Police Funding — House of Lords, 2015-11-09
Topic: Law and Crime
Michael Bates (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, with the leave of the House I would like to repeat the Answer to an Urgent Question in another place by my right honourable friend the Minister for Policing, Crime and Criminal Justice and Victims, Mike Penning. The Statement is as follows: "The Home Secretary regrets that she cannot be here today as she is attending an extraordinary meeting of the Justice and Home Affairs Council in Brussels This Government believe that police funding must be allocated on the basis of a modern, transparent and fair funding formula that matches funding with the demands faced by the police. The current arrangements are unclear, out of date and unfair. In recent years, a great many chief constables have called for a new formula. The National Police Chiefs’ Council, the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners and Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary have all called for a revised model. The issues with the current formula are also well known to the House. In 2009, the then Policing Minister, the right honourable Member for Delyn, agreed to review the police funding formula—a review that did not happen. Since then, the Home Affairs Select Committee, the National Audit Office, and the Public Accounts Committee have all argued for new funding arrangements The new formula is what we have been doing. During the last Parliament, my predecessor announced that the Government would review the existing formula. In July of this year the Government published a consultation on the principles of a new formula, to achieve one that is fair, robust and transparent. That consultation closed in September, with 1,700 responses. Since then we have been working with forces to understand what those principles mean in practice to force budgets. Within this process, a statistical error was made in some of the data used. While this error does not change the principles that we consulted on, and the allocations provided to forces were always indicative, we recognise that this has caused concern among police forces. The Government regret the mistake and I apologise to the House for it, as well as to the 43 forces that I wrote to when we shared the exemplification data and launched a second, informal consultation period of the police funding formula review. The Government are therefore minded to delay the funding formula changes for 2016-17, as we had previously intended, in order to give more time to consider their impact. We will seek the views of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners and the National Police Chiefs’ Council before going any further. It is essential that we come to a funding formula that is fair, transparent and matched to demand, but is also one that is supported by policing as a whole. So the Government will continue to listen, and we will consider the next steps in conjunction with police leaders. We will update the House in due course Reform of the police funding formula is something we should all support. Police forces and police and crime commissioners have called for it, as have committees of this House. It is especially important now, at a time of savings, that scarce resources go where they are needed most".