More than £20m in cash savings held by West Mercia Police could be spent over the next few years.

The force has already reduced the amount it has in its reserves by more than £20m in the last three years and Police and Crime Commissioner John Campion’s draft budget for 2018/19, and his plans for the next three years, will see the reserves drop by a similar amount.

Mr Campion says this will deliver a ‘balanced budget’ by 2019/20.

Much of that spending will be on modernising buildings and equipment.

The draft budget says: “We will continue to rationalise our estate through the co-location of separate teams within West Mercia and Warwickshire and by sharing premises and facilities with key partners such as other blue light services, local authorities, criminal justice agencies and the NHS. This creates the need for a significant provision for invest-to-save initiatives.”

From April, Mr Campion wants to spend £6 million on projects including upgrading Police HQ at Hindlip Park, £0.4m each on sorting asbestos in buildings, CCTV, and redundancy payments.

Infrastructure projects in 2019/2020 should also have £6m spent on them, and £0.4m has also been earmarked for redundancies and CCTV.

At the same time, Mr Campion has suggested that the Police’s share of council tax goes up by four per cent from April - £7.58 for a band D payer – and three percent in 2019/20 and at 1.99 per cent after that.

While his predecessor as PCC, Bill Longmore, was criticised three years ago for putting up council tax by 1.9 percent while keeping £55m in reserve, Mr Campion has been praised by his fellow Conservative politician, West Worcestershire MP Harriett Baldwin.

She said: “For several years, I have been urging West Mercia Police to deliver greater levels of efficiency savings and to use their extensive reserves supporting frontline policing.

“I support this plan adopted by the PCC attempting to deal with increasingly complex crimes like domestic abuse, sexual violence and child sexual exploitation."