[John Bercow in the Chair] — Police Funding (East Midlands)

Part of the debate – in Westminster Hall at 9:50 am on 28 February 2007.

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Photo of Mark Todd Mark Todd Labour, South Derbyshire 9:50, 28 February 2007

I congratulate Mr. Garnier on securing the debate. It is an important subject on which, as he has rightly said, there is a great deal of consensus. By and large, his speech invited consensus—he strayed into occasional political rapier thrusts, but not much more than that.

I want to concentrate on only one aspect of this large subject—regional partnerships and the concrete steps that can be taken to improve their longevity and effectiveness. As my hon. Friend David Taylor has mentioned, the original reasons behind the proposals for a regional force for the east midlands as a whole or for two larger sub-regional forces were the need to address the shortfall in protective services in the region and to try to ensure that resources were redeployed from the back-office functions of the police forces into the front line. That was the theory behind the idea.

As my hon. Friend the Minister knows, I was not a supporter of the proposals at the time, mainly because I felt that they did not do what they said on the tin, as I said to a number of local meetings that I attended on the subject. I would have endorsed many of the proposals, if it had been clear that they would have improved the quality of protective services for my constituents and had demonstrated means of saving substantial sums of money over a reasonable period of time. Neither of those objectives were enshrined in the proposals that we had to consider. A variety of other things were missing, too, but I shall not go into those.

Let me turn first to the issue of protective services. The O'Connor review highlighted the shortfall in protective services in the east midlands. I think that it is generally agreed—I shall refer to an august opinion that I have obtained privately that backs this up—that the shortfall in protective services is greater in the east midlands than in any other part of the country and that its remedy deserves greater priority. That is in part because the east midlands has no large city base on which protective services are likely to have been developed in the past. We do not have a location such as Greater Manchester, London or the big north-eastern cities on which we can base our expertise and where we can have a solid core of experienced officers who are used to tackling such crime. That is to our merit, to some extent. We have not been troubled by the scale of organised crime and terrorism that has been faced in some other parts of the country, and so there has not been the call to develop such services, but none of us is unrealistic enough to think that that could long continue.

We recognise that there are threats among us and from outside the region that we should counter. It is reasonably obvious from an analysis of the region that significant threats are likely to be present—a young man who was educated in my constituency was a suicide bomber in Israel. One cannot say that simply because an outrage has never been committed in the east midlands, it is not likely to happen. I am pleased that the Home Office and the Association of Chief Police Officers responded to the obvious shortfall by putting £8 million of funding into the regional initiative. The east midlands special operations unit, which has already been referred to, is based in Ripley and was established at the end of last year. It has already done some sterling work.

The funding is secure only until 2008. One of the purposes of the debate should be to make clear that that funding is required for the long term and that to expect it to be absorbed into the mainstream budgets of the individual police forces that serve our constituencies is wholly unrealistic. The hon. and learned Member for Harborough has already set out the budgetary constraints that the forces will face in the long term to absorb the impact of the regional unit. It has been established that that is quite impossible and would mean disabling an important process. The unit does not simply address counter-terrorism requirements. As hon. Members, especially the Minister, will know, I have taken a particular interest in cash machine robbery and assaults on people delivering to shop retail units in my area and elsewhere in the region. The regional unit has spent a good deal of time tracking the organised criminals involved in such violent criminal activity.

I have mentioned the august opinions of others. I had the opportunity to speak to Sir Ronnie Flanagan at a private event a few days ago, and he strongly endorsed the need for the east midlands to have priority in securing additional protective services. He made the confident assertion that he could not see how the funding could be turned off in 2008, and I hope that he is right. He is certainly a senior and well-respected adviser to the Minister, and I hope that he has the Minister's ear on that matter.

I have had private discussions with the Minister on sharing resources, and he has complimented the region's forces on co-operating on addressing the need to assemble projects that will save money in the longer term. Most of those who have managed large organisations, as I have, know that reorganisation to achieve substantial savings normally has initial costs. In that circumstance, the Home Office ought to make a budget available to forces that produce high quality business cases for resource sharing and partnership so that they can secure initial funding to start the initiatives that they have researched. At the moment, such resources are not available. I hope that the Minister will take the opportunity offered by the debate to say that such initiatives, which are based on a solid track record of savings in all the east midlands forces over the past few years, will be supported by his Ministry.