Cleveland PCC has 'serious concerns' about police forces merging
The Home Secretary is setting out details later on plans to reform policing in England and Wales
Cleveland's Police and Crime Commissioner says he wouldn't like to see our police force merged with any others in the North East.
It's as the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, is setting out details later of the biggest shake-up to policing in England and Wales for generations.
The measures include cutting police forces from the current 43.
Matt Storey, Cleveland PCC, said: "I wouldn't like to see Cleveland Police merged with any other force, no. I have serious concerns about any potential mergers.
"I think the communities of Cleveland are better served by a force that's linked to their communities and understands their communities rather than a huge North Eastern force, where Cleveland may get squeezed out of some of those conversations around resources and where resources should be placed, when you've got dense-urban centres like Newcastle and Sunderland. I feel like some of the resources may struggle to get to us.
"I think that community connection can be lost and that's quite dangerous. I also think if you look around the country, bigger isn't always better. The Met, the biggest force in the country, have had significant problems in many different ways over many years. West Mids recently have been in bother as well, so I think when you look at some of these really big forces, if the Government thinks bigger forces are better, I'm not sure that there's evidence to back that up.
"There's a danger that you lose that community connection. I don't think it'll save money. I think these things actually cost money in the long run. The Government is trying to devolve power to communities and devolution is supposed to be about devolving power to smaller groups of people, to smaller numbers of people in communities, not creating huge institutions, bigger organisations.
"The Government are announcing a lot of different areas of focus. All of those are really ambitious targets and things that I'm really pleased to see and I'm all onboard for it but without the funding, without the resources to go with it, none of those things are deliverable. And at the minute the Government aren't backing us up with the funding to deliver those priorities but if you don't fund it, it won't happen.
"I think the concern I would have is if you live in a small, minor village in Durham or if you live in East Cleveland, are you going to get the resource that you need within a huge geographical space for a new North East force? I would be concerned about that. I would also be concerned that maybe your neighbourhood cops don't know your area as well as they did because it's a much bigger organisation.
"I also don't think it saves money or resources by making a bigger force because both Durham and Northumbria also have a bad settlement from the Government and essentially all you're doing is merging three cash-strapped forces together to make one huge cash-strapped force, which for me, doesn't actually provide any degree of assurance around resources and saving money.
"It would just be a very big force that had less resources and if you fewer resources as a big organisation, a lot of that funding will gravitate towards particular urban centres and I think some of those rural centres, some of those remote areas, and we do have them across Northumberland, Durham and Cleveland, I think they may lose out and I wouldn't want those communities to lose out."
The changes wouldn't fully take effect until well into the next decade though.