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Police Grant

Some time ago, it was suggested that Cheshire and Liverpool should amalgamate their police forces. Oddly enough, that decision did not meet with the unalloyed admiration of the citizens of Cheshire. Indeed, their representations were so effective that the plan was abandoned. That area was then the responsibility of the then Home Office Minister who is now Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government. This three-year settlement may turn out to make that not only a pyrrhic victory, but one of gigantic proportions, for the citizens of my constituency. It will penalise Cheshire in no uncertain terms, and I want to make it clear why that is a matter of concern to me. The general public do not understand the relationship between the finances of central Government and local government. They are more inclined to believe people who say, ““We want to dilute our powers from central Government and give them back to the people who are nearest to their constituents. We want local government to take many of the decisions that will affect the policing of the streets and the general level of protection that people have in their town centres and homes.”” Therefore, they do not always understand why decisions taken at central Government level seem in some manner not to chime with the decision to send those powers, and the finance needed to maintain those police forces, back to the areas in which they are so desperately needed. Cheshire will suffer enormously under this settlement. I have in the past made it an important aspect of my debates with local government elected officials to ask them why Cheshire has not, for a very long time, had a much higher police precept. It is essential not to cut at local authority level the money available, but to demand further amounts and make it clear to the population why those sums of money are necessary. Most people who live in certain areas of Crewe or in the centre of Nantwich, and who are there on a Friday or Saturday night, do not have difficulty in understanding the connection between money and police officers on the beat. Most people who find themselves, as the neighbours around my office building did after a recent weekend, surrounded by a sea of broken glass and having been submitted over a long period to real social disorder, have no problem understanding why we need police officers; indeed, they want to see many more. The burden of their complaint is frequently that no matter how much money is presented to them annually in the figures in their rates returns, those officers are not there on the beat. They are told clearly how much the police force costs them, but nevertheless, when they look for the neighbourhood policing about which they have heard so much, they find that it is somehow not there. Yet we are told that for the Cheshire police authority, the response to the Government's provisional funding allocations for 2008-09 to 2010-11 will mean that the grant settlement of 2.5 per cent. will only just cover inflation, and unless there are other settlements, it will result in the loss of 80 police officers from the front line. That is a massive, and quite unacceptable, cut. The police authority has not suddenly come across this state of affairs; it has made representations over a long period, saying that it would be facing a large funding gap of nearly £6 million even if it were just going to stand still—in other words, to overcome reliance on reducing reserves to support level 2 operational demands in the current year, to maintain its commitment to, and public support for, neighbourhood policing, and to support further efficiency. The authority is also aware that it is facing a double whammy. Not only does it not have a suitable settlement to enable it to improve and increase the amount of policing that my constituents can call upon, but it will be threatened with a cap if, for any reason, it succeeds in raising more money than Her Majesty's Government find acceptable. However, in the name of transparency, of which more anon, the Government have chosen to produce a grant formula that, frankly, is no clearer, and is in some ways more obfuscatory, than the ones we used to have. The method does not simplify the system, which was the reason behind its introduction, and it contains elements of notional levels of spend and tax-base calculations. For example, let us consider the formula issues raised with regard to Cheshire police authority. Why is the net relative needs/resource amount per head of population £3.53 in Cheshire and £10.26 in Avon and Somerset? We suffer equally badly when it comes to resource equalisation: 73.9 per cent. of the needs amount is deducted, on the assumption that Cheshire has a richer council tax base. Let us be clear about this. The Home Office is demonstrating a Janus-like ability to say to Cheshire on the one hand, ““You're really just an adjunct of Liverpool and Manchester, so you must be reorganised so as to enable you to organise your affairs through a greater relationship with the city regions,”” while on the other hand it is saying, ““But you have a much higher tax base.”” It is essential to look at the number of band D properties; we will then discover that council tax income is the third lowest in the country. Is it assumed that our council tax is higher, or is it simply assumed that Cheshire can be exempted from all the arrangements made in relation to other areas? In the past, Cheshire was given an area cost adjustment, along with London and the south-east counties, which recognised higher labour and living costs, but the average is now very low, and no longer of any benefit. A completely essential, but somehow ignored, element of policing in Cheshire is the development of attacks by organised crime. The cities that we are told are the drivers of affairs in our area are very good at disgorging their criminal elements on to the motorway and into our county, not least because the more efficient the policing is in the centres of cities, the more the instinct will be to develop organised crime elsewhere, where policing is perceived not to be of the same standard. We therefore require a much more expensive and intensive policing system. Cheshire has always taken a proactive stance against serious crime. We recently brought to justice in our area a criminal with repeated attempted murder and firearms offences after four other forces had failed to do so. That effort alone involved 90 witnesses and cost £200,000 pounds. However, no part of Her Majesty's Government is prepared to accept the cost to Cheshire of those direct attacks from the Liverpool and Manchester areas. Now we have a potential further constraint through capping. It is essential to understand that the missing £9.7 million needed to plug the funding gap will be obvious when we look to the provision of front-line services. The majority of ratepayers in Cheshire are more than prepared to pay a proper rate for policing services. They understand that their enjoyment of their homes and the calm in which they can use the services of their towns and cities depend on the provision of policemen on the beat. That is not an abstract theory, but a demonstration of practical understanding of the pressures on those areas. So far, however, we have been unprepared or unwilling to accept the absolute cost of the formulae to constituencies such as mine and counties such as Cheshire. Many of the formulae were developed in the name of transparency. The Department is good at saying how much it cares and how much it wishes to respond to the interest of individual taxpayers and ratepayers. The Home Secretary has made some engaging speeches about the need to respond. She says, for example, that wherever there is a petition containing more than 250 names, she will take note of the content of the petition. I do not know how she reconciles that with the fact that the 10 Downing street website now has a petition with more than 400 signatures that objects to the division of Cheshire into two bits—but I suppose we all have to have our little inconsistencies from time to time. When the Minister replies, will he give me one simple bit of information? The division introducing unwanted new local authorities has been imposed by the Department on the basis that it will not only improve the facilities but will be much cheaper and more efficient, and will roll us forward to a fantastically bright future. Cheshire county council made a freedom of information request to ask why there was a direct and clear difference between the figures originally given to the county council by the Department and those that were published subsequently: why was no FOI request accepted? If the report asked for by Paul Rowsell, to get an independent assessment by the Institute of Public Finance of the costs of reorganisation, was so strongly supportive of the Department's attitude, why are we not allowed to read it? If someone had said what a good job I had done, I would have thought that it might be a good idea to make that public. Indeed, I might seek to give it to everybody who inquired—but somehow or other, we are told, that is not the case. The draft Cheshire (Structural Changes) Order was laid before Parliament on 31 October, and will create two new authorities with, we were told, annual savings of £16 million and transitional costs of £25 million. Those numbers cannot be recognised from the original proposal to create two new authorities, which said that the ongoing savings would be £30 million with transitional costs of £16.6 million. In effect, the Government are saying that they do not accept the district figures. To put it another way, the headline transitional costs have increased by 50 per cent., the headline savings have reduced by 50 per cent. and the payback period has doubled to almost four years. Before the Department takes even more money away from Cheshire ratepayers and, before it is prepared to accept that we will lose 80 officers on the front line, whatever its decisions are, it should think seriously about how it intends to justify those policies. It may find that rather more difficult than it seems to anticipate.