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Council Tax Capping (Surrey)

My hon. Friend's timing is perfect. I expect the effect of the re-billing notice on most council tax payers to be confusion or bemusement. If they are aware of the cost of the re-billing to the already strapped police force, they will be furious. Local authorities throughout Surrey will have to reset their direct debits for every council tax payer who pays by that means. Many thousands of people pay by bankers' orders and will have to send off new bankers' order forms, which will probably cost about 20 per cent. of the so-called saving, and there may be additional costs at the banks. That is perhaps the smile side, if there is one, to the re-billing problem, but there is a deeply serious effect. My constituency is a mixture of rural and semi-rural. It has two main towns—Dorking and Leatherhead—and approximately 32 villages spread across the countryside, and considerable numbers of relatively isolated houses in between. In the past several years, organised crime and individual thefts of agricultural property on Surrey farms have cost hundreds of thousands of pounds a year. Several years ago, such crime was successfully targeted by a special police team in Surrey, and following its success, Surrey police set up a single liaison officer for farmers, known as the farm liaison officer. That was a full-time job. With last year's cuts it became a half-time job. I am concerned that, as Surrey police authority looks around for further savings because of the re-billing and the designation, that key officer may have to be drawn back in, and the post may go. Antisocial behaviour is a big problem at the moment. It is continually sprouting up in my area, showing its ugly head in forms varying from general abuse through to shop and household window-breaking. It has now moved on to unlawful purchasing and semi-organised theft, by groups, of alcohol. The latest problem is a series of serious arson attacks in different towns and villages. Generally, Surrey police have been successful in stemming the tide of those activities and acting either pre-emptively or preventively. When that is not possible, there has been an organised attack on the problem. However, the greatest value comes, as was mentioned in an intervention by my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Surrey (Mr. Hunt), from neighbourhood specialist officers. Those individuals are present in the neighbouring police force, where they are also very successful. The Metropolitan police have one neighbourhood specialist officer per 100 crimes. At the moment—before the cuts that will have to be made—Surrey police have less than half a neighbourhood specialist officer per 100 crimes. I have been talking to a local police inspector in one of my towns, which is having a lot of difficulty from three dozen or so youths, who work either in groups or gangs. The most likely effect of capping is that the inspector may have to reduce the number of front-line neighbourhood officers following the capping and re-billing.