THE statement by the Home Secretary represents a three year funding settlement for the Police Service of England and Wales, and nationally represents 2.7 per cent for 2008/9, 2.8 per cent for 2009/10 and 2.8 per cent for 2010/11.

Grants will be distributed according to a national funding formula, with actual settlements ranging between 2.5 per cent and four per cent. Therefore, not all forces receive the same increase.

Eighteen forces will receive the minimum increase of 2.5 per cent. Gloucestershire is one of those forces.

Gloucestershire Constabulary and Police Authority will now begin the process of working out in detail what it means for the county's policing.

Certain specific grants for Neighbourhood Policing and Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs) remain in place, although their effect will be frozen over the next three years.

Furthermore, the capital grant allocation has been frozen at this year's level and will not increase over the next three years. This represents, in practice, a real terms cut.

It will now be a matter for the Gloucestershire Police Authority to determine the level of council tax which it will set in support of policing in Gloucestershire.

The grant settlement announced today would not, in itself, be sufficient to avoid some cuts in staffing levels over the next three years unless supported by a sufficient degree of increasing council tax.

However, the Authority is currently conducting a consultative process with the communities of Gloucestershire about priorities and funding for policing, and will take those views into account, together with the information announced today, before finalising its budget for 2008/9 in February 2008.

The Chief Constable of Gloucestershire, Dr Tim Brain, said: "I am pleased that the Home Secretary has recognized many of the arguments that ACPO and the APA and nationally, and the Constabulary and police authority locally, have presented over the last few months.

"While this is not a generous settlement, there appears to have been a genuine attempt at finding a balance between competing priorities.

"We are pleased to see that a minimum grant of 2.5 per cent has been set for all forces. This to some extent recognizes that all forces across England and Wales face a range of similar challenges in the early years of the 21st century.

"Gloucestershire, in recent years, has seen counterterrorist operations, operations to interdict serious and organised crime, a prolonged operation to deal with the largest civil emergency this country has ever seen, and at the same time provide neighbourhood and response to policing throughout the county.

"However, we have only received the minimum level of grant increase.

"This means that we will still probably have to introduce a range of cuts, although we will do our absolute best to ensure that this either does not affect the delivery of operational services to local people, or at the very worst does so only minimally.

"Although I cannot be specific in detail, it is still likely that we will have to lose some posts in the next financial year. It cannot be guaranteed yet that these losses will not have some impact on service levels in the county.

"Where the settlement does produce a problem, however, is in the increase in capital grant. This has been frozen, and will remain frozen for the next three years.

"This means that vital development in terms of technology and buildings will probably have to go on hold nationally. We do not want to stop development here in the Constabulary. We have renewed many parts of our operational building estate, including notably our Tri-Service control room at Waterwells. Some other parts of our estate, including our custody centres, however, need renewal. We will have to look very hard at what the settlement means for that estate development programme.

"We will now have to look at what this means in detail."

The chairman of the Gloucestershire Police Authority, Councillor Rob Garnham, said: "We have been working hard behind the scenes to get the best deal we can for the county and the 2.5 per cent increase will certainly help in funding the gap we face in our budget. The settlement still leaves us with some problems, however, and some cuts may still have to be introduced in 2008/9. It is also important that we try and find investment to keep developing the Constabulary, in personnel, technological and estate term for the future. If we hadn't made those investments over the last few years we simply would have been amalgamated two years ago and would not have been in a position to deal effectively with the flooding emergency of July and August 2007.

"We have already begun our consultation with the public and we will take the messages we receive from that process into consideration when we set out priorities for 2008/9 and finalise the budget.

"We will now be working closely with the Chief Constable and his team to work out the impact of the settlement and future budget implications."