BritainJan 2nd 2016 edition
Funding the police
Counting up the coppers
As the police get more control over their budgets, different forces are taking very different approaches to fundraising
ON A recent Sunday night in Bedfordshire, north of London, a damp-looking officer enters police headquarters. He has been fishing a possible murder victim out of the river, he says, but "had nothing to fish him out with". Under the gaze of throngs of Christmas shoppers, he found he also had no tent with which to cover the body, and "embarrassingly" had to borrow one from an ambulance.
Following big increases in spending on the police in 2000-10, the past five years have been austere. Police spending per person has been remorselessly trimmed back to roughly where it was in 2003, accounting for inflation. Further cuts were expected to be imposed in 2015, but after intensive lobbying by officers, and the jolt of the Paris terrorist attacks, on November 25th the government announced that the police would be protected from cuts for the next five years.
Amid rises and falls in police funding there has been one constant trend. The police in England and Wales long received almost all their money in the form of a grant from the central government. But over the past two decades they have been raising more and more of their money locally. Whereas in 1995 only 12% of police funding was local, by 2014 30% of it was earned in this way (see chart). Tweaks announced in November mean that in five years' time the proportion will be higher still. Britain's police forces are slowly gaining real control of their finances—and they are using this power in very different ways.
The shift began in 1995, when forces gained the ability to raise money by adding a supplementary "precept" to council tax, a local property levy. Police precepts were small at first: about £70 ($100) per household in today's terms. They crept up in the 1990s, before soaring in the 2000s: in the decade to 2010, forces increased local charges by an average of 98%.
There was wide variation. Whereas some forces increased their precepts by just a few percent each year, others went for broke: in North Yorkshire the police more than trebled the amount raised from local taxation in 2000-10. In the main, according to an analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a think-tank, those forces that increased their local funding most were those that had done least well under the old system of direct grants, which favoured populous places with high crime rates. Forces covering England's largest cities—Greater Manchester, Merseyside, West Midlands and London's Metropolitan Police—all raised their local taxes less than average. The most enthusiastic taxers were small or rural forces: after North Yorkshire, the biggest increases were in Durham, Cambridgeshire and Cleveland.
After entering office in 2010, the Conservative-led coalition put a brake on local fundraising, forbidding police bosses from raising taxes by more than 2% without holding a referendum, a feat none has yet managed. (Only one force, Bedfordshire, has tried it; Surrey considered it, but backed down in 2015 after a Conservative minister branded it a "lazy option".) Yet the government has increased reliance on local funding in another way, by reducing the central grant. Central funding for the police was cut by one-fifth across the board in 2010-14. The forces that suffered least were those that had plenty of local income. The differences are stark: overall, North Yorkshire's total budget is now 30% higher in real terms than in 2000, whereas in Northumberland, which increased its local precept the least, it is 8% lower.
The devolution of funding allows locals to decide for themselves how much to spend on security. But it may lead to more being spent in wealthy areas—an odd way to approach crime, which is strongly correlated with poverty, points out Tom Kirchmaier, a policing expert at the London School of Economics. The reliance on raising money from households also punishes districts that combine sparsely populated rural areas with troublesome urban patches. Bedfordshire falls into this category: of the 43 forces in England and Wales, it ranks 32nd in the number of police officers per person, yet the presence of Luton, a rundown town with an international airport, gives it the fourth-highest rate of gun crime per head, as well as what local officials believe to be a high terror threat. There are sometimes so few officers on duty, says Kate Rowley, a local copper, that she knows that if she pressed her emergency panic-button no one would come.
Police forces are finding new ways to supplement their incomes. In April the Home Office raised the modest fee charged by police for licensing firearms for the first time in 14 years. More controversially, the police make money by sending dangerous drivers on remedial "speed awareness" courses costing £85. Between 2010 and 2014, as forces' central funding was squeezed, twice as many motorists were sent on such courses. Some police bosses have threatened to raise money by fining motorists who stray only fractionally above speed limits.
Like doctors, police officers report that they are increasingly "dumped on" by social services, whose budgets have been drastically cut. In November the government announced that social services, too, would be supplemented in future by an optional local levy, to be determined by councils. Increasingly, it will be for local people to decide what sort of services they are willing to pay for. With a round of elections of police commissioners due in May, voters will get a chance to say just how thin a blue line they want.
This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline "Counting up the coppers"