As we've heard, funding for the four Welsh police forces is delivered through a three-way arrangement involving the Home Office, Welsh Government and council tax, with the Home Office operating a needs-based formula with a floor mechanism to distribute funding across Welsh and English police forces, and with the Welsh Government component based on consistency across Wales and England.

For 2023-24, the total core support for police forces in Wales will be £433.9 million. Police forces across England and Wales will receive a funding boost of up to £287 million next year from the UK Government. The rise will take total funding for policing in England and Wales up to £17.2 billion, and mean that police and crime commissioners across the 43 police forces in Wales and England will receive an increase of up to £523 million from Government grants and precept income. Council tax precepts will rise by 7.75 per cent in Dyfed-Powys, 7.4 per cent in south Wales, 6.8 per cent in Gwent, and 5.14 per cent in north Wales, equating, for example, to £1.86 per month for band D properties in south Wales and £1.34 in north Wales.

Figures last month showed that an extra 1,420 officers have joined police forces across England and Wales in the past three months, and 16,753 since 2019 as part of the UK Government's three-year programme to recruit 20,000 additional police officers by March 2023. This includes 1,843 new police officers across Wales. Of course, Welsh Conservative policy also remains to increase funding for police community support officers each year, aligning with the Welsh Government on that issue.

Although police-recorded crime in Wales and England has risen, the Office for National Statistics states that this was largely driven by increases in the offence categories that are most subject to changes in reporting and recording practices. Therefore, they said these estimates should be treated with caution as they may not reflect a genuine increase in crime. Figures released a fortnight ago show an estimated 136,000 violent offences have been prevented since 2019 in 18 areas of England and Wales, including south Wales, most blighted by violent crime, which have received targeted UK Government funding. And according to the crime survey for England and Wales, the best indicator of long-term trends in crime, the latest crime figures for the year ending September 2022 show that compared with the pre-coronavirus pandemic year ending March 2020, total crime decreased by 10 per cent.

As the finance Minister stated here last week in a different context, 

'we've got that long, porous border with England'.

And as I learned when I visited 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. However, and I conclude with this comment, the Welsh Government is yet to explain why the Thomas commission report only makes one reference to cross-border criminality despite the evidence presented to them, which I was appraised of during that visit. Diolch yn fawr.