Contribution
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Wishart. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Luke Akehurst) on securing this debate. I will start as he did by paying tribute to our police officers and police staff, who work tirelessly in what can be incredibly difficult circumstances, and who sometimes have to pay the ultimate price. I think all hon. Members have paid tribute to PC Blades, PC Clough and PC Turnbull, all of whom died this year. Their deaths have all been an incredible loss to their families, but also to the policing community and their wider communities.
My hon. Friend the Member for Blyth and Ashington (Ian Lavery) talked about Jess and how young she was. I have met her father a couple of times now. He was a police officer and had just retired when Jess became one. That whole community has been devastated. At all three of those funerals I saw an entire community coming out to support policing, which was incredibly powerful to see. I know that there has been a struggle in terms of people’s confidence in policing. There are challenges that we are dealing with, but in those communities I saw a community supporting their police officers and giving them the respect they deserve.
I probably have the best job in Government. Working with policing is an unbelievable privilege and a joy, but standing here and listening to hon. Members talk about the struggles they are facing in their communities is very humbling and difficult. I hear the message they are telling me loud and clear. Since the A66 crash and the awful incidents that followed, I have met the police and crime commissioner or the chief constable five or six times, and hon. Members as well. I have heard loud and clear, not least from my colleague in the Home Office, the Minister for Border Security and Asylum, my right hon. Friend the Member for Redcar (Anna Turley), about the challenges that are being faced in people’s communities. I want hon. Members to know that I hear those challenges; that is important to say.
I will touch on a couple of topics. The first one is the funding formula, which everybody has leant into in this debate. The funding formula used to be based on many of the measures that Members have mentioned: deprivation rates, crime rates, rurality and ethnicity. A whole raft of indicators went into the police funding formula and previous calculations. When the Conservatives began austerity, they took the decision to cut all forces by the same proportion. That was the point at which the relationship between funding and all the different factors that go into the funding formula was cut. It was still there, in that the proportions were increased—or decreased, in that case—equally, but over time, what was originally the funding formula has lost its meaning, and it has lost its connection to the factors that need to go into determining funding. We are reviewing that. I am spending a lot of time thinking about that process. It is complicated, and we have to get it right. There are lots of different parts to it.
I ask Members to imagine a graph of a certain crime type—let us say violence against women and girls—plotted against an indicator of crime. We map all parts of the country and see what the line tells us. For example, it is clear from the graphs that there is a link between violent crime and educational attainment, so educational attainment has to be an indicator that is part of how funding formulas are worked out.
A lot of work has to go into that. The police put a lot of work into solving crime, as well as their other work. Police spend more than 50% of their time dealing with things other than crime, such as missing people and people with mental health problems. They are working on things that are not what people might perceive as crime. We have to think about that work.
Hon. Members mentioned fairness in relation to council tax and the precept. We have seen our colleagues in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government go through that process, to the advantage of some and to the disadvantage of others. There are always winners and losers in a funding formula review. It is a complicated process.