Policing: If We Pay More, We Should Receive More

Increases in council tax are never far from the agenda and there is a massive rise looming on the horizon. Cheshire Police take a small part of our council tax which covers about a quarter of their costs. The remainder is paid by the government who have said that next year Cheshire Police will get a 2.5% increase. Because Cheshire Police are so strapped for cash they are asking you and me to up our part of council tax which goes to them by about 30%! With local authorities being capped at 5% you would expect Cheshire Police to come up with some good reasons for asking for six times that number. There are masses of statistics to support their case but basically it comes down to the belief that they have been so underfunded by Cheshire ratepayers for so long that the time has come when something has to be done. Two big numbers stand out to prove their point. We are told that Staffordshire residents have paid £90million more for their police than we have in the last ten years. The comparable figure for Herefordshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire (West Mercia) is £100million more. Cheshire Police go on to claim that if the funding gap is not closed they will “no longer be able to provide the high quality, consistent policing the public wants”. This statement assumes that they are currently providing a high quality consistent service but that is not borne out by stories in the press nor by audiences at the Police Forums that I attend. Nor is it supported by the survey that the police themselves carried out to reinforce their plea for more money.

In this, their own survey they say that 74% of respondents would pay more for increased visible patrols and 69% are prepared to dig deep to improve response times. If such large majorities of Cheshire residents are already receiving the claimed high quality consistent policing that they want, why are they prepared to pay more? The truth is they do not believe that Cheshire Police is as good as the top brass claim it is. They may want better policing and will pay for it. BUT and it is a big BUT – where is the guarantee that if we lie down and let Cheshire Police impose a 30% increase on us how can we ever be sure we shall get value for money? For too long the police have been able to blame inadequate funding for poor response times and slack enforcement of what they see as minor rules but to us are major irritants. So if they were to get the money they are asking for would we be able to go to Police Forums and Community Action Meetings and see our local police officers embarrassed by the praise being heaped upon them? I doubt it, don’t you? We need some cast iron commitment from the top that if our public agree to a high increase, I say high because no-one really believes it will be anywhere near to 30%, that’s just to open the bartering, how shall we see that our money is being spent on policing we can see and security we can feel? How can Mr Fahy satisfy us that we have done the right thing?

Some answers to these questions may help to shift the mood away from the current ‘you must be joking’ to one of ‘maybe it is time we paid more and received more’ as the police survey seems to say.

Adrian Bradley a.bradley@macclesfield.gov.uk (28/11/2007)
County Councillor, Wilmslow North

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