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Council Tax Capping (Surrey)

It is a pleasure to be down here, for a change, rather than where you are, Mr. Fraser, and able to make a speech in Westminster Hall. Until the Government set up the Greater London authority, the whole of my constituency was part of the Metropolitan police district. The Government argued that my constituents would get better policing and feel more comfortable with a county constabulary than by being policed by London. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Woking (Mr. Malins), I believed and supported them. Years later, I find myself having to say that what is being delivered, through no fault of Surrey police, is not what we would have expected had we remained within the Metropolitan police district. Do not get me wrong—I do not want to return to it—but we were told that the service would improve, but the reality is as has been depicted today. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Mole Valley (Sir Paul Beresford), who introduced this debate, I have long experience of local government and have watched successive Governments introduce formulas, add to them, simplify them, abolish them and reintroduce them, in the fond belief that they can find one that will get everything right, everywhere. But they cannot! There have to be special cases. The worst possible sort of formula is an inflexible one, which is what we are dealing with this morning. My hon. Friend was worried about mentioning common sense. I do not apologise for mentioning it, because I was brought up by a headmaster who would not have more than 12 rules in his school. He insisted that the 12th was that the above 11 were no substitute for common sense. That is the issue today. Surrey faces special problems that the Government refuse to recognise. I shall briefly mention three of them. The first, which has been mentioned already, is Heathrow, parts of which are in my constituency, although the airfield itself is not. Of the 30-odd sites that are checked regularly as possible places from which terrorists could attack the airport, a goodly number are in my constituency. Already, due to the pressures, Surrey police has to get the Met to help it do the job that the Government expect it to do but will not fund it properly to do. The Government are introducing measures to force BAA to pay the full cost to the Met of policing the airfield, but to the best of my knowledge—perhaps the Minister will correct me—no attempt has been made to allow the knock-on costs to Surrey to be charged to BAA as well. Our constituents have to pay for that, and if ever there were a special case, that is it. Some concession must be made for the Government's ever-growing demands for security measures at Heathrow. I am sure that my hon. Friends who know more about Gatwick than I do would advance the same case. However, Heathrow is on my doorstep, so I make that case myself.