“I hope that any future Prime Minister has a different attitude to policing.”

SOUTH Yorkshire Police Federation is hoping to see a ‘complete attitude change’ to policing from the next Prime Minister.

Departing leader Theresa May made few friends in the sector during her time as PM and Home Secretary with severe cuts in the service happening on her watch.

Around 1,000 officers have been lost in South Yorkshire over the past decade and one job at the top of the new PM’s agenda, whoever it is, must be to repair policing, South Yorkshire Federation Chair Steve Kent said.

“I think there does need to be a complete attitude change. I think we have seen a bit of that from [Home Secretary] Sajid Javid now in terms of the way he’s looked at policing.

“But I don’t think he’d have the support of his Prime Minister. Whatever the new Prime Minister needs to do, it just doesn’t need to focus on Brexit. They need to focus on the repairing of policing, which is pretty much broken in this country. We need to have that reverse of attitude.

“We need to obviously have increased funding across the board to get the numbers back up and to get our equipment back to where it needs to be, and basically to get us to start repairing the damage that has been done for the last nine years of horrendous cuts towards us, such as us in South Yorkshire going from 3,500 to 2,500 cops, which is a staggering figure.

“As a Federation, we have had a very negative relationship with Theresa May and all I can hope is that any future Prime Minister, whoever that might be, has a different attitude to policing and can see the effects that it’s having on the public. Some parts of Britain are seen as lawless – law and order needs to be prioritised.”