Tory taxpayers to bear brunt of Reeves's squeeze on police

Yahoo

12-06-2025

Council taxpayers in Tory areas will bear the brunt of Rachel Reeves's squeeze on police funding, official figures show.
Police forces in rural areas, which are predominantly under Tory control, have to draw twice as much of their budgets from council taxpayers as metropolitan areas, which are largely overseen by Labour police and crime commissioners.
Conservative Surrey funds 57 per cent of its budget through its policing precept on council tax at the top of the table compared with 21.8 per cent for the West Midlands, 24.3 per cent for Merseyside and 27.1 per cent for the Metropolitan Police Service, which are all Labour-controlled, according to official data for 2024.
This disparity means that they can only plug gaps from the Chancellor's police cuts through a disproportionate reliance on their council taxpayers who face an anticipated increase of £14 on their tax bills for Band D properties, or more than five per cent.
The figures come a day after police chiefs warned Ms Reeves that the funding shortfall would mean they would be unable to deliver on the Government's pledges to put 13,000 more neighbourhood bobbies on the beat and halve knife crime and violence against women and girls.
Ms Reeves pledged police forces would get an increase of 2.3 per cent in their spending power, but this included the council tax precept on which rural areas disproportionately rely for their funding.
Police chiefs also maintained it was only a 1.7 per cent increase in reality because of carry-over funding for hikes in National Insurance contributions and pay rises.
Police and crime commissioners from the hardest-hit areas are urging Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, to revise the funding formula, which they claim pushes government grants away from sparsely populated rural areas to more densely populated metropolitan forces.
While the Met, which is overseen by Sir Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, receives £5.11 per head of the population and Merseyside gets £4.58 per head. Meanwhile, Dorset gets £2.10, Surrey £2.11 and Lincolnshire £2.13, according to analysis of police data.
Marc Jones, Lincolnshire's Conservative Police and Crime Commissioner, has previously threatened legal action against the Home Office over the 'unfair' and 'outdated' formula which still relies on population statistics from 2013 and even includes a metric based on pubs per square mile.
David Sidwick, Dorset's Police and Crime Commissioner, said the formula failed to take account of the demands of policing sparsely populated rural areas such as his, which has also seen some 25 million day visitors per year.
'Why should the people of Dorset bear a bigger burden than other areas because they have better grant funding,' said Mr Sidwick. 'What they are doing in a cynical way is saying that if you want extra policing, then the local people have to pay for it.
'That would be fine if we were all starting from a level playing field but we are not. Those forces that do best from the grant are able to have the lowest precept. The money needs to be distributed in a fairer way otherwise it is unjust for people in Dorset.
'It's also unjust police officers who have to deal with 25 million day visitors a year. They have the highest individual demand of every police force.'
Roger Hirst, Essex Police and Crime Commissioner and joint finance lead for the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, said the police funding was 'disproportionately' based on the policing precept.
'Those areas that are rural, non-urban and largely governed by Conservatives are having to bear the bigger burden of this real term increase in policing relative to urban areas where there is more grant,' he said.
'The precept is a bigger proportion for me than for the West Midlands, Newcastle or Manchester.'
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