Police force to bill govt for botched merger plans
North Wales police authority has announced it will be billing the Home Office for the £375,000 it spent on preparing for a merger that has now been scrapped.
The force was due to merge with the three other forces in Wales as part of a highly controversial police restructuring plan announced last November.
Following widespread opposition from within the police and from opposition MPs, the government announced last week that it would no longer be proceeding with any forced mergers – and the only voluntary merger was not able to go ahead.
North Wales authority chairman Ian Roberts welcomed the decision to scrap the forced mergers, which many believe are a sign that the plans will be quietly dropped, but insisted the police force should be compensated for all its work in preparing for them.
“We said from the very outset this was an extremely costly waste of public money, money that could and should have been far better spent putting more bobbies on the beat to keep our communities safe,” Cllr Roberts said.
“This exercise in futility has cost £375,000 in North Wales alone and across Wales as a whole the bill is likely to be in excess of £1 million – and that’s a conservative estimate.
“And as a result, 65 people were diverted from their normal duties and tied up working on a project that was doomed from the very beginning.”
It was not right that council taxpayers should have to pick up the pieces of the “merger mayhem”, he continued, saying: “The mess was of the Home Office’s making and quite simply they should pay to clear it up.”
He suggested Sussex police authority had also decided to send its bill to the Home Office, and said he expected other police authorities to follow suit.
A Home Office spokesman refused to comment on the individual cases, but said any applications for extra funding would be “considered”.
However, he stressed that the decision to abandon forced police mergers did not mean an end to attempts to restructure the police – as the reasons behind the original proposals, which would have seen the number of forces cut from 43 to 12, remained.
“We still need to reach that same destination, which is making sure our police forces are equipped to deal with terrorism and organised crime,” the spokesman told politics.co.uk.
