Police Funding

Whoever you are and wherever you sit on the political spectrum, there is broad agreement that the structural deficit which the country has been running was unsustainable. Anyone who runs a household budget knows that you have to live within your means. Every political party at Westminster now agrees. This agreement masks a harsh reality about the cuts which have already been made and those which are to come however. Since 6th May, I have been focussed on how those cuts are going to affect us here in Lincolnshire. Don't get me wrong - I am not asking that we should receive special treatment. But I do say, as I said throughout the general election campaign, that it is about time we got our fair share of whatever resources there are. It's not about a bigger cake. It is about how you divide what cake there is. Last week, MPs debated the police grant for this year. Some of us have also sought to open up the question of the money which is going to be available for the police in the coming years. To be able to argue our corner, I had the opportunity to meet with Richard Crompton, our Chief Constable, as well as with Cllr Barry Young, who chairs the Police Authority. What they told me came as no real shock, though it is shocking. So stand back and digest the following: here in Lincolnshire, with all our problems of a sparse population and a huge rural area to police, we get a worse police settlement from central government per head of population than any other county in the UK. Why? I have to tell you that I have no real idea. It's something I'm determined to try to change however. To do so, I met this week with the new police minister, Nick Herbert MP. Nick is an old friend. Indeed, he was the first shadow minister to visit the constituency after I was selected to fight the seat. Yet there are no favours from ministers at the moment, even for friends. So I had to make our case on its merits. Putting it simply, under the present funding formula, Lincolnshire's police grant is ‘damped'. That means we get less than we are supposed to under the funding formula, whilst other counties get more. There is no good reason for this that I can see. More importantly however, it means that when cuts are made, we do even worse than we would do if we were receiving the money which we should have had in the first place! This is so obviously unjust that even Nick, as a government minister with hard choices to make, had to accept that we have a case. He can give no guarantees. But he has promised me that the government will look carefully at the funding formula and this ridiculous damping as part of the comprehensive spending review. That, at least, is a start. And I will keep a close eye on where things go from here. As I say, we don't want special treatment. We do want the fairness of which we have recently heard so much.

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