I am grateful for the opportunity today to debate the excellence of the Safer Hastings partnership, but also, unfortunately, to raise a concern about a recent decision to reduce the funding for the partnership in-year. The Safer Hastings partnership is the local crime reduction partnership serving the borough of Hastings and St. Leonards, and, in common with other CRPs, it has achieved the Government’s objectives on reducing crime and, importantly, the perception of crime. All that good work has been possible because of the Government’s wisdom, in 1998, in deciding to fund crime reduction partnerships.
Does my hon. Friend agree with me that it is not only in Hastings where there have been advances in combating crime, but that across Sussex generally there has, for instance, been a 55 per cent. drop in the number of burglaries since 1997? In Brighton and Hove, part of which I represent, we now have the sixth lowest burglary rate in the country. Does the hon. Gentleman agree, however, that consistent rates of funding to help that work to continue to combat crime are important, not only in Hastings but across East Sussex and West Sussex?
Indeed, my hon. Friend is right. Government investment has meant falling crime rates not just in Hastings but across the nation. However, there is another problem in many places, and that is the rising perception of crime. I know that that perception is not increasing in Brighton and Hastings. Why should that be so? The crime reduction programme, combined with communication initiatives, has meant that the percentage of people who now feel safe walking alone in their neighbourhood, certainly in my area, has gone up to 55 per cent., even at night, and 92 per cent. in the day. The percentage of people who feel safe in the town centre when they are alone at night has gone up to 31 per cent.—an increase of 13 per cent. The equivalent daytime figure has jumped to 95 per cent. That is an excellent record. Indeed, under the community strategy put in place by Hastings borough council, which is set to run until 2013, a target was set that 50 per cent. of people should feel safe at night alone in their neighbourhoods by 2008-09. Already—two years ahead of schedule—the figure is 55 per cent. The importance of a perceived fall in crime rates cannot be underestimated, economically or socially. When people have confidence in the safety of their environment, they are more willing to engage in their communities, and they can go about their daily lives with a more positive attitude.
Perhaps I can explain a little more about how the success that I have described has been achieved. Several streams of funding were provided by Government, and gratefully received. It has been a massive investment. However, an essential stream has been the one known as the safer and stronger communities fund. It relates in particular to the building of safer communities and the combating of antisocial behaviour, and to drug support partnerships. Those are key components in the fight against crime and the perception of crime, and that is why I am concerned today at the Government decision not just to impose a reduction on the budget, but to impose a reduction in-year, after the budget was fixed.
The problem that my hon. Friend is speaking about has, of course, been imposed across the whole south-east. Funding to my own crime and safety partnership has been cut by £42,000. Does he agree that, apart from the effect of the cut itself, there is an impact from the fact that it has been imposed in-year, with no notice from the Government office for the south-east?
My hon. Friend is right. It is that which causes me to raise the concern today. Not only were cuts made; hon. Members were not involved in the process, or even told what was going to happen. They learned only after the event. That is what has been so damaging—it is not just that the amount of cash has been reduced, but that there has been an effect on the well-being of the partnership, and its confidence about what can happen, particularly given the Government’s proud record of giving forward funding in all sorts of other areas.
Examples of what has been done with the funding include the restorative justice scheme for teenagers, which introduces first-time offenders to their victims and takes them on prison visits, highlighting the consequences of their continued actions. Reoffending among those participants has gone down, according to some checks that have been made in my area, to 5 per cent. That is an amazing success story. Another example is the LIFE project, in which fire and rescue personnel, over a five-day course, train offending youngsters in fire-fighting skills, and challenge the reasons for antisocial behaviour. That has proved highly effective in instilling a new sense of personal values.
An aspect of the Safer Hastings partnership’s work on the perception of crime has been its innovative approach in providing a network of 11 community televisions in public places across the town, such as McDonald’s, Tesco and doctors’ surgeries—you cannot get away from it—telling residents that life is much better than they might have thought. That innovative approach has been credited with the achievement of a 20 per cent. increase in the number of people who believe that crime is falling. Of course, that figure should be 100 per cent., because crime is falling, but an increase of 20 per cent. is pretty good.
