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Ms Blears: Only this week, I was in West Yorkshire visiting Leeds to look at some of the excellent work that is going on in local communities, especially in tackling antisocial behaviour, and to meet some of the community support officers. I think that West Yorkshire has 201 CSOs on patrol—one of the highest numbers. My hon. Friend is right to say that the force contributed £6.8 million to the pot for floors and ceilings this year and that will clearly have an effect. Nevertheless, there is an increase of £9.5 million in grant allocation for the force this year, which, building on significant previous increases, ought to be of assistance.
We shall continue to work with the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister on issues relating to the police precept. Pensions have been mentioned several times, and I think that I have dealt with those issues.
I want to deal with the Metropolitan police, as hon. Members are greatly concerned about that force, which has a significant impact in policing our country. Grant for the Metropolitan Police Authority will increase from £1,764 million to £1,822 million. I have increased the formula provision for the MPA national and capital city functions from £202 million to £207 million. The Met will benefit from a range of special grants and payments: £73 million from the crime fighting fund; £9 million—again—to tackle street crime; about £10 million for basic command unit funds; about £7 million from the DNA expansion programme; and a range of other funding, including £29 million for the London allowance and £3.1 million towards free travel for officers in the capital.
The capital grant will be £355 million in the coming year, an increase of £22 million, or 6.6 per cent. Most of that provision, £185 million, will go directly to police authorities to support their capital programmes; we circulated the allocations this week. The Met will receive £48 million for capital plus a further £40 million as part of our agreement to support the costs of creating the command, control and communications system—the C3I system—which will further enhance the force's effectiveness.
I am delighted to tell the House that this year we shall be phasing out the £20 million premises improvement fund, as we have managed to make significant progress on improving police stations and facilities for officers.
However, I shall be asking forces to concentrate a similar sum on capital improvements in the coming year to give priority to investment in technology to support front-line policing. In north Wales, I have seen excellent examples; forces are beginning to use palm pilots and mobile data that save them from having to keep going back to the police station. They can download photographs or key in statements directly. We are asking them to look into such technology and I am delighted to say that forces will not have to bid for those funds, so we will not have to go through bureaucratic bidding processes.There are several specific programmes where funding is provided. One of the best and most successful is the crime fighting fund, a grant designed to increase the number of police officers. I hope that Members on both sides of the House will acknowledge that we have a record number of police officers. That has been achieved with the assistance of the crime fighting fund, which has enabled us to drive up police numbers.
Dr. John Pugh (Southport) (LD): The Minister is presumably aware that her comments about increased police numbers do not apply to Merseyside, but may I take her back to her discussion of representations from police authorities? My only experience of that was in the days when the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) was at the Home Office, there was a Conservative chairman of the Merseyside police authority and we received nothing. Will the Minister make clear how many of the representations made this year resulted in any change whatever to funding for local authorities?
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Michael Lord): Order. Before the Minister responds, may I make this point to the House? It is difficult for the Chair to prevent Members from seeking to intervene and obviously the Minister then has to respond. The more and the longer the interventions, and the more the responses, the less the time that will be left for other Members who are waiting patiently to make their contributions to the debate.
Ms Blears: The hon. Gentleman will know that the population of Merseyside is falling, but it has one of the highest ratios of police officers to population in the country. He will also know, from the statement made in the House, that we have confirmed the provisional settlement in relation to the proposals.
I am conscious of the time, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and of the fact that hon. Members want to speak, but I should like to highlight one or two other issues in concluding my remarks. Additional funds will be given to the police service this year to enable it to respond to the continuing challenges of international terrorism. Special grant will continue for special priority payments.
We will continue to fund and support the hugely successful community support officers. We now have 3,000 patrolling throughout the country, and 18 forces have been able to receive funding for their CSOs, not just from the police but from local authorities and,
increasingly, from housing trusts and registered social landlords. I saw some in Telford just this week, and they are extremely successful.The rural policing fund will continue at £30 million. The street crime initiative will continue to be funded at £24 million, and we have had tremendous success in driving down street crime—a 17 per cent. reduction in the top 10 areas. We will provide another £50 million for high crime areas under the BCU fund.
We will provide some new money this year for work force modernisation, which is absolutely central to the reform programme, to get a better skills mix throughout the police service; we have got £8 million this year and we will have £5 million next year. We have three big programmes in Northumbria and Surrey, and I hope to have a big programme in the Met as well, to redesign and re-engineer the way in which the police service works on the ground. We have seven medium-sized programmes in areas that range from Nottingham and Dyfed-Powys to civilian staff in Humberside and investigating officers in Lincolnshire—an engine for change and reform in our service.
On the centrally provided services, we continue to fund the National Criminal Intelligence Service and the National Crime Squad, with increases of £12.2 million and £6.8 million respectively. The Police Information Technology Organisation has £264 million, and Centrex training receives £89 million. All that is fundamental to our reform programme.
We are also taking action on the big challenge for us—to try to reduce bureaucracy. We will roll out the fixed penalty scheme right across the country. That scheme is hugely welcomed by officers, as they can issue fixed penalties without going through the custody process, so they are back out on the streets doing the job that they want to do and the job that we pay them for.
All 43 forces now have facilities to undertake video identification parades, and Airwave is being rolled out across the county. The case and custody IT programme, which I saw in Warwick, will be a tremendous improvement on the current system. We are continuing to press police authorities to meet their efficiency gains. Many of them have done extremely well in recent years, and I hope that they will be able to do the same again.
We always said that this year's settlement would be difficult. I believe that we have managed to strike the right balance in the distribution of police grant. There are some significant gainers; there are also those forces that have had to contribute significantly to the pot, but we have done a great deal with police reform in the past two years. We will continue to invest strongly in a reformed police service and to work closely with forces and communities to deliver, as the public rightly expect, ever higher standards of policing and performance to help to build safer communities for the people whom we serve. I commend the report to the House.
2.33 pm
Mr. James Paice (South-East Cambridgeshire) (Con): The Minister refers in her closing remarks to spending the past two years reforming the police service. Do I have to remind her that the Government have been in office nearly seven years and that, in the first four years of that period, they actually slashed the police service by 3,000 officers?
May I join the Minister, however, in paying tribute, as she did at the beginning of her speech, to our police forces? In the context of the Soham inquiry I am fortunate, or perhaps unfortunate, to represent South-East Cambridgeshire, so I have seen the police force at its most magnificent in the way that it and so many forces coped with that awful tragedy. I stand second to no one in paying tribute to the commitment, courage and sometimes astonishing bravery of our police in maintaining law and order—especially, as the Minister said, in these times of the increased threat from terrorism.
The Conservative party wholly welcomes the increase in police numbers. It is pity that we had to go down 3,000 before we went up 12,000.
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