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Council Tax Capping (Surrey)

The hon. Member for Woking (Mr. Malins) has been here long enough to know that and has, unfortunately, just eaten up even more of my time, leaving me less time to respond to his points. I accept that much of Surrey police authority is probably excellent, as the hon. Member for Guildford (Anne Milton) has said, but, sadly, its financial arrangements do not fall into that category. I take her point about the Street Angels project, which seems a worthy initiative, and I wish it well. The hon. Member for Woking spoke at some length about terrorism and counter-terrorism, for which there is a separate budget, which has more than doubled in the past few years because the Government have recognised some of the challenges that the country faces in that regard. Much has been said about common sense, but there is no more basic common sense than living within one's means. Why can 420 other authorities accept and live within their means, while Surrey cannot? Every one of the 36 other police authorities could have come here and made many of the same arguments, but they have not. I have heard today that they recognise the challenges that budgets impose on them, but they also recognise their responsibility to stay within budget and make reasonable increases. That is common sense to everyone else. The hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr. Hammond) made some arguments that I simply did not find credible. There were some rather silly and churlish accusations about petty political vindictiveness, but, as I have just explained, this has nothing to do with politics. Surrey is the only billing and precepting authority out of 421 that has gone for excessive increases in two successive years.