The community television scheme that I mentioned was showcased in the House of Commons exhibition earlier in the year, when my noble Friend Baroness Scotland, who was at the time a Home Office Minister, and is now the Attorney-General, referred to the scheme as an exemplar, and one that she would want to spread wider. It has been so effective that not only has it achieved ministerial approval: Roger Fisher, the former head of the Home Office fear of crime team said that the Home Office currently views community partnership television as an example of best practice as a method of communicating with the public.
The plaudits for the Safer Hastings partnership and other crime reduction partnerships go on and on. They are a real success story. For example, the Government Office for the south-east communications conference awarded the SHP the award for best new media initiative, as part of the community partnership television scheme. Just recently the partnership achieved international acclaim as a result of its varied programmes, funded by the Government’s safer communities fund. Hastings has now been recognised by the Italian Association of Language Consultants as one of the best destinations for foreign students. In fact, later this year, in this very place, the managers of the SHP, David Furness and Mike Fagan, will receive an award from the Italian authorities recognising their success in achieving a safe town. To conclude the list of awards, the SHP has been shortlisted for the Tilley Award, which is a prestigious Home Office award for the most intelligent, courageous and effective approaches to the relevant problems.
The reason I have told the House all this is because I want hon. Members to appreciate that the Safer Hastings partnership, and the crime reduction partnerships in my hon. Friends’ constituencies, have been a huge success in helping to achieve the twin objectives of the Government—the right objectives of reducing crime and reducing the perception of crime, which is so debilitating. It is in that context that I am bewildered and puzzled to learn of a cut in funding for the current year, 2007-08. It is not a matter of future plans, but of the here and now—something that happened after the budgets had been fixed. Funding reviews will always need to reassess priorities, but in this case, without any consultation or warning, the funding has been cut after the financial year has begun. I also regret that, as I have mentioned already, Members of Parliament whose constituencies were affected by the cuts were not informed of the decision by the Department. It all came out by rumour; in my case an outraged police inspector called me on the telephone to say, “What is this all about?” Sadly, at the time, I was unable to tell him.
In East Sussex the building safer community’s budget has now been cut by £102,000, or 14 per cent., and the Safer Hastings partnership takes its share of that. Having spoken with SHP officials I understand that that means that this year there will be cuts to initiatives targeted at reducing hate crime, domestic abuse and street crime. That is dreadful. Public reassurance initiatives will also suffer, and that could have a hugely detrimental impact on public confidence in our crime reduction programmes.
I am told that the reason for the changes is that the Home Office needs extra money for prisons and the prevention of terrorism. Obviously, those are both important programmes, especially in light of recent events, but there will always be competing demands, and it is short-sighted to address in that way issues that are priorities for people, namely street crime, local crime and local confidence that they are being dealt with. To do so means simply that many of our objectives, such as not having overcrowded prisons, will be lost if we do not also reduce the crime that leads to people being put in prison.
There might even be a legal impediment to such late notification—I would welcome the Minister’s comments on that—because the deal was done and the grant was agreed, but then withdrawn. I suspect that that is something for local authorities to consider, but the purpose of this debate is to ask the Home Office to reconsider. The decision was clearly made under the old regime, and I invite my hon. Friend to return to his colleagues, including the new Home Secretary, and ask whether it can be reconsidered. These are relatively small sums of money in the great scheme of things, but the cuts will have an effect on local crime reduction partnerships, both on the programmes that cannot be continued and on the morale of people who will be removed from their posts part-way through the year, after contracts have been entered into.
The Government have made it clear, in their dealings with local authorities, that they will not simply say what next year’s budget will be, but will try to give three-year funding projections. They are the first Government who have ever been prepared to do that, and that decision is to be applauded. In contrast, this in-year cut is contrary to all that the Government say is their intention and to what they are doing in all other respects.
I have corresponded with the Treasury team about this matter, and have here a letter dated 3 May from the then Chief Secretary to the Treasury—now the Minister of State, Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform—telling me that the budget for the Home Office between 2005-06 and 2007-08 provided £2.1 billion of extra resources, which is equivalent to an average real-terms growth of 2.7 per cent. for the period, so extra money has been provided. He also said in the letter that the Government’s priority is to have a “safe and secure society”, and stated:
“By the end of the current financial year Home Office spending will have risen by 75 per cent. in real terms since 1997”,
which is to be applauded.
