Home Secretary refuses to abandon police cuts

THE Home Secretary has rejected calls to abandon planned cuts to policing, insisting that the proportion of frontline officers has increased in the past five years and that communities are safer than they have ever been.

Theresa May (pictured) claimed that five years after chief constables, the Police Federation and the Labour Party warned against funding reductions, “not a single one of those irresponsible claims has come true”.

Speaking in the House of Commons, she accused Labour MPs of making the same mistake again ahead of the Treasury’s Spending Review this month.

Mrs May’s comments came after former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Lord John Stevens launched an online petition calling for a rethink over the Conservative government’s “double figure” spending cuts to the police service.

“In the last five years, police forces across England and Wales have lost 12,000 frontline officers. Government plans to cut the police by between 25 per cent and 40 per cent over the next five years could lead to the loss of over 20,000 more,” said Lord Stevens.

“Indeed, any budget cuts in double figures would spell the end of neighbourhood policing and put the public at risk.”

In the House of Commons, Shadow Home Secretary Andy Burnham warned that the government was “sending the police on a dangerous journey without a route map”.

He suggested that police reforms were a “crude, Treasury-driven process” that owes more to an “ideological drive to shrink the state” than to the good governance of the police and public services.

“What we will soon be left with is the police service of the Treasury’s dreams but the public’s worst nightmares,” he said.

However, Mrs May said the proportion of officers deployed to the frontline had increased from 89% of officers to 92% since 2010 – the highest level on record.

“The Labour party was united with chief constables and the Police Federation in saying that funding reductions would lead to a ‘perfect storm’ of rising crime, falling public confidence and a depleted and damaged frontline,” she said. “Five years on, and not a single one of those irresponsible claims has come true.”

Mr Burnham said the Home Secretary was “painting a rosy picture”. He added: “I think that police officers watching this debate will conclude that she is not living in the same world as them.”