I will be voting for the police settlement this afternoon, but it gives me no pleasure to vote for a settlement that provides even further cuts to our policing services up and down Wales. Mark Isherwood pays tribute to his colleagues in London for the work that they've been doing in funding police over the last few years, but what we know, and what we know in Gwent, is that police forces are actually seeing year-on-year reductions in their budgets. In this settlement, the Gwent police force, for example, will see a 2.8 per cent reduction in its actual spending power, and when you actually look and take 2010 as the base point, you'll see that Gwent Police again have 85.9 per cent of spending power available to them that they had back in 2010. And when we hear about 20,000 new police officers, what we also know is that what they're doing is replacing police officers who were sacked during the years of austerity. In fact, in this coming financial year, there will be fewer police officers in Gwent than there were in 2010. So, it's not that we're just not seeing the increases; we're not even seeing a stability in the numbers that the Tories inherited from the last Labour Government. What we are seeing is salami-slicing of the police budgets year on year on year, and the people paying the price of this, of course, are police officers themselves who are unable to deliver the service that they want to deliver, but also the communities that we all seek to serve in any part of Wales.

And it is important that when we're debating this, we are able to provide the funding that police forces require up and down the country, but that we are also able to provide the policing service that communities want to see in different parts of Wales. And what that means is that policing is able to operate on the same basis as other public services and other blue-light services in Wales, which means that they operate within a devolved structure and that policing is devolved to this place with utmost urgency. Because we have to do two things: we have to certainly maintain and increase spending, because that's absolutely fundamental to being able to provide a service; but then, what we have to do is deliver the coherence of service, so that police officers are able to work with all other police and public services to deliver a coherence. And I've heard the arguments from Mark Isherwood over these matters on a number of occasions, and he's very, very happy to quote his speeches from many years ago to support his arguments of today, but were he to quote his speeches from 2016, from 2017 to 2018, then he will also see the way in which the UK Government has cut back policing. And it is the poorest and most vulnerable people in our most fragile communities who have paid the price for these cuts year on year on year, and until policing is devolved to this place, we will not be able to have the coherence of services that this place demands and that our people deserve. So, I will be voting for the police settlement this afternoon, but I am really disappointed to see the way in which the Home Office plays fast and loose with police forces, fast and loose with public safety and fast and loose with the future of our communities.