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Police Grant Report

I hope to say a few words about the county of Surrey, and I very much hope that the Policing Minister will at the end of the debate acknowledge not only that Surrey has a very good police force, but that our county has particular problems. I am quite certain that my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Ruffley), who will be the next Policing Minister, will take a similar line. We have a very good police force in Surrey. It is well led by chief constable Mark Rowley, and the British crime survey assessed that it was the absolute top force in the country in terms of public confidence in the police and local councils' joint work to deal with antisocial behaviour. In Surrey, not least because of financial constraints, we are focusing very hard on local expectations rather than on national targets. We perform well with a low level of funding. So far, so good, but funding has always been a problem for Surrey. I do not expect any Government Front Bencher to talk as positively as I shall about extra funding for Surrey police, but we are in a bad way. A lot of funding comes from a central Government grant, and some comes from the county council precept, but Surrey has historically received one of the lowest per capita levels of central Government funding of any police force in the country. For example, Government funding for Surrey police in 1996 was £96 per head of population. By 2009-10, it had dropped to £93, which is £57 below the national level. That is not a happy state of affairs, and the formula that the Government use to allocate funding to forces does not reflect the real cost of policing our county.