As we've heard, funding for the four Welsh police forces is delivered through a three-way arrangement involving Home Office, Welsh Government and council tax, with the Home Office operating a common needs-based formula to distribute funding across Welsh and English police forces, and a Welsh Government component based on consistency across Wales and England. Police budget cuts to 2014 were first announced in Labour's March 2010 UK budget statement, which stated that the scale of the deficit meant that the UK didn't have enough money. I think that was Mr Darling's quote.

Since 2015, the UK Government has raised its contribution to overall police funding in line with inflation, and, since 2019, the UK Government's announced the investment of over £1.1 billion to increase police officer numbers and provide forces with resources to tackle crime. The UK Government has now announced an overall £1.1 billion police funding increase compared to the 2021-22 funding settlement, bringing the total up to £16.9 billion, and confirmed three-year total grant funding for our police forces. This provides an extra £540 million by 2024-25 to recruit the final 8,000 police officers to meet the UK Government's commitment of 20,000 additional officers across Wales and England by 2023. All forces are receiving a 5.9 per cent core funding increase, and overall the funding package for Wales and England represents a 7 per cent cash increase on last year, with north Wales, for example, receiving an 8.4 per cent increase. Wales has also benefited from other UK Government programmes, with North Wales Police, for example, receiving over £0.5 million from the UK Government's safer streets and safety of women at night funds.

Funding to police and crime commissioners will increase by up to an additional £796 million, assuming full take-up of council tax precept flexibility, with council tax increasing in Wales this year by 5.5 per cent in south Wales and Gwent, 5.3 per cent in Dyfed-Powys, and 5.14 per cent in north Wales. Across Wales, this equates to a band E property paying below 30 per cent extra a week.

According to the crime survey for England and Wales, the best indicator of long-term trends in crime, overall annual crime increased 14 per cent, but this included a 47 per cent increase in fraud and computer misuse, and crime excluding this decreased by 14 per cent, largely driven by an 18 per cent decrease in theft offences. Further overall crime rates in Wales, as we know, are fairly low compared with the rest of the UK on average.

As I learned when I visited Titan, the north-west regional organised crime unit, an estimated 95 per cent or more of crime in north Wales operates on a cross-border east-west basis, and almost none on an all-Wales basis. North Wales Police therefore collaborates with five north-west England police forces to tackle serious organised crime. Devolution of policing would therefore be operational insanity and financial lunacy. Diolch yn fawr.