A quick mid-week edition of The Teesside Lead for you after last night’s announcement Cleveland Police would get an additional £2m to tackle serious crime across Teesside.
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Cleveland Police and Crime Commissioner Matt Storey has criticised the Home Office’s plans to give Cleveland Police an extra £2m to “tackle serious crime”, saying the additional funds “won’t touch the sides”.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood made the announcement in the House of Commons last night (1st September) “in light of the situation the force has faced”, referring to last week’s A66 crash which killed two police officers and five young men, and the subsequent arrests and disorder in areas like Grangetown and South Bank related to organised crime.
Labour PCC Matt Storey told The Teesside Lead he’d “never turn money down,” but added, “it won’t touch the sides.
“The force think they need £26m to get back the funding they’ll have lost over austerity.”
If Cleveland Police’s budget from 2010 is adjusted for inflation it would be £246m this year, but the force has only £196m to spend.
Storey told The Teesside Lead last week there was a £2.4m funding shortfall in the force’s budget. This is roughly equivalent to Cleveland Police’s increased costs of employer’s National Insurance contributions.
Responding to last night’s announcement, Storey continued: “The issue is structural. The [funding] formula has to change ASAP to reflect poverty and crime rates. It can’t wait until after the police reform work is done.”
The government published a white paper on police reform in January, setting out a blueprint to radically overhaul policing in England and Wales, including plans to reduce the number of police forces.
Middlesbrough and Thornaby East MP Andy McDonald agreed with the need for urgency, saying: “We can’t wait for police restructure. That’s years off.”
He told The Teesside Lead last night the money was “welcome”, but “doesn’t fix the gaping hole in resources long term”.
Ms Mahmood said the new funding would “build on existing operations, including the clear, hold, build approach, which is both tough on serious crime and on the causes of serious crime, and has been shown to work across the country.”
She added: “The government will continue to work closely with Cleveland Police to ensure that they have all the support they need as they face these challenging circumstances and grieve the loss of two of their own.”
Responding in the House of Commons to Ms Mahmood, Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland MP Luke Myer said: “While I’m grateful for the £2m extra funding that’s been announced… in the long term what we need is funding formula reform.”
Hartlepool MP Jonathan Brash told the House: “These tragic events did not materialise out of the blue. The lawlessness that we’re seeing in parts of our communities did not happen overnight. It is the consequence of systemic underfunding for our police.”
Afterwards, Mr Brash told The Teesside Lead that last night’s announcement “cannot mask the need for a fundamental change to the funding formula that has resulted in our police and fire services being systematically underfunded for a decade.”
MPs returned to the Commons on Tuesday after their summer recess, the first day Parliament sat since Andy Burnham had become prime minister.
He told MPs: “I know the whole House will wish to join me in expressing deepest condolences to the family, friends and colleagues of PC Matthew Blades and PC Tom Clough, who were killed in the line of duty on the A66.
“We will do our best to support the Middlesbrough community, which is hurting and grieving right now, and we hear the call from the members of this House representing it for a discussion about investment in policing and police numbers.”