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Police Grant Report

Well, he is here now, so he can make the promise now. I would expect a similar promise to be made from my own Front Bench. If the Minister makes that promise today, I shall be able to go back to Northamptonshire and tell the county constabulary, who will be immensely happy. The Minister can see how easy it is to make our policemen happy, and I hope he will try to do that. There are other reasons why I believe that the funding formula should be changed. As my hon. Friend the Member for Woking pointed out in his amusing speech, we need only look at the book to see how complicated it is, but no formula is any good if the basic input figures are wrong. This formula uses national statistics, and, unbelievably, the Office for National Statistics concluded that Northampton would experience no population growth between 2000 and 2008. I am sorry, but Northampton represents part of the Government's major expansion plan. I am sure that the Minister has been to my town and has seen the thousands upon thousands of new houses. I do not know who lives in them. I know some of my constituents but not the whole lot, and many are relative newcomers. Unless people in Northamptonshire are dying at an incredible rate there must have been an increase in population, but those are the figures that were used for the funding formula. No wonder we consider them to be totally discredited. My good and hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Mr. Jackson) mentioned immigration. As in Peterborough, so in Northampton. We have seen a massive influx of mostly very good people—mainly from eastern Europe—but some of them are not so good, and they place put a sizeable additional strain on our police force. The formula is not nimble and quick-footed enough to be able to take that increase into account. Therefore, Northamptonshire misses out again, especially bearing in mind that the county town accounts for about a third of our population. All specific grants, excluding the neighbourhood policing fund, have been frozen for six years. That means there will be a real-terms cut for Northamptonshire police. Indeed, Northamptonshire's capital grant from Government is frozen at £1.379 million. Specific grants are used to fund activities such as rural policing, and rural policing is especially expensive. I know from all my correspondence and conversations with people from the rural area that I myself live in, which is just outside Northampton, how strongly the local rural population feels that it is not getting a good deal from the police service. The people there rarely see a policeman. It is true that Northamptonshire police have tried very hard to lift the profile of policing in rural areas, but the fact of the matter is that the local population still feels it is being hard done by, and I would put money on that also being the case in constituencies across the land with rural areas. I ask the Minister to look at this issue as a matter of urgency. He has heard that plea from Members on both sides of the House during this debate. I simply ask that when he rises to his feet, he looks at me and smiles sweetly, and says how much he agrees with the hon. Member for Northampton, South and that he will ensure that the change to the formula funding is undertaken and that that will create an easier to understand and fairer situation for constituencies such as mine and counties such as Northamptonshire—and I hope my Front-Bench spokesman, the hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Ruffley) does the same thing.