South Yorkshire Public ‘Betrayed’ By Austerity Cuts To Policing

“The public of South Yorkshire have been completely and utterly betrayed by the previous decade of Government.”

The Chair of South Yorkshire Police Federation, Steve Kent, said that cuts to the police service in the early 2010s have led to “an absolute nightmare”, after a former Conservative minister admitted things could have been “done differently”.

In the wake of the Leeds riots, Sir Robert Buckland was asked on GB News whether the previous Home Secretary Theresa May had made a mistake in “taking a machete to police numbers”. Sir Buckland replied: “It was something that perhaps we could have done differently.”

Steve said: “This is a case of ‘we told you so’. The public of South Yorkshire have been completely and utterly betrayed by the previous decade of Government, because the cuts decimated the numbers of police officers.

“In our force we’re still not back to where we were on numbers. We used to have 3,500 officers, it went down to 2,600 in the last decade, and now it’s only back up to 3,100. We actually need to be at around 3,700 officers to be able to cope and deal with demand.

“Meanwhile we’ve seen increases in financial crime and cybercrime. Then across the country there’s been a rise in knife crime. Look at our traffic departments, they’ve been decimated. You only have to ask any member of the public and they’ll tell you they don’t see traffic cars anymore. It’s absolutely broken across the country.

“Members of the public in South Yorkshire should be very proud of what we do with so little, but it’s an absolute nightmare. It was so obvious to see it was going to happen and, lo and behold, here we are.

“We’ve seen an unprecedented attack on policing, it’s been the worst since the formation of the Federation in 1919. There needs to be some serious repair work done.”