Paying price for extra police
FROM April, we’ll all pay at least £10 a year more for local policing. It will help fund an extra 153 officers – so at least money well spent.
But that’s not quite what we were promised at the general election in 2019, is it? We were promised extra police officers – not that we will have to pay extra for extra police officers.
No wonder local police and crime commissioner Clive Grunshaw describes the model of funding police in the UK as ‘flawed, unfair and unjust’ – because essentially, the additional funding comes down to house prices in an area.
Lancashire has a high number of Band A council tax properties, which means the average amount of additional cash Lancashire Police can realistically expect from council tax is much lower than say, somewhere like Surrey.
Alternatively, the police have to ask for more money from people in lower-value homes than, for example, the police in Surrey do because they have more residents in expensive homes.
And, of course, after a decade of funding cuts, we essentially are paying more to reinstall police officer roles which we never stopped paying for, but which were lost when the Government started giving the police less money. That hardly seems fair does it?