The Home Office has had reasonable settlements. Of course, it has enormous obligations, but it has the cash to avoid this lurching of cuts part-way through the year. I therefore ask that the in-year cuts be restored and that should changes be necessary in future, we do not adopt the across-the-board approach, but consider what works best. Clearly, the Safer Hastings partnership works well—I have given examples of its success—as do the schemes in Milton Keynes and Brighton, but schemes in other areas might work less well. Perhaps some objective assessment should be made as to where, if anywhere, reductions should be made.
If reductions are made in the constituencies that have been mentioned today, services will be affected. The Minister might say that funding could be filled from other sources or could be dealt with differently, but that is not possible because it is ring fenced, so a reduction in the funding for particular projects means a reduction in those programmes. I regret that it has been necessary to raise this issue, and I am grateful for the opportunity to do so. I hope that the Minister will reassure my colleagues and me that he will reconsider.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye (Michael Jabez Foster) on securing the debate. He spoke with passion about all that has gone on in Hastings with policing, community safety and Home Office matters, and about developments throughout the public sector to do with the Safer Hastings partnership. I do not doubt that the partnership has, as he described, had a significant impact on improving the quality of people’s lives in Hastings and St. Leonards.
Let me give the detail of the main Home Office funding for the partnership’s work, although that funding is not paid directly to the partnership by the Department. Key elements for 2007-08 are the safer and stronger communities fund, the drug interventions programme grant and the basic command unit fund. The SSCF is a pooled budget comprising funding from the Home Office and the Department for Communities and Local Government, which is paid to upper-tier local authorities under the local area agreement process.
My hon. Friend will know that, for this year at least, the SSCF for East Sussex is £2,301,332 in revenue and £702,451 in capital, compared with £1.69 million in revenue and £190,000 in capital last year. That is an advertent point, which he did not seek to make, but the overall SSCF has not been cut; its pooled budget has grown. I shall come to his specific point about the Home Office, but people should not run away with the notion that the overall SSCF, and all that it does with such success throughout East Sussex, including Hastings, has been cut in the way that he described, because it has not.
Given the pressures that my hon. Friend described, which I understand are not priorities from his perspective, tough choices had to be made across the Home Office, both before and after its split from the Ministry of Justice, to enable us to live within our budgets and to meet our public protection obligations. As a result, the Home Office contribution to the SSCF is less than it was in the indicative figures that were offered in December, but that does not mean that we are any less committed to local delivery through LAAs—local area agreements—and partnerships, or to having a localised, neighbourhood focus on all that we do in policing and community safety. He will know that the overall pot for neighbourhood policing in England and Wales has increased by 41 per cent. this year, and he will be as committed as I am to ensuring that neighbourhood policing, in all its forms, works alongside crime and disorder reduction partnerships and other partnerships to bed in the success that he discussed.
The East Sussex upper-tier authority, in which Hastings sits, received over £3 million from the SSCF for 2007-08. Under its LAA, East Sussex and its partners enjoy greater freedom and flexibility to decide how best to use the SSCF grant to deliver an agreed range of outcomes. The intention is clearly that local areas should be able to prioritise pooled resources as they see fit to meet the needs of local communities. That flexibility is at the core of the new relationship between central and local government and is the basis of the LAA development that we want to see, not least in holding local police forces accountable more readily, particularly at BCU level.
I acknowledge that local authority systems should determine priorities locally, but perhaps I did not make my point very well. How can a local authority do that if it has fixed its budget and made its decisions for this year, and then a reduction is made after that budget has been agreed and determined?
In the strictest sense, it was not agreed. It was not until mid-May or June that Home Office contributions to LAA budgets were confirmed. That was quite wrong, and I assure my hon. Friend that that cannot and should not happen again. Previously, from December onwards, any figure about the Home Office contribution to LAAs was indicative, so the notion that the deal was done by December simply is not accurate. I understand why my hon. Friend is frustrated, and I accept, as I had to on a range of other issues last year, that it is not appropriate to wait until after the start of a financial year to wait for confirmation of decisions or subsequent reductions before making such decisions. I shall do all that I can to ensure that that does not happen again.
