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11.18 am
Mr. David Drew (Stroud): I am pleased to participate in this important debate. I shall restrict most of my remarks to the issue of funding.
The hon. Member for Beckenham (Mrs. Lait) realised that the crux of the apparent contradiction is due mainly to the perception of crime. In the past couple of days, the Women's Institute has referred to the importance of police on the beat in rural areas. However, that is not necessarily the same as catching criminals. We must ensure that we put resources where they really count, and invest in intelligence and the most effective policing, as my hon. Friend the Member for Salford (Ms Blears) made clear. I should be worried if we went away from the debate believing that the contradiction was easy to solve. The Government have got the balance right. I shall explain how that can be enhanced and how it can be made clearer to our constituents that the funding situation is right and reasonable.
I shall restrict most of my remarks to funding, which is at the core of the debate. I have been engaged in correspondence with my hon. Friend the Minister about the needs of Gloucestershire. We shall be having a meeting shortly to discuss those matters in greater detail. It was a little disingenuous of the hon. Member for Beckenham to refer to the pensions problem, because the Conservative Government signally failed to grapple with the issue. They have left us an incredibly difficult legacy. Let us be honest. No police organisation wants to renegotiate the pensions situation, because they could not get a better deal. I may be wrong on some of the details, but I believe that a police constable retiring from the force today after 30 years' service would take about £60,000 in cash, plus half his current salary. With the best will in the world, that cannot be improved by a renegotiation of the pension terms. However, we shall have to deal with that dilemma.
I do not want to speak for very long, because I know that others want to contribute to the debate. Many factors, including the pension situation, affect the funding requirements. I am grateful to the Government for addressing Gloucestershire's funding problems in respect of the number of royal households in the country. The problem with the 2 per cent. efficiency savings is that they have to be found from those areas, as well as from the wider budget. That causes us some grief in Gloucestershire. Perhaps that requirement should be reconsidered.
We need to fund policing properly, but we must also ensure that we are policing in the right way. We welcome the progress on the public safety radio communications project--a phrase that does not slip off the tongue easily--but we have to find a means of funding it, which is difficult. In Gloucestershire, there will be an annual leasing cost of £750,000, which is the equivalent of 40 police constables. I hope that the Government will come up with some good news on that. It is a project that we not merely want, but have, to implement. Gloucestershire has been bedevilled by a problem of hills. The communications network has never functioned properly, because people on one side of the Cotswolds cannot communicate with those on the other side. I try to go out with the local police on a Friday night. They have to switch wavelength regularly because that is the only way in which they can communicate with each other. That is a bit ramshackle at the end of the 20th century, when we are looking for the most effective way to deal with law and order issues.
We welcome the drug strategy, initiatives on youth offending and the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, but we must find ways to fund those ideas. Our old friend information technology will have a part to play and a lot of money is being put in that direction. We all agree that such spending should not be at the expense of front-line policing. People have a perception of crime and want to see their bobby on the beat, but they also want the most effective means of catching criminals and following up the more deviant members of society. We have to find ways of doing that.
We can argue about the statistics and what they mean, but we were disappointed with the 1.4 per cent. increase in funding in Gloucestershire, which was below the national increase of 2.3 per cent. We responded by putting up our budget and raising our precept. I could argue that Gloucestershire's precept was too low, but we had the fourth-highest increase of all police authorities, and there is a limit to the number of times that we can do that. We may now be more in line with the family of authorities that we all lovingly compare everything to in these days of benchmarking and the rest of it. I hope that the Home Office and the Treasury will look favourably in future at how we can make good our funding needs.
We are looking to the future. I thank my hon. Friend the Minister for our success in achieving funding for the tri-service control room project, which brings the police into line with the ambulance and fire services to make best use of our control rooms. There are ways of taking that initiative further forward. It is an efficient way of using our funding. That may be special pleading, but I hope that the Home Office will have more to say today or in the future about making more effective use of such funds.
We do not pretend that funding is not an issue. I am one of three Gloucestershire Members here today, together with my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Ms Kingham) beside me and the hon. Member for Tewkesbury (Mr. Robertson). We have regular meetings with police authority representatives, who tell us their problems. Funding is always at the top of their agenda, so there is no point in pretending that it is not. However, the situation did not start with the election of a Labour Government in May 1997. It is an historic problem. In the debate on 18 March--which my hon. Friend the Member for Salford mentioned--I talked about having separate police authorities, some of which, including mine, are small. That has its benefits, but it also has its downsides, because there are no economies of scale and we were bound to have difficulties with the separation of administrative costs and overheads resulting from splitting police authorities from county councils.
Within reason, we are doing what we can. We need more funds. We need help from the Home Office and the Treasury to get the special projects up and running and to make them as effective as possible. That is as true in rural Britain as in urban Britain, as the recent report of the Women's Institute says. A report by the Back-Bench group of Labour Members published a couple of weeks ago contains an interesting article by Simon Anderson of System 3 about people's perceptions of crime in rural areas and how the globalisation of crime has a special impact on more isolated communities, because they want to see the police presence, but they also want to know that the policing is as effective as possible. That is the essence of the problems with getting the funding formula right. There is a need for more help in rural areas, because the funding formula is not as effective as it could be.
Ms Tess Kingham (Gloucester):
We have heard a lot about the perceptions of the public and the desire for more police on the beat. However, we should also recognise that the Government have done a great deal in looking at other ways of preventing crime and taking the stress off police forces by ensuring that there are always police on the beat to deal with the after-effects of crime and clear-up rates. We have had the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and there is a duty on local authorities to have local crime prevention partnerships. We had a big launch of that in Gloucester, which included all the stakeholders. The initiative was greatly welcomed by every section of the community involved. The police said that they felt that it would have a great impact on the public perception of crime and on preventing crime, which would take the stress off the police.
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael J. Martin):
Order. The hon. Lady must sit down when I get to my feet. That is the first thing that she must learn. The second is that she should not make a speech during an intervention.
Mr. Drew:
I acknowledge the work done by my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Ms Kingham) in her constituency, both now as a Member of Parliament and before coming here. She has much to offer, and she made a valid point.
We will not hide from the funding issue. We welcome many of the initiatives and we recognise that there must be a balance between urban and rural areas. All the figures show that the majority of crimes are committed in urban
areas. The incidence of reported crime is four times greater in urban areas than in rural areas, but we have seen a relative increase in rural crime. That is due partly to globalisation, because people can move about more quickly. People in rural areas feel very vulnerable.
Mr. Laurence Robertson (Tewkesbury):
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Mrs. Lait) on securing this debate and on the detailed way in which she gave examples of where police funding is inadequate. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Stroud(Mr. Drew), who made the case for extra funding for Gloucestershire. I want to mention that. The fact that there are three Members of Parliament from Gloucestershire in the Chamber suggests that things are not well with police funding in that county.
The general funding of public services leaves something to be desired. The Labour party spent 18 years telling the public how the Conservatives had underfunded public services, but, now that we have a Labour Government, we still have similar problems. It is not only the police who are suffering in Gloucestershire. Despite the high-profile figures about health service spending, the health service in Gloucestershire is having to make £5.5 million worth of cuts because of inadequate funding. Tewkesbury borough council has had its grant reduced, causing it to increase the council tax. It has been named and shamed by the Government for reacting to a problem that the Government brought about. The same is true of police funding.
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