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Police Grant Report

I thank the Minister for that intervention. I am absolutely delighted to hear him repeat that this is a matter for the Police Negotiating Board; that was stated last week and it has now been repeated this afternoon. I welcome that statement. If the Thames Valley force takes its case to the negotiating board and is successful, it will be committed to paying that additional allowance. I hope that that will go some way towards alleviating the problem of experienced officers being sucked into the London Metropolitan police area. I should like to make it clear that I am not advocating any additional grant resources to the Thames Valley, but if the force is to retain its best officers, it will need the Minister's support to try to resolve this situation. Its costs the Thames Valley police £55,000 to train each trainee constable, but it has lost 242 officers in the past five years. It would be a drain on any force for those numbers to continue, and this issue is an increasingly difficult problem and a big financial drain for the Thames Valley force. Anything that the Minister can do to help will certainly be appreciated by the chief constable. Thames Valley police has become a training ground for the Metropolitan police, and my constituents—along with the other people served by the force in the wider Thames Valley—will undoubtedly suffer a poorer service if that is allowed to continue. Indeed, the chief constable has said publicly that the force is a very young one, and that it needs experienced officers as part of the overall mix of officers in the area. In addition to the £1,000 uplift for police pay in the Thames Valley force that the chief constable is asking for, there also needs to be an agreement with the Metropolitan police that it will not poach significant numbers of police officers. That would be extremely welcome to the chief constable in the Thames Valley, and I am sure that the Minister will do all that he can to facilitate such an agreement. I would like to raise a number of other financial issues, particularly in relation to population growth. The chief constable has raised significant concerns about the impact of population growth right across the Thames Valley, and I know from my experience of living in Reading for the past 25 years that the city has grown significantly in that time. Of course, more recently, immigration has added enormously to that population pressure. Several years ago, I was briefed by the police in Reading that much of the serious organised crime in Reading was run by immigrants, many of whom were in the country illegally. I would be interested to get an update on that from Thames Valley police, and to hear whether the Minister has any further information on whether there has been any improvement.