Council Tax

This rare usage of the central check on council tax goes to show, with more significance than ever before, the severe lack of funding for police authorities, which has left Lincolnshire police authority with no conceivable choice but to use its council tax precepts to try to improve its service. The decision is embarrassingly last-minute and will cause huge disruption to the police service planning to use those funds. Furthermore, the administrative costs of changing the council tax increase will be disproportionate to the benefits that it will reap. Indeed, the Minister has already told us the colossal cost of changing the plan. This situation has come about because the tight police funding settlement has left police authorities with relatively little choice. As we heard from the right hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz), a great deal of work has to be done, and that is increasing all the time because we pass too many laws in this place. Unsurprisingly, it therefore follows that certain police authorities, including Lincolnshire, feel obliged to make substantial increases in the council tax demand in order to achieve their goal. The 2008-09 settlement was the tightest for many years, with a 2.7 per cent. grant increase. It will be 2.8 per cent. in 2009-10 and 2010-11. That is effectively a real-terms freeze, or perhaps a contracting budget if inflation does as we fear it will. The needs formula is obviously seriously flawed, and some areas are already missing out on additional grant resources that the formula itself says they need. This will simply exacerbate the existing problems. The police authorities are forced to make up the shortfalls through the council tax—they have no other way of doing it. Yet again, the Government's spending squeeze has pushed the responsibility on to police authorities, yet the Government are blaming them for shortfalls created by underfunding from central Government. That is the paradox. A police authority can find itself being capped for trying to achieve the income that it needs to fulfil the targets that it has been set by the Government. That is why so many people are angry about this, and it goes some way towards illustrating the frustration that the police authorities unquestionably feel at having to cut back on plans that were, after all, designed to improve public safety. This will have an impact on police services on the ground. In Lincolnshire, Chief Constable Richard Crompton has vowed to maintain his staff at its current level. He has said, however, that plans to employ 100 additional officers and police community support officers—which he claims would have made a real difference to people living in Lincolnshire—will be abandoned. He had wanted to increase the number of officers monitoring serious offenders, including sex offenders, but that will now have to be put on ice indefinitely because the police authority does not have the necessary money. This is also bad for police service planning. How can authorities be expected to plan their services and ensure that they can adequately protect their local community when the Government move the goalposts at the last minute? As I have said, the administrative costs involved are quite significant, but the principle behind the action conspires with the logistical problems to create administrative chaos as well as political contradiction. For example, some people who already pay by standing order will have no time to make the necessary change and could find themselves in arrears. We have already discussed the content of the funding formula. Incidentally, most council tax rises are above 5 per cent. if precepts are included. So there is a practical problem, and also one of principle. I was rather surprised by the comments made by the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill). He is a tremendously nice chap, but he seemed to be highlighting a contradiction in the Conservative party's position. He said that this mess was a direct result of Government policy and that it seemed pretty clear that the lateral grants system was not working. He also said that the Government had created that situation. I agree with his criticisms, but we need to remember that it was none other than the Conservative Government who capped Lincolnshire police authority in 1995, in exactly the same way as the present Government are doing. I do not really understand how there can be political consistency in condemning the Minister and his Government today for doing something that the hon. Gentleman's party did 13 years ago—unlucky for some.