No Dorset police tax increase would create £2.9m shortfall

David Sidwick, who is seeking support for his first precept since taking on the role, said there would be a reduction of 63 officers in Dorset Police if the precept remained at the same level.

As reported, Mr Sidwick is seeking views from residents for an additional 83 pence a month from the public in the police precept element of council tax.

Police and crime commissioner for Dorset David Sidwick

Speaking to the Daily Echo, Mr Sidwick said: “My message to residents is nobody likes tax rises. I don’t like tax rises, I will be paying it as well, but we value how safe our county is.

“We want our county to be the safest in the UK, we can get there.

“Without this money, if we didn’t get £10 in the way we are doing, 83 pence a month, if we didn’t do a precept increase, we would actually be reducing by 63 officers, so this money is badly needed and I will make damn certain residents get value for money and this place will get safer.

“If we didn’t do it we would have a shortfall of around £2.9million.

“This £10 allows us to do what we need to do but it also allows us to do the new stuff.”

If the proposed increase is approved, the Dorset Police precept would be £77.2m in 2022/23, up from £73.5m in 2021/22.

Mr Sidwick said: ”In order to keep the people of Dorset safe, in order to enact the promises I made during the election, I need to put the precept up. That precept won’t just go on inflation. That allows us to do some significant things, things that need to happen.”

Launching a consultation earlier this month, Mr Sidwick said the increase would allow him to give Dorset a new county lines task force, to put more officers in the rural crime team, to improve the 101 and emergency response service and to provide community police surgeries.

“Something which I was aware of but obviously you don’t understand fully until you are actually doing the job is the amount of money we get from government versus the amount we get from the precept,” said Mr Sidwick.

“Dorset is the second least funded from the national government grant. We are 40 out of 41 forces. That means a more significant proportion of the police funding needs to come from the precept.

"I would love to not need to put it up and I would love to get to a situation where that didn't happen, but I can't get there yet.

"My job now regarding it is two fold. One, to extract the maximum value of what we have got and make certain that drives for those priorities.

"But also to lobby up, so I have over the past few months been talking to local MPs and they have been talking to government, I have been talking to government and making it clear that the national funding formula needs to change.

"It is being reviewed now, which is an absolute bonus, but that review will take some time and until then we have the situation where we are the second worst funded force in the country from the point of view of national money."

Mr Sidwick provided comments on the area the precept increase would help improve

Anti-social behaviour

"One of the areas which people were extremely concerned with, one of the areas we have been pretty dire at is addressing anti-social behaviour. The police now have that as a priority. This precept increase of £10 will also go towards embedding local neighbourhood policing teams in the community and expanding the new neighbourhood enforcement teams, so that will help address anti-social behaviour and volume crime.

County lines

"I am making certain we are tough on the enforcement around drugs, violence and county lines.

"We are a net importer of crime. Roughly 80 per cent of our county lines comes from London, 15 per cent from Merseyside and five per cent from the West Midlands, so basically we need to do more and more.

"The specific county lines task force will allow us to do that."

Rural crime

"We had two great rural crime team officers, absolutely superb, but we only had two. My ambition was we would increase this and increase this considerably and that is shared by the new chief constable.

"We will making more announcements about that in the new year but to do this properly and make sure they have the resources they need, we had to have that as part of the precept as well.

101

"It is a complicated thing. My experience which was about three-and-a-half years ago now, was 45 minutes. The average now for 101 is 10 minutes but part of the issue is the ways people can communicate. If you have something to report and it is not an emergency, it is much easier to do it online or use the 101 email.

"All that information is taken into account. You might have a colour of a car doing something fishy. Someone else might have a registration number. It all links up.

"There is also what these numbers are being used for. The absolute classic is the fact that there was a 999 call I listened to when I was in the force command centre and it was somebody calling because he had an emergency. The emergency was he had locked himself out of his flat. Forgive me, but that is a locksmith you need, it is not the emergency services.

"There is an education, there is consistency about how to call and who to call, and there is technological point in order to address this.

"It is an absolute tragedy to me that we are one of the last forces in the country to get something called Single Online Home, which is a much more efficient web-based way of filtering out demand. We should have been there far earlier, but we will get there and we will get there in the next year or so.

"The precept allows me to move on with some of that."