Police Grant

Part of Points of Order – in the House of Commons at 5:52 pm on 4 February 2008.

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Photo of Douglas Hogg Douglas Hogg Conservative, Sleaford and North Hykeham 5:52, 4 February 2008

The hon. Gentleman is right. Such measures would, for example, constrain the ability of any police force to introduce new IT provision, because that comes largely out of capital expenditure. Alternatively, a force might find that it had to cut back on its building programme. The hon. Gentleman is quite right to raise that serious issue.

I should like to put a bit of flesh on the generalities that I have outlined. If we wished to achieve the savings in Lincolnshire that will be required in 2010-11, we would have to find a saving of more than 200 officers. In fact—if I can read my writing—the figure would be 275, which is one quarter of the total force. Alternatively, if we were to concentrate exclusively on civilian employees, their number would have to be reduced in that year by 364. Those are substantial numbers.

I want to turn now to the grant itself. I am sorry that the Minister for Security, Counter-Terrorism, Crime and Policing is no longer in his place, although I appreciate that it is not possible to be here at all times. On the face of it, the grant of 3.1 per cent. to the Lincolnshire force is not out of line with the grants that have been made to other forces. It suffers from two problems, however. First, it ignores the fact that the Lincolnshire force is the lowest funded force in England and Wales by at least £11 million, as I have already mentioned. Secondly, it ignores another critical point, which is that, in 2007-08, there was a special one-off £3.4 million grant. If that is taken into account as it should be, we see not an increase of 3.1 per cent. but a decrease of 1.9 per cent., or £1.37 million—and those are all significant figures.

Let me next address the question of what can be done about the problem, given the realities of life. There are only three sources of finance available to the police service. One is central Government funding through the grant; the second is special one-off grants; and the third is the precept. I shall speak briefly on each of those sources.

On the formula that produces the annual grant, ever since I have been a Member of Parliament, from 1979, rural forces have faced particular problems because of their sparsity—and in forces such as Lincolnshire, there is a particular and perverse difficulty. We are very sparsely populated as a county, but there are no large spaces of emptiness. In North Yorkshire or Cumbria, for example, there are large areas of emptiness, where there is nobody around—and very nice it is too, I might add—but in Lincolnshire that is not the case. It is a very large county, but all of it is populated. There are small settlements, separated by a few miles, which may well be true of other constituencies. That makes for a special problem when it comes to policing, but that particular problem associated with sparsity is not taken into account at all in the formula. I would like to see the formula looked into again in that light. I have been calling for that for nearly 30 years, but it has not been a successful call, so I am not unduly optimistic now. On behalf of forces such as Lincolnshire, I say that it is imperative that the formula be looked at again. One has to ask whether that is going to happen in the next two weeks, and the answer is obviously no.

The next aspect is ad hoc funding of a yearly kind. I acknowledge that the Government produced a one-off payment of £3.4 million last year and I would obviously like to see another substantial payment come through this year. However, there is an important difficulty in that, if structural problems are funded by way of annual one-off payments, that fails to deal with the underlying structural difficulty itself. There is, perversely, the additional problem of disenabling police authorities from long-term thinking, as they will not know what their revenue stream will be. It is difficult to take strategic decisions about the force or any police operations without knowing the amount of long-term structural funding. Although I would welcome an additional one-off grant, either the same or larger than last year's, I do not regard it as a solution to the long-term structural problems that I have identified.

That brings me to the precept, which is a real problem. There is no doubt that the Lincolnshire police authority is going to come forward with a very substantial increase in the precept. However, precepts are subject to capping and, even worse in one sense, this will be deeply resented by the council tax payer. Council tax payers will say with considerable force that this is a stealth tax, whereby they are being obliged to shoulder the cost of providing a proper police service in Lincolnshire and elsewhere, which should properly be borne by the Government.

My strong suspicion—I am sorry to say this to the Minister—is that that is deliberate policy. I believe that in many rural areas, it is deliberate policy to drive up the local tax by way of stealth taxes of that kind in respect of those matters that should be properly borne by central Government. It is not coincidence, but deliberate policy. Where do we go from here? As I said, I believe that the Lincolnshire police authority will come forward with a very substantial request for an increase in precept. I do not believe that it has any alternative. It is an unfortunate state of affairs, brought about by a deliberate policy of Government, but I am a realist and I think that the police service in Lincolnshire needs to be reinforced, which will require a substantial increase in the precept. I shall defend that, but I greatly regret the fact that it has to be met.

I say to the Under-Secretary of State that it would be perverse of her and her colleagues to impose a cap on the request that may well be made by the police authority, which will have been brought about by what I believe to be the Government's failure to provide proper funding for Lincolnshire. If that request is made by the police authority, it should be allowed.