This week, during parliamentary questions to Home Office Ministers, Richard asked the Policing Minister for a meeting with all Bedfordshire MPs to make the case for increased funding for Bedfordshire Police. The Minister agreed to a meeting and the full exchange can be watched here at : https://youtu.be/tIWQY5xXN-M
Richard Fuller MP said
This week, I asked the Policing Minister for a meeting with all Bedfordshire MPs to address the unfair funding of Bedfordshire Police, which has gone on since 2004 when the concept of “damping” was introduced to the police national funding formula. This has meant that a number of police forces, including Bedfordshire, have not received the full amount of funding that the national police funding formula said they should.
In our small county, our police not only have to deal with crime that affects many other parts of the country, but also have to deal with serious and organised crime and security in and around Luton Airport. There are also issues of social community cohesion in our urban centres and rural crime as well.
While I thank the government for the uplift in police numbers and significant grants awarded in recent years, we continue to be funded as a rural force and the situation is not sustainable. We have two large urban centres and an international airport requiring complex counter-terrorism resources and the funding needs to match the challenges Bedfordshire Police face.
In recent years, Bedfordshire's Police and Crime Commissioner has been successful in regularly applying for grants to boost funding but this is a sticking plaster approach and not sustainable in the long term. Richard has written to the five other Bedfordshire MPs asking them to join him in meeting with the Policing Minister to seek a solution to this perennial problem.
Richard will report back in due course.
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