SURREY Police is opposing a £29 million merger with Sussex, claiming that it would merely create a larger underfunded service.
The police and police authority, which controls the purse strings, have joined forces in opposing the proposals and have instead urged the government to tackle the fundamental problem of underfunding every year.
Its stance comes after analysis was carried out in response to the Home Secretary's request for forces with fewer than 4,000 officers to consider merging with neighbours.
It demonstrated that "a lack of resilience in police service delivery in the South East is caused by an accumulating deficit in funding".
The call for an increase in funding and a review of the government's funding formula for policing is made in a joint submission from the force and the police authority to the Home Secretary on the preferred options for force restructuring.
Surrey Chief Constable Bob Quick and Surrey Police Authority chairman Liz Campbell are united in their belief that the creation of strategic forces in the South East will not sufficiently mitigate the effects of the deficit.
Instead, the pair are calling for funding for Surrey to be improved.
"For the past four years, Surrey Police Authority has said that we are underfunded," Mrs Campbell said.
"This underfunding creates an unreasonable council tax burden for Surrey residents.
"We are leaders in police reform and we support the need for change. The status quo is not feasible as the funding formula will not sustain the service local people have come to expect from us.
"We have widely consulted our staff associations, councillors, MPs and members of the Surrey public and we have engaged in a thorough analytical process to understand which of all the merger options would be the best for Surrey."
The chairman said that Surrey Police will not support the proposed merger unless it proves to be the best deal for the county.
"Our analysis has been thorough and we do not see a convincing business case to merge with another force," she said.
"Even the least-costly merger will leave a bill of £29 million and will not deal effectively with the increasing capacity and capability gap we have been highlighting in recent years.
"We will not be railroaded into restructuring or bribed by money from the government to decide on a merger if we have concerns that it will not benefit local people.
"Our responsibility is to Surrey residents and to our workforce – we have to retain public confidence in policing locally."
Mr Quick voiced his support and said that the funding for the police service was a vital issue.
"The issue the Home Secretary is trying to address is not really a question of structure," he said.
"It is much more a question of how police resources are used, and of removing much of the red tape which constrains chief officers in making the best use of the resources we have.
"In the South East in particular, it is also a question of funding that can no longer be ignored.
"This exercise has been helpful in bringing into focus the scandalous deficit in police resourcing in the South East of England.
"Surrey suffers from the perverse effect of the national funding formula more than any other force.
"Over the last four years, Surrey and other South East forces have had their funding position dramatically eroded by the formula, which has decanted police funding to other parts of the country.
"This exercise has prompted us to cost this gap in detail and we have found that to achieve full resilience, whereby we would not have to abstract local police resources to deal with anything but the most critical of events, would require an additional £26 million of funding per annum in Surrey alone. "Interestingly, this funding gap would disappear if the people of Surrey received the average policing grant per head of population for England and Wales.
"It is my considered view that amalgamations in the South East of England will not address this emerging serious capacity and capability gap."
Mr Quick explained that the force has analysed and costed a possible merger with neighbouring Sussex.
"This option would cost £29 million," he said, "and while it would increase resilience in providing force-level protective services, for example major crime investigation, strategic roads policing, counter-terrorism capabilities and other services, we have calculated the same level of resilience could be built into the Surrey Force at similar cost but without the upheaval of a two-year merger exercise.
"Other merger options have been considered involving the merger of three forces and these options are prohibitively expensive and offer little additional resilience."
The police authority is unconvinced about the merger plans and will not be offering to merge with another police authority, or make a recommendation about the way forward without greater clarity from the government on issues such as funding and impact on staff.
Instead, the Surrey draft business case includes a preferred option to operate as a Surrey stand-alone force with more funding and greater flexibility from the government.
However, if the government is insistent on creating forces of 4,000 officers or more, the most pragmatic option is for Surrey to merge with Sussex.
Yet Surrey Police Authority points out that this will only have the effect of bringing two poorly funded forces together to create one larger, poorly funded force, with cuts in services on the horizon.