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Police Grant Report

On the first part of that intervention, the hon. Gentleman misses the point entirely. I am not trying to be partisan. As I have said, the criteria for the figures were determined by a cross-party panel, and we deliberately changed the entire definition of violent crime. Given that there was broad agreement on that, it is incumbent upon all of us to use the new figures appropriately and not to compare them with the previous figures—and nor, frankly, to shroud-wave and scaremonger to the public in the disgraceful way that the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell has done. The other points that the hon. Member for Peterborough (Mr. Jackson) made were precisely the points that I was making. When I was Police Minister, I clearly did not succeed in everything I did. If I had, the formula would not be quite as it currently is and more of the contribution would be local. Although, of course, we will never reach the stage when the entire police budget comes from local sources, because of the transactional nature of policing and police authorities, we have to move to a system beyond the current formula. The hon. Gentleman is also wrong on another point; the needs-based formula we have is far more responsive to the factors he mentioned than the system prior to 1997. I agree, however, with his broader point about the Government in general not responding to changes on the ground as quickly as they might—and that will not change if, heaven forbid, the colour of the Government changes—and about how that links in with various formulae allocations not being as they should be. That is in part because the creaky old Whitehall machinery is not responsive enough to the massive and almost instant changes that are happening in Peterborough and elsewhere; changes that used to take five or 10 years to happen fully now happen in three or six months.