Have Your Say on Police Funding

Office of the Police & Crime Commissioner

Have Your Say on Police Funding

Good Afternoon,

Thank you for your time if you have completed the survey from the previous message.

We are currently running a public consultation, and we would like to hear from you about what you are willing to pay towards the cost of policing in your community next year.

Of the £203 million we currently spend on Policing and Crime in Cleveland:

£53m comes from your Council Tax payments

The vast majority of the remaining £150m comes from the Government

To provide a similar level of service in 2026/27, it will cost around £10 million (5%) more because:

We need to pay Police Officers and Staff more – this is expected to increase our costs by around £7 million.

We need to pay higher non-pay bills such as insurance, and we are seeing higher costs of policing major incidents – this along with general price increases is expected to add costs of around £3m to our budget.

The consultation will ask residents to choose from a few options (e.g. extra £1–£2 a month) and tell us which policing issues matter most (anti-social behaviour, burglary, violence, etc.)

You may notice there is no option to freeze the policing precept, as this would result in:

Around £2.4m less than we need to continue to maintain current levels of service delivery

It could lead to 40 less Police Officers

And this would then put at risk a further £7m of funding that we receive from the Government to maintain our current level of Police Officers.

We currently forecast that the Government will provide around £5m of our increased costs, leaving us around £5m short for 2026/27. We will therefore need to increase the Police precept and deliver savings to meet this shortfall.

https://www.smartsurvey.co.uk/s/PoliceFunding25-26/

This will take a minute to complete the survey.

Kind regards,

OPCC Team

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