Crime commissioners threaten legal action over police cuts

The Home Office has hit back at a threat by Boris Johnson’s policing deputy and four Conservative police and crime commissioners to sue the home secretary if she goes ahead with controversial cuts to their funding.

Stephen Greenhalgh, who oversees the Metropolitan police as one the mayor’s deputies, joins with the four fellow Tory PCCs and two Labour PCCs in describing the the proposed new funding formula for police forces in England and Wales as “unfair, unjustified and deeply flawed”. Their objections are set out in a letter to policing minister Mike Penning.

The four Conservative PCCs involved have responsibility for the North Yorkshire, Devon and Cornwall, Thames Valley, and Cumbria forces. They are joined by the Lancashire and Merseyside PCCs, who are Labour. The police forces face cuts of up to 16% in their funding as a result of the changes, and Cumbria has said its future viability is at stake.

The Metropolitan police stands to lose 11.4% or £184m of its Whitehall grant, which ministers have been told equates to the loss of 3,000 officers in the capital.

The letter says Merseyside would lose £5m, which would result in “drastic cuts across operational policing, including teams responsible for investigating sexual assaults, hate crimes and serious and organised crime”. Lancashire’s 14% or £25m annual reduction would lead to the loss of “almost all of its proactive crime fighting and crime prevention capacity by 2020”.

The PCCs object in particular to the inclusion in the proposals of a “commercially developed ‘urban adversity’ indicator” which has led to an extra £2bn being directed to inner city forces.

The proposed formula changes are in addition to expected deep cuts in Whitehall police funding to all forces in England and Wales as part of the chancellor’s comprehensive spending review later this month.

The letter continues: “The uncertainty and concern caused to the communities we serve by the review as it currently stands was entirely avoidable and wholly unacceptable.

“It is with much regret that we are therefore taking legal advice with a view to initiating a judicial review, should our concerns not be addressed.”

The funding formula proposal has already been redrawn once after the West Midlands police chief constable made a similar threat to take Theresa May to court when her original proposal left some mainly Labour-controlled inner city forces facing grant reductions of up to 50%.

But Penning has hit back at the fresh legal threat, saying no final decisions had been made on police funding, which had to be put on a long-term sustainable footing.

He said the indicative Home Office figures that had been shared so far with forces were based on this year’s settlement and should not be taken as their final allocations.

It is expected that London in particular will be treated as a special case, but this has yet to be confirmed.

“The current model for allocating police funding is complex, opaque and out of date,” Penning said. “That is why we have consulted on principles for reform of funding arrangements for the police in England and Wales, ensuring they are fair, robust and transparent.

“We are refining our proposed model in light of responses to the public consultation and are engaging further with police and crime commissioners and forces as part of this process.

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