Council Tax

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr. Hayes), who is an articulate and tireless campaigner on behalf of his constituents. He was absolutely right to highlight the real concern felt when the police authority put forward its initial precept. Both our constituencies have a significant number of hard-working but low-waged people who find things difficult, particularly given the current economic contraction, rising fuel and food prices, and the fact that they have little public transport and little alternative to using their cars to get to work and go about their daily business. A rise of nearly 80 per cent. in the police precept therefore presented a significant challenge to their personal and family finances. That is one reason why I will not vote against this capping order. I was delighted that my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Mr. Hogg), who is a distinguished and eloquent former police Minister, made a forensic analysis of the issues. He was absolutely right that the lack of flexibility in the funding formula is to blame for Lincolnshire police authority's current problems. I will return to that point later. I shall not say too much about the contribution of the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford (Mr. Davies), who is a constituent of mine, except that it was disappointing. I found it slightly offensive that there was a direct implication that Conservative Members representing Lincolnshire constituencies do not represent their constituents to the best of their ability. We were concerned about the proposed rate of the police precept, and he is absolutely wrong to suggest that we acquiesced in it. I am pleased that the Minister has introduced the order. I wish to take this opportunity to thank the Minister for Security, Counter-Terrorism, Crime and Policing, who has been courteous throughout the process. He has at least listened to the concerns of Lincolnshire MPs of all parties. I follow my hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings in requesting that he examine some specific issues prior to future funding reviews. The Minister for Local Government introduced the order in a typically calm and considered way, but I am afraid that he cannot get away with implicitly passing the blame on to the police authority. The reason for its problems is insufficient resources from central Government. The point has already been made, but it is worth re-emphasising that Lincolnshire police authority is the lowest-funded force per head of population in the whole country. The next lowest, Suffolk, gets £11 million more. It is recognised and acknowledged that the problem is with the funding formula. It is inflexible and unresponsive to Lincolnshire's population, geography, rurality and sparsity. As I said in my intervention on my hon. Friend, the £3.4 million grant last year was made in recognition of the fact that the authority has funding problems. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham rightly pointed out the deficit. Of course it is right that police funding is not awarded on a per capita basis, and there are complexities and differences between urban areas and rural ones such as Lincolnshire. However, the disparity in the numbers is stark. The West Midlands police authority gets £189.78 per head, Greater Manchester £189.54, Northumbria £188.62, and South Yorkshire, the Minister's own police authority, £162.74. Lincolnshire gets only £112.29 per head. I shall say more in a moment about the significant increase in population. There has been underfunding for a number of years. I accept that it is not a new phenomenon. There are no more police officers in Lincolnshire than 10 years ago, and there are fewer officers per capita than in any other force in the country. Its limited resources have to be applied over the third largest police authority area in the whole country. My right hon. and learned Friend made a pertinent point. Had the Minister not allowed a significant precept, 25 per cent. of the police officers in the Lincolnshire police authority might have had to be made redundant. As I said in an intervention, that confirms that the funding formula is not working for Lincolnshire. Such redundancies are not legal, and the authority's only alternative would have been to make 364 civilian staff redundant and withdraw police officers from the front line to do that civilian work at additional cost to the police authority. If there is one consistent theme articulated by my constituents in Boston and Skegness, it is that they want a more visible police force, and I believe that that is true elsewhere in Lincolnshire. If the precept had not been allowed at 26 per cent., we would be moving in completely the wrong direction. The argument that the Minister for Local Government seemed to make—and a small part of it may be true—was that Lincolnshire police authority must be more efficient. That has been looked into by PricewaterhouseCoopers and academics at Loughborough university. The Minister will be aware that the police authority has made year-on-year efficiency savings, rightly demanded by the Home Office, to the tune of £12.3 million over the past nine years. Because of the overall funding problems, the police authority has not been able to use those savings to improve the provision of services, as it has had to use them to bridge the deficit.