Council Tax

No, I will not give way. I had to give way to the hon. Gentleman when he sat on these Benches. I am happy to say that I do not have to give way to him now, and I do not propose to do so. I hope that I have made my position clear. I have no doubt that my constituents will be relieved by the fact that there has been a capping order. Inevitably, they were distressed by an increase at the level proposed by the police authority. Inevitably, they will also be relieved that they will pay less as a consequence of the capping order, but we must understand that what the police authority did reflected a serious underlying problem within the Lincolnshire police force. Those of us who have represented the county for many years, and my hon. Friends who have been in their places throughout this debate, know well that the Lincolnshire police force faces a serious problem of structural underfunding. Only a limited number of sources of finance are available to the police service. There is the precept, there is central Government grant and there is a special grant. The problem that Lincolnshire faces—and has faced for several years—is that the underlying grant has been too low. It is possible that we could criticise the police authority, in temperate and courteous language, for not having in the past increased the precept by as much as it could have done. I am inclined to think that there is some merit in that criticism and if the hon. Gentleman had confined himself to that, I would have had some sympathy with him. It is also possible that further savings could be made by the police service. I was, many years ago, a Home Office Minister with responsibility for the police and I am conscious that there are few police forces of which one could say that there are no further savings that they could sensibly make. However, that does not go to the root of the matter, which is one of structural underfunding. The Lincolnshire police force is now looking at a structural shortfall—a deficit—in 2010 of £14 million. It can put that right only through an increase in its funding or a decrease in expenditure. One of the real problems that face police services—and local authorities, fire and ambulance services—is that more than 80 per cent. of their budget goes on manpower. If police services want to shrink their budgets, they have to cut manpower. It can be done over time by reducing the number of uniformed officers, but I do not think that many people in Lincolnshire want to see that happen. It can be done by sacking civilian staff, but that involves up-front redundancy costs and then requires uniformed staff to do the tasks previously done by the civilian staff. That also reduces front-line services. We should be as unpartisan as we can about this problem—and I make that point to the hon. Gentleman. There is a structural problem in Lincolnshire. I suspect that that is also true of Norfolk, Suffolk and some of the other forces. Why that should be so, I am not wholly clear. I have some difficulty in understanding the formula, as does the hon. Gentleman. He attended many a meeting that I did, and he did not understand, any more than I did, exactly how the formula was calculated. I have a strong feeling that the rural areas are being discriminated against. That is not deliberate or malevolent, but because the Government's sympathies are not with the rural areas they have not focused on the matter with the intensity with which they should. I suspect that something like the following is true of Lincolnshire. Although it is a sparsely populated county, habitations are located quite close together. There are not many areas of wildness where there is nobody. Areas that contain nobody do not have to be policed too much, but sparsely populated counties with a lot of habitation have an intensive police requirement.