Council Tax

I was rather brought up to believe that the prime and foundational task of a Member of Parliament was to defend his or her constituents against unreasonable, excessive or unjust taxation. I rise this afternoon, conscious that that is what I am trying to do. I am struck by the fact that no Conservative Member—from Lincolnshire or anywhere else—appears to be remotely interested in playing that particular role. They are here, either explicitly or silently, to defend a completely unreasonable precept proposed by Lincolnshire police authority. With the honourable and laudable exception of the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh), who is not in his place, Conservative Members from Lincolnshire have been so much behind this precept—unreasonable and absurd as it is—that I am led to believe that the Conservatives on the police authority were whipped to vote in its favour. It is against that background that we should interpret what the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) has said this afternoon. I have nothing against him personally: he is a Front-Bench spokesman and he has to do as good a job as he can; he did so on the basis of a very bad brief. We know what that job consists of, however, because we see it done every day. Opposition Front Benchers come to the House and say, ““It's all the Government's fault—it's all terrible.”” This afternoon the hon. Gentleman talked of a long-term malaise that was apparently all the Government's fault, without ever saying what the Conservatives would do differently. He did not suggest for a moment that they would introduce a different level or form of grant, or change the formula. What is more, he did not have the courage of his convictions in criticising the Government. Obviously he does not want to make himself even more unpopular in Lincolnshire by voting against the order, so he announced that he would not vote against it or call on his colleagues to do so. In terms of its content the hon. Gentleman's speech was a complete washout, although it was delivered in his usual charming fashion. As I have said, I do not blame him in any way. All that he is doing is coming to the House just as his colleagues do. It is only because we listen to the same thing every day that we can see through it. I understand why the public might initially think, ““That sounds very plausible: something must be wrong, and it is all the Government's fault—how terrible.”” Nice Tories, with their modern image, would not apply their critical faculties and realise that what is being proposed is complete air, complete hollowness, complete nothingness. That is the background to so many debates in the House of Commons nowadays, and to so many Opposition motions. Let me turn to the specifics of Lincolnshire. Lincolnshire is very well policed. We are fortunate enough to have a good police force, and there are very good relationships between the public and the police. That is not the case in every part of the country. In rather more than 20 years in politics representing the people of south Lincolnshire in slightly different constituencies—the constituency boundaries changed midstream—I have never encountered a case of police corruption or police violence. I will touch wood, because we all know that human beings are fallible everywhere, but I do not believe that there have been any such cases over that period, and probably for a long time before. We are deeply appreciative of that. It is perfectly reasonable for a chief constable to have ambitious desires to develop the force, improve the service to the public and improve the facilities available to officers and civilian staff. I am sure that I would feel the same if I were a chief constable. Anyone who runs an organisation feels like that. There is an element of empire-building in any form of management. In the private sector it is controlled by competition: those who become uncompetitive go out of business. In the public sector, it must be controlled by some other discipline. There must be some external countervailing force or influence to prevent excessive spending. That is why we need the disciplines that we have in the public sector today, one of which is the capping mechanism. I do not blame the chief constable—a previous chief constable, in fact—for producing a wish list that seems to have been excessively imaginative. I do, however, blame the police authority for not only accepting the wish list but adding to it, in an extremely uncritical fashion. I read with great attention the business plan and budget that the authority produced last summer, and begged its members not to proceed with it. Several things were wrong with it. First, it was far too long and full of verbiage and jargon. It was very incoherent and badly organised, and as a result very unconvincing. I think that someone else should draft the police authority's business plans in future. Secondly, it made a number of extravagant demands without any critical examination of the possibility of internal savings. A year ago almost to the day, I wrote a letter to the chairman of the police authority and the chief constable asking a number of questions. I asked, for example, why the number of civilians employed in the force could not be increased. Lincolnshire has a lower civilian quota than other shire counties. I received