I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this important debate and it is not lost on me that quite a self-selecting group of MPs has turned out today, all of whom will probably try to follow a similar formula of saying that the funding formula does not respond well to the challenges of their communities. The cumulative nature of the speeches, however, should not necessarily detract from the veracity of their argument. Clearly, across this House, many of us have deep concerns about our police forces and about how they are treated under the current regime. There are winners and losers and, dare I say it, in the Chamber today there are more losers than usual.
I am no different from other Members. For me, the acid test of whether a funding formula is truly fair is Bedfordshire. We have lost 171 officers since 2010, and the number of police community support officers has halved from 108 to 53 in that period. In my community in Luton, where we face all sorts of challenges, the effect of those cuts is that neighbourhood policing is practically non-existent. In 2012 we had PCs working alongside PCSOs in Luton. In other words, we had proper neighbourhood policing. That was true of many other parts of the county too.
The old police authority, looking at the scale of cuts coming through, proposed to remove those officers and to cut PCSOs. When the police and crime commissioner was elected in 2012 he put a halt to that process and protected numbers, but, with £20 million of cuts defined, they had to go. The police and crime commissioner in Bedfordshire has said:
“The impact in Luton is no different from the rest of the county. We’ve had no choice other than to strip away preventative, problem-solving neighbourhood policing everywhere to the barest minimum because the alternative is even worse. But current projections mean we need to find £11 million savings and this may mean reducing the establishment by 44”
in the next three years.
The chief constable, Jon Boutcher, estimates that Bedfordshire needs another 300 officers even to reach the average number in police forces in the country. Why? We are the county with the fourth highest gun crime, the fifth highest serious acquisitive crime and the seventh highest knife crime figures in the country, but we get by on just 169 officers per 100,000 population. To put that in context, the average is 232 across all forces, rural and urban, and the Metropolitan police, about which we have already heard, has 388 officers per 100,000. In simple terms—it is easy to get lost in the numbers—the residents in Luton whom I represent, if treated as though they were, say, 20 minutes down the train line in north London, could expect an additional 482 officers protecting them. That is the scale of the gap.