Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 10:00 pm on 6 January 2025.
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for granting this important debate on police funding in Cambridgeshire. It has taken a number of attempts to secure this debate and I am extremely grateful that it will now be the first Adjournment debate of the year. I am extremely pleased to see so many of my fellow Cambridgeshire MPs in attendance and I welcome their timely interventions. Having spoken to several of them about the subject, I know that this is a topic that concerns us all and transcends party politics. Police funding continues to be an issue throughout the county. I made it a cornerstone of my election campaign and pledged to fight for a fairer funding solution.
Last year, Cambridgeshire experienced significant political change, not only in the make-up of its Members of Parliament but in the make-up of its constituencies, with the necessity to add a new parliamentary constituency owing to the increase in the county’s population. Cambridgeshire is the fastest-growing county and, as such, it is vital that its growing population is properly protected.
The subject of police funding in Cambridgeshire has been a growing issue in recent years. Indeed, the way in which our police forces are funded, via the Government core grant allocation and the policing precept element of the council tax bill, has long since led to an unequal distribution of funding across the police forces of England and Wales. Cambridgeshire is the fourth worst-funded police force. The discrepancies between the funding available to Cambridgeshire constabulary and other similar-sized forces becomes apparent when we look at their per capita allocation. In Cambridgeshire, it is only £217.80 per person, whereas in Durham it is £265.17. The national average is £275.20. Cambridgeshire currently receives a raw deal because the police allocation formula that underpins the funding is based on population data that is now hopelessly out of date.
The current formula was introduced in the 2013-14 financial year and is based on the population size of Cambridgeshire in 2012. The county has, as we all know, grown significantly in the intervening 13 years. When the figures are broken down they show that this year, 2024-25, the total budget for Cambridgeshire is £197.5 million. That is split between 56% Government funding and 44% precept. The national average is 66% Government funding and 34% precept. Why will Cambridgeshire residents continue to pick up the slack next year when there was an opportunity to change the formula to better balance that split and reduce the burden by 10%, which would have brought us in line with the national average? Indeed, that £197.5 million is Cambridgeshire’s share of the total budget for England and Wales of £16,575.7 million. It represents just 1.2% of total funding. That correlates with Cambridgeshire’s share of current police numbers. As of
The Government have pledged to restore neighbourhood policing via an uplift of 13,000 new neighbourhood police. The pledge was first made by the now Home Secretary in February 2023 but, as I understand it, the recruitment of those officers will not begin until the 2025-26 financial year, and they are set to be recruited over the remaining four years of the Parliament. Will the Minister clarify whether the 13,000 was on top of the police headcount in February 2023, or against the projected headcount in March 2029? If it was the latter, what is the projected headcount for police in England and Wales in March 2029? In November, the Home Secretary confirmed that those 13,000 neighbourhood police would be made up of only 3,000 FTE police, 4,000 police community support officers, 3,000 special constables and 3,000 officers reassigned from other duties.
On the basis of those numbers and the allocation that I established earlier, Cambridgeshire would, with just 1.2% of those numbers, receive 36 police officers, a figure which, spread over the remainder of this Parliament, amounts to just nine new officers per year. Given that we have eight constituencies in Cambridgeshire that is, realistically, just one new officer per constituency, and assuming that Peterborough and Cambridge, as our two cities, have an increased requirement compared with more rural constituencies, we could easily see zero new officers in some Cambridgeshire constituencies.
Additionally, the current plan includes the redistribution of 3,000 existing police officers. As the previous calculation showed, at just one officer per constituency, it is highly unlikely that there will be any discernible difference. While I appreciate that operational decisions are the responsibility of the chief constable, I gently ask the Minister where she thinks that those officers, in an already overstretched and under-resourced force, will be redistributed from?
Before Christmas, I spoke to Cambridgeshire constabulary about the impact the Government’s neighbourhood policing pledge would have. This provides a useful illustration of what the pledge looks like for the forces that have not been properly resourced. The Government have pledged that every neighbourhood will have a named officer. As things stand the town of St Ives—a town with a population of 17,000 residents—has a single named officer to cover it, who is also the named officer for the smaller market town of Ramsey in North West Cambridgeshire, 12 miles to the north and just outside my constituency, with a further 6,000 residents. That same officer is also responsible for all the villages that lie between those two towns: Warboys, Bury, Upwood, Wistow, Broughton, Old Hurst, Woodhurst, Pidley and, I believe, even Somersham, Bluntisham, Colne, Earith, Needingworth and Holywell. Conversely, the same area is covered by two Members of Parliament and more than a dozen councillors. How big an area should one officer be expected to cover?