My hon. Friend will also know that Hastings is within the East Sussex BCU, which received £190,000 from the Home Office for 2007-08, as it has for the past four years. In any partnership, partners bring some of their own funding and resources to the table, and funding streams feed into the Safer Hastings partnership to meet local priorities. I was pleased to hear, for example, that it is being awarded funding from the neighbourhood renewal fund to progress its already considerable efforts in tackling town centre violence and disorder. If my hon. Friend could tell me how he unlocks NRF money, I would be enormously grateful, because my constituency has not received a penny from it in the past 10 years, despite containing significant pockets of deprivation.
The overall allocations of the SSCF grant were given to upper-tier areas, including East Sussex, and, given the nature of the pooled pot for LAAs, that allowed areas at that stage to plan their spend. I agree with the core element of my hon. Friend’s point: it is unfortunate that the detail of the Home Office element of SSCF allocations came later than usual. I fully understand that that may have caused some local planning difficulties, and the Home Office is committed to ensuring that it is not repeated in future years. The reasons for the delay were complex, but we will learn from this experience.
Collectively, £10 million accrued to the Home Office in terms of its contribution. Rather like the £27,000 lost in Hastings, that could, in the scheme of things, be conceived as being rather small beer in the Home Office’s budget of billions. I take with a gentle pinch of salt the letter that my hon. Friend received from the Treasury saying how wonderfully generous it has been and that everything is fine because it gave 2.7 per cent. None the less, I appreciate and would not deprecate the notion that £27,000 is huge in terms of Hastings’s funding. The loss of such a sum would have a potentially significant impact if forewarned and planned for; it would have even more impact if not planned for.
In the scheme of things, £10 million does not help matters much in the Home Office’s budget, but I have had to take £10 million from one place, £20 million from another and £10 million from another to get funding for the key priorities at the time— prisons and the counter-terrorism budget—and we in Government must take such decisions.
I also take my hon. Friend’s point about the notion of using needs-based assessment, rather than universality, if these things are reduced in future. It is no comfort to him, or to my hon. Friends the Members for Milton Keynes, South-West (Dr. Starkey) and for Brighton, Pavilion (David Lepper), that they have all been hit by 14 per cent. cuts. The fact that they share the pain does not make it all okay.
My hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye made the fair point that, if we were to recalibrate and lessen the moneys—I have no intention of doing this—that the Home Office puts into the LAA and SSCF pots as a matter of policy, it should be done more readily on either a success and performance-reward basis or a needs basis. I am entirely sympathetic to the challenges that the funding reduction causes and to the point that the Home Office elements were determined late and should have been done more readily—hopefully prior to the start of the financial year—so that people could have gone about their business.
Hon. Members would expect this, but I should say that we would still expect areas to meet their agreed target on reducing crime and disorder and the harm caused by drugs. I hope for the continuation of the substantive success that has occurred across East Sussex broadly and certainly in Hastings, as my hon. Friend outlined.
It is easy to talk about tough choices, appropriate priorities and targeting resources where they can have the most impact as things flatten out, rather than be reduced more generally, in terms of the Home Office. I am afraid that I cannot give my hon. Friend any satisfaction on restoring those elements that were reduced this year. However, I assure him that whatever the news, good or bad, for SSCF, LAAs, the BCU and all the key Home Office funding elements, it is incumbent on the Home Office to ensure that people know sooner rather than later what budgetary elements are coming from it. Such an approach would allow them to plan accordingly and to sustain—this is true in the case of Hastings—the good works that have been done through the partnership.
I applaud not only the commitment, but the innovations, substance and evidence of results of the Safer Hastings partnership. Although I might deprecate and decry the manner of the process, largely because I was involved in it, given that I know what the £10 million is being spent on elsewhere in the Home Office, I would defend the fact that cuts were made. My hon. Friend’s anger and frustration at it being mid-May or June—well after the start of the financial year—before the funding was finally announced is entirely fair.
I applaud what is happening in Hastings. East Sussex is wedded to the neighbourhood policing model that I see very much as the other part of the equation in terms of what people are achieving in partnerships such as Safer Hastings. I wish my hon. Friend and his colleagues in the partnership well in continuing the process, albeit, however temporarily, handicapped by the late confirmation of Home Office funding, for which I apologise. I shall seek to ensure, through him and my other colleagues, that that will not happen again. I therefore hope that we can maintain the good news and good success in crime and community safety, rather than discussing the unfortunate oversight of presenting the funding after the financial year has started.
Sitting suspended.