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Police Grant Report

The Liberal Democrats have clearly said that we would divert money by abandoning particular Government programmes—identity cards have been a long-standing option. At one time, based on the original grandiose costings for ID cards, that would have paid for up to 10,000 extra police. Now the figure is about 3,000. That answer has been given and published before. After a short interim period back in 1997, the Government accepted that neighbourhood policing was effective and one of the No. 1 issues that the population of this country is concerned about—it still is to this day. The expansion of neighbourhood policing beat teams has been very effective. We should remember, however, that some of the glowing headlines that Ministers often tell us about are not the same all over the country. We have heard about the situation in London where, because of the combination of a London system that can raise the police precept without its being capped by the Government and can put that money into the police force along with the receipt of money from the Government—this is a situation that we often hear boasted about—every local authority ward will have a neighbourhood team of six, made up of a combination of officers and police community support officers. That is very effective—I see it, living in London as I do for three or three and a half days a week when Parliament is in Session. However, that is not true in the bulk of the country. Many hon. Members would make that point. For example, my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle (Mark Hunter) has long campaigned on the fact that his area, Stockport, and Greater Manchester in general cannot remotely approach the levels of neighbourhood policing that we see in the London wards. My hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, West (Stephen Williams) has long campaigned on the fact that Bristol, compared with other comparable cities, has one of the lowest ratios of police officers for neighbourhood policing and for all kinds of policing. There are huge disparities. Exactly the same is true of Chesterfield and Derbyshire—those aspirations of six officers dedicated to a team for each local government ward are a pipe dream in many parts of the country. If that is the situation that we have reached at the peak of success and investment, what is going to happen as things start to get worse? Only two weeks ago, I was talking to the beat team in an area called Loundsley Green in my constituency. One of the police officers had been assigned to such things as the police response cars for 17 years and had now switched to beat policing and neighbourhood policing. He said that it was by far the most successful and rewarding part of police work in which he had ever taken part. Instead of rushing to one emergency and spending as little time as possible there before rushing off in the car to the next and then to the next, he was able to get to grips with local issues and to follow up local miscreants. He was able to get to know them, their parents and the people involved and to follow their cases up effectively over a period of time. He could really feel that he was making a huge difference to policing, community safety and community consciousness in that area. It would be a great shame to see that undermined in years to come, but that is the danger. If police numbers are at a high and are just starting to fall from that high, is there a danger that they could start to plummet very quickly? The chief constable of Bedfordshire has pointed out that police numbers depend not so much on the core police grant, for which we get funding for the three-year rolling cycle that we are discussing today, but on special grant funded allocations. That is the case for PCSOs, in general, but it also applies to all sorts of policing. The special grant funded allocations are just the sort of thing on which the plug could be pulled next year, the year after or the year after that. A Government could boast that they were maintaining core funding, with little change, but could pull the plug on the special grant funded allocations. We would then see a drastic reduction in police numbers.