no reasoned answer to that question. I asked why we were not using specials more, and about a number of aspects of policing that seemed to me to be less than essential. I asked why we did not drop them and use the resources elsewhere, employing the officers concerned in other tasks. More recently, I have asked why our financial proposals do not take account of potential savings from the Flanagan reforms, and why we have not—as some constabularies have rightly done—tried to anticipate the reforms by getting rid of superfluous bureaucracy in advance. There is a lot of superfluous bureaucracy in the police force. The Lincolnshire police force has over the past few months not been behaving in the way we would expect if it were true that it has been reduced to penury; far from it, in fact. We opened a very nice new police station in Grantham last year, and within a month or two it was being repainted. On a Saturday afternoon a few weeks ago in Lincolnshire, I saw two policemen with speed guns engaged in traffic policing, but traffic policing should, on the whole, be done by civilians operating electronic equipment. I am always told that the real strain on policing occurs at the weekends—that that is the expensive time, and that that is when there are often law and order difficulties in various places, such as at football matches on Saturday afternoons. I believe that we should use more specials at such times, but leaving that point to one side, there were those two uniformed officers not chasing after dangerous criminals or engaged in the kind of dramatic police operations that the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Lembit Öpik) was saying will have to be sacrificed if Lincolnshire does not get the money it is demanding, but simply handing out speeding tickets. Neither my analysis of the Lincolnshire police budget and business plan, nor my own experience of Lincolnshire police, nor the reactions of my constituents—whom I believe are 100 per cent. behind me in everything I am saying on the subject—lead me to think that the demand for a 78 or 79 per cent. increase in the police precept from one year to the next was remotely reasonable or justified. The police authority's task should be not to accept uncritically what the force are asking for, let alone to add to its wish list, but to act as an intermediary between the police and the public, and to take account of the taxpayers' interests and of what the taxpayer can reasonably be expected to pay, and of what it is reasonable to ask for by way of an increase in charge for a public service from one week, month and year to the next. Last week, we were talking about how great an increase in the pay of Members of Parliament it might be reasonable to ask for, even if in the past they have been underpaid in relation to other professions, which is, of course, perfectly true. We asked whether it would be acceptable to have a sudden dramatic catch-up over the course of a year. Even if there is an argument that Lincolnshire should have been more generously funded in the past, which I think it should have been, and even if there are arguments about the funding formula—which there are, and I believe the funding formula could be greatly improved—is it reasonable to go for a 78 per cent. increase? Was that even sensible or pragmatic? The people who did this have public responsibilities. They are supposed to act in a way that is not only sound in terms of the philosophy of what they are doing, but which makes sense pragmatically in terms of making it likely that they will achieve the objectives of the institution for which they have a charge. They suddenly asked for 78 per cent—I think the figure is 78.5 per cent. actually, but I always say 78 per cent. to try to be fair. [Interruption.] The Minister says the figure is 79 per cent. Regardless of which is correct, to ask for such an increase from one year to the next is immediately not to be taken seriously. Therefore, I think the police authority did a very irresponsible job. Moreover, the police authority is entirely responsible, as it knew the score. It had people, including me, begging it not to go down that road, and it knew it would have to rebuild if it was capped. Therefore, it is entirely responsible for this £500,000—that is the figure we have heard this afternoon—which it will cost to rebuild. I have called in my constituency, and I call now in the House, for the resignation of the chairman of the police authority and of all those members of it who voted for this completely inordinate increase, because I think they did a very bad day's work in doing so. They were quite irresponsible in the way in which they conducted that exercise, and they have now lost all credibility. I suspect they have lost a lot of credibility in Whitehall, and they have certainly lost a lot of credibility with the public in Lincolnshire, who can see that they were trying to get £100 or more out of them for a band D property, and they have now succeeded in getting only £30 for such a property. Also, as has been made clear, there will not be any redundancies as a result. A lot of the panicky propaganda that has been mouthed in Lincolnshire over the past few months has been seen to be as empty as the rhetoric we heard this afternoon from the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst.