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| Cllr Mary Harkin, myself,Amanda Stubley, Cllr Mehboob Khan, Mike Wood MP |
Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper launched Labour’s campaign against police cuts in West Yorkshire today. Ed Balls had been leading this campaign which Yvette is now fronting and she said she is keen that Labour continues to challenge the Tory – led government on cuts to frontline police officers.
Yvette was joined by Ed, Mary Creagh – (in whose constituency the campaign was launched), and other West Yorkshire colleagues including Hilary Benn, Mike Wood, Gerry Sutcliffe, Fabian Hamilton and also councillors from Kirklees, Wakefield and Calderdale, at the Police Headquarters in Wakefield, to formally launch our West Yorkshire police cuts campaign.
Yvette told us that she and Ed had met with Sir Norman Bettison the Chief Constable and Mark Burns-Williamson. She explained that Sir Norman has been put in an impossible position by the government which has asked him to find cuts of more than 20 per cent in central government funding over four years, and front loading those cuts so around 15% needs to be found in just two years.
In West Yorkshire, we face losing over 500 officers and 1500 staff in total has been announced so it is time for us to begin campaigning more vigorously to highlight this short-sighted decision which risks the safety of the communities we represent.
West Yorkshire has been particularly hard hit, like Greater Manchester and the West Midlands because a larger percentage of the police force’s budget comes from central government funding unlike low crime Surrey where around half of total funding comes from the local council tax precept.
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| Myself, Ed Balls MP, Amanda Stubley |
PLP Brief
Police numbers
· The Government has confirmed that Police budgets throughout the country face real terms cuts of 7.5 per cent in 2011/12 and 8.7 per cent in 2012/13 (HOC Library calculations)
· Police funding will be cut by 20 per cent over the next four years, and the government is taking big risks with the public’s safety and undermining the fight against crime and anti-social behaviour.
· When Labour left office there were record numbers of police on the street, nearly 17,000 more than in 1997 in addition to 16,000 new PCSOs
· Helped by the record number of police officers, crime fell by 43 per cent under Labour and the chance of being a victim of crime was at a thirty year low. But the government’s reckless cuts to policing and crime prevention will put all this progress at risk.
· The speed and scale of the government’s cuts have put police forces in an impossible position. A number of forces have already announced plans to lose thousands of police officers, blowing apart the government’s claims that the frontline will be protected.
· The cuts are also ‘frontloaded’ – they will be larger for the first two years of this Parliament making it even harder to make longer-term efficiency savings and putting more pressure on police forces to cut officer numbers
· The first Police Officer numbers released since the Tory-led Government took office show that around 2,000 full time police officers have already been lost since the General Election
· This fall in numbers was for the period before the Government’s 20 per cent cut to police funding was announced and we fear they are only the thin end of the wedge
· Policing Minister Nick Herbert said the fall in police numbers was "not surprising”These cuts go way beyond what experts believe can be achieved through efficiency savings and better procurement. As coalition Ministers have regularly quoted, a report from Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary, Valuing the Police: policing in an age of austerity published in July, said that a “re-design” of the police system could “at best... save 12% of central government funding, while maintaining police availability”. Front-loaded cuts of 20% go significantly beyond that.
· The Home Secretary has abjectly failed to fight the corner of the police in these Spending Review negotiations and it will fall to the Labour Party to stand up for the law-abiding public against these reckless cuts.
Directly elected police and crime commissioners
- At the same time as inflicting savage cuts to police funding that will mean thousands fewer police, the Government is committed to subjecting the police to an unwanted organisational upheaval – replacing police authorities with 42 directly elected police and crime commissioners.
- This controversial top-down experiment goes against a 150 year tradition of keeping politics out of day to day policing. It raises the very real prospect of a politician telling a Chief Constable how to do their job.
- People will be rightly angry that at the same time as cutting funding for frontline police, the government wants to spend over £100m – the equivalent of 600 full time police officers - on bringing in directly elected police commissioners.
- It will risk politicising the police at a huge cost to the taxpayer, yet a single elected police chief for an area as large as the West Midlands, Greater Manchester or North Wales will do little to improve local police accountability.
