Police Funding

An Urgent Question was granted by Mr Speaker, Rt Hon John Bercow to Rt Hon Keith Vaz MP, Chair Home Affairs Select Committee on 9 November 2015 on errors made by the Government in calculating the Police Funding Formula.

This error would have had devastating implications for policing in Walsall South. As a result of the erroneous calculation, West Midlands Police would have lost £28.3 million from its budget next year. This would have had an impact on the number of officers on patrol in Walsall South.

I raised the issue of the cut to the budget of West Midlands Police at a Westminster Hall Debate on 9 September 2015. At the debate I said:

“One person spoke to me of being at the mercy of a local response team, and those will not always deal with the low-priority cases. Pleck, Alumwell and Birchills are distressed at the kind of things that the police, with the minimum of resources, are having to do—they cannot do their job. As to response teams, it is said that they are moving away from the public, given the closure of front offices and falling numbers of patrols. People cannot talk to police officers on the street. The police are retreating into their cars. That is the wrong strategy.”

“Now more than ever before, we are in a challenging time. We need people to be vigilant, and we need to build up relationships with local people. We need local intelligence to protect our communities. In Walsall there have been two marches—a drain on people’s resources—of people who do not consider that a diverse community should be together, and who try to divide it. Those are the kinds of things that we face in Walsall.”

“My constituents want to know the police officers they speak to every day. They want them to know the community, and they want to allow the police the resources to do what they need to do to serve the community.”

The following police forces are losers under the funding formula:

Avon & Somerset: £2 million WORSE OFF
Cambridgeshire: £3.4 million WORSE OFF
Cheshire: £5.7 million WORSE OFF
City of London: £0.3 million WORSE OFF
Cleveland: £2.0 million WORSE OFF
Cumbria: £5.8 million WORSE OFF
Derbyshire: £13.1 million WORSE OFF
Durham: £12.7 million WORSE OFF
Dyfed Powys: £7.3 million WORSE OFF
Essex: £0.5 million WORSE OFF
Gloucestershire: £3.9 million WORSE OFF
Gwent: £12.8 million WORSE OFF
Hertfordshire: £6.6 million WORSE OFF
Leicestershire: £2.4 million WORSE OFF
Lincolnshire: £0.6 million WORSE OFF
Norfolk: £2.9 million WORSE OFF
North Wales: £12.5 million WORSE OFF
North Yorkshire: £5.1 million WORSE OFF
Northumbria: £16.5 million WORSE OFF
Nottinghamshire: £14.3 million WORSE OFF
South Wales: £15.5 million WORSE OFF
South Yorkshire: £28.4 million WORSE OFF
Staffordshire: £9.4 million WORSE OFF
Suffolk: £0.6 million WORSE OFF
Surrey: £3.5 million WORSE OFF
Thames Valley: £0.1 million WORSE OFF
Warwickshire: £0.5 million WORSE OFF
West Mercia: £9.7 million WORSE OFF
West Midlands: £28.3 million WORSE OFF
West Yorkshire: £6.2 million WORSE OFF
Wiltshire: £0.4 million WORSE OFF

The following police forces would have increased their budgets:

Bedfordshire: £1.1 million gain
Devon & Cornwall: £0.6 million gain
Dorset: £0.6 million gain
Greater Manchester: £12.9 million gain
Hampshire: £5.4 million gain
Humberside: £5.7 million gain
Kent: £11.5 million gain
Lancashire: £16.5 million gain
Merseyside: £0.6 million gain
MOPAC (for Metropolitan): £181.2 million gain
Northamptonshire: £1.4 million gain
Sussex: £10.3 million gain