WIREDGOV

Roger Hirst, APCC Joint Finance Lead

As many people were starting to wind down for the Christmas break the Government announced last Thursday – the day Parliament broke up for recess – that policing in England and Wales is to receive a provisional core grant from central government of £19.5 billion for the year 2026/27. 

If you strip out just over £1 billion for counter-terrorism, it equates to an increase in cash terms of 4.2% on 2025/26 which happens to be the same percentage increase as this year’s pay award. 

On the face of it, then, so far, so good in terms of covering the cost of increased salaries. But beyond the overall figures, there was no detail on how the next steps of the Neighbourhood Policing Guarantee are to be paid for, nor the 10-year strategy to tackle violence against women and girls (VAWG) published the same day, nor indeed the Government’s pledge to halve knife crime. We are promised further detail in the new year. 

Police and crime commissioners (PCCs) fully support the Government’s strategic aims – they have reached totally unacceptable levels and are damaging too many lives. People understandably expect to feel safe and tell us consistently they want and value the reassurance of visible police patrols. PCCs have a uniquely close relationship with our communities so we know how much these things matter to them. 

We are acting on these public priorities, but initiatives of this kind cannot be delivered cost-free and that means they cannot be treated as business as usual. PCCs are concerned, too, that the burden for paying for such national priorities shouldn’t continue to be passed disproportionately to local communities through increases in the Council Tax precept. 

Costs are outstripping funding 

Police budgets have been under strain for an uncomfortably long time now, even as demands on policing are growing. It has left police – and fire, in my case – and crime commissioners and deputy mayors facing difficult and often deeply unpalatable decisions. 

As is the case across the public sector, we have become accustomed to this. It is our statutory duty to set the police budget in our area, and we do not shy away from that responsibility – our police forces must operate efficiently and effectively. 

But last week’s funding announcement suggests balancing the books while delivering effectively on national and local policing and crime priorities will continue to be extremely demanding. 

In my area of Essex, I have delivered more than £100m in efficiency savings across police and fire services since 2016/17. It hasn’t been easy, but it shows what can be achieved with financial rigour and a drive towards efficiency. Similar examples exist among my colleagues across England and Wales. 

As things stand, there is a gap of close to half a billion pounds in the funding available to policing and the actual costs forces face. The cost of salaries, goods and services, along with capital investments in existing technology, buildings and kit, are outstripping the money we have to pay for them. And if policing is to better counter the increasing amount of crime committed online there must be more money to invest in new technology and upskilling the workforce. 

Across England and Wales, reserves are being significantly depleted to fund day-to-day spending. According to the National Audit Office (NAO) they dropped by £276 million last year. In that same year, P(F)CCs also borrowed £632 million to fund capital projects which simply maintains existing asset capability. 

With no capital grant to support investment, the NAO forecasts that in the current financial year, 71% of capital programmes will be funded through borrowing. With the cost of servicing debt remaining stubbornly high, those kinds of year-on-year increases are clearly unsustainable. 

The need to modernise the funding model 

Not for the first time, the latest core grant makes no provision for capital investment, which undermines the ability of forces to maximise efficiency and productivity. 

Then there is the expected additional burden on policing following the recent Independent Sentencing Review, estimated to cost the service £0.3bn, which will see more offenders serving their sentences in the community. This is a patent cost pressure. Despite a three-year Comprehensive Spending Review, we have only been given a one-year settlement which undermines our capacity to plan. 

PCCs are working hard to drive efficiencies and boost productivity in our local forces, but we are operating in the context of an outdated police funding model. As the APCC Chair and Merseyside PCC, Emily Spurrell, said in her response to the NAO’s report, we recognise the need for smart investment if we are to deliver for our communities. 

We have an opportunity with the current police reform programme to take a fundamental look at how the service is funded, ensuring investment in the resources needed to bring about productivity gains and create a police service equipped with the technology and skills needed to respond to crime in the 21st century. It will be a huge, missed opportunity if we let it pass. 

On the topic of reform, we have yet to learn how any of that will be paid for. Significant change is coming, including the creation of a new National Centre of Policing; such change will inevitably bring with it up-front costs, even if savings are made further down the line. 

There was no mention of it in last month’s Budget, so we must hope the Government’s delayed police reform White Paper, now expected sometime in the new year, will shed some light. 

Looking to the future 

Implementing and delivering on the Government’s new and much anticipated VAWG strategy will be a key part of our work. Indeed, it was the efforts of PCCs that helped push it up the national agenda to the point it is now acknowledged as a strategic threat akin to that of terrorism. 

The VAWG strategy rightly approaches the issue as a society-wide one. Policing must do all it can to pursue perpetrators so that they are held accountable for their crimes, while working with others in education, health, local government and the charitable sector to identify and address the root causes and, vitally, support and protect victims. 

In pledging to halve VAWG in a decade, the Government has set a major challenge, but it is a challenge to which we and our colleagues across policing are committed after years of women and girls being let down by the police and wider criminal justice system. However, it must come with additional funding, or we are setting ourselves up to fail on a critically important issue. 

PCCs commission services to support victims of crime, funding for which has recently been confirmed for the next two years – a welcome 2% increase. But with the erosion over time of victims’ services funding, matching provision with the level of need is extremely difficult. The Government’s commitment to funding for just two years means the sector faces a dangerous funding cliff edge in 2028/29. 

The Government’s announcement that the PCC role is to be abolished in 2028 makes it all the more important that the victims’ services sector, and consequently victims themselves, have the reassurance of a full three years of funding to PCCs, allowing for a smooth transition into the model that will replace that of us. 

Some police programmes come with ringfenced funding – the Neighbourhood Policing Guarantee, for example. This ensures money is available for such programmes, but it reduces flexibility for PCCs and chief constables in allocating the overall policing budget based on local need. This can introduce perverse effects on the balance of a force’s workforce, for instance, and skew priorities. 

As things stand, currently ringfenced funding may not extend beyond this financial year so the viability of those projects that rely on it cannot be guaranteed beyond then either. 

One worrying aspect of the current funding situation is the pressure PCCs are under to use the Council Tax precept to fill some of the funding gap. Increasingly, local tax-payers are asked to foot the bill not only for central government’s strategic aims but to meet day-to-day cost pressures of inflation and national pay awards. These are not local issues and should be funded centrally. 

Of course, cost pressures differ from force to force, but so too does the amount a PCC can collect via the precept, depending on the level at which it’s set, the number of people in an area paying the tax, and the value of properties in that area. 

Coupled with significant population growth in some parts of the country which adds to the demand on the police, it is creating unfairness in the police funding system which needs addressing. 

The Government has set the maximum increase PCCs can make to the precept in the next financial year at £15, up from £14 this year. We do not want to be asking already hard-pressed households to pay more in their Council Tax for policing, but the funding situation is such that I suspect that is where many PCCs will find themselves – or finding ways to make savings. 

PCCs may be being abolished in 2028, but the financial challenges policing faces must be dealt with here and now. Police funding needs reform. In the meantime, we will continue to ensure the money available is used to best effect, and that when it comes to handing over to whatever the system is that replaces PCCs in 2028, we do so knowing we are leaving police budgets in the best shape possible. 

• This article first appeared in Policing Insight