are not right. Our county borders on the Metropolitan police area, but we have major road conurbations and supplementary policing responsibilities at Heathrow and, at the other end of the county, extra responsibilities for Gatwick. There are terrorist implications and the police have to respond to that situation and maintain awareness. There are extra pressures when there are special events. In addition, we had the merger considerations with Sussex police. I advocated that the merger should be aborted very early on, but in fact it was aborted very late. The figures are rather interesting. I hope that the Minister will listen to this, because he gave me what Surrey police called an obfuscating answer in the recent oral questions session in the House. The total cost to Surrey of the aborted merger was about £811,000. That included manpower costs; it is higher than the figure that the Minister will have, which is about £560,000. The grant to Surrey police from the Government is about £100,000. There is a shortfall. These things are cumulative. The Minister has already acknowledged to me that the police precept in the county council tax contribution in Surrey is just under 50 per cent. That will soon rise, but over the next three years the underfunding of Surrey police that is estimated by both the police and the police authority is about £18.2 million. There are no ways in which further efficiency gains can be found. Surrey police have already found efficiency gains that exceed the Government’s target. The Government wanted a £5 million efficiency gain; the police have achieved about £8 million. The Minister has to understand that there are severe problems in Surrey that are not necessarily evident. It is inexplicable that Surrey does so badly in relation to the other shire counties. The per capita figure is about £89 and the average is about £107. I do not want him to come back to me with the fact that there are 14,000 more officers compared with 1997. I am not saying that everything that the Government have done in relation to policing is bad. I am saying that we are dealing with some serious problems now. In my view, those problems derive from the fact that, given its geographical position, a county such as Surrey has stresses and strains that are not recognised by the formula. Surrey has problems in raising further money from local people to fund its police force, not least because council tax increases will be capped at 5 per cent. anyway, even if the people of Surrey wish, in a fit of generosity, to pay more council tax. There are issues in relation to the organisation of the police force, not least its proximity to the Met and that fact that policemen and women make a comparison with people who happen to work for the Met but live near them. All those things cumulatively can be thrown out of gear by big problems that might emerge, such as the EU heads meeting at Sandown Park, which happens to be in my constituency. We also get big criminal trials. In one case, there is not a trial but a continuing inquiry into the tragic murder of Milly Dowler several years ago. The culprit is yet to be found. There is also the evident problem that a lot of the crime—particularly the more violent crime—in Surrey is carried out by criminals who come across the boundary from London and then go back again. I ask the Minister please to think of Surrey sympathetically and to be constructive in his responses.