I have read with astonishment the recent criticism from some local councillors – including members of the Police & Crime Panel – of Dorset’s Police & Crime Commissioner’s proposal to increase the local police precept by just 7p per week.
Perhaps not surprisingly, those voicing most displeasure are from the same party that is promoting austerity across all public spending nationally. As I set out in a blog post last week, the floods crisis has exposed the false economy of austerity measures in the Environment Agency, and so it is that austerity in policing and justice is leading the nation in to being less safe and less responsive.
Under the last Labour government crime fell by 43%. Perhaps more importantly, we championed the importance of community engagement and neighbourhood policing, ensuring that police priorities were guided by local concerns.
We listened to what people wanted from their police and invested. Over 13 years of a Labour government the nation gained an extra17,000 local bobbies who know their communities and 16,000 PCOs were trained and appointed to support police officers, and to be the vital link between local police services and local communities. Neighbourhood policing proved popular and it worked.
In just under four years of the coalition government, the country has lost 15,383 police officers – the biggest cuts to frontline police services since the Second World War. The government has consistently sought to paint these losses as “efficiencies” – as though somehow their ideological cuts had no impact on the police services we all rely on.
In May 2011, The Home Secretary Theresa May claimed, while outlining the cuts she was to implement, “All the savings that I have set out can be made while protecting the quality of front-line services.”
Yet it is the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) that openly challenged this claim. 15,383 officer posts gone since 2010 they say – and of these 10,460 are operational, frontline posts. Surely, that has to have an impact, doesn’t it?
In the through-the-looking-glass world that is government press releases, we are told not – crime continues to fall, they say. The inconvenient problem for Theresa May and David Cameron however, is that the Office for National Statistics has said that the UK’s crime figures cannot be relied upon as a realistic indicator.
I met with Dorset’s PCC Martyn Underhill recently. He may not have stood for the role of PCC on a Labour ticket, but he struck me as a reasonable man, and one that genuinely wants to do the best for Dorset Police, and the communities that they serve. Dorset Police – he told me proudly – perform well, right up there among the highest performing forces in the country, while at the same time being the lowest funded of the centrally-funded police services nationally.
Was he confident that this level of performance could be maintained? Not at all. “How can we maintain it,” he asked me, “when we’ve had the little we already get in comparison to other forces cut yet again?”
That was when he told me – quite openly – about his plans to increase the precept. This was of course no secret as his office was already mid-way through a public consultation. As might be expected, when the facts were calmly and clearly set out for people, the majority of those responding approved the modest precept rise.
In 2010 Dorset Police had 1486 full-time equivalent police officers. By the end of 2013 that figure had fallen by 228 to just 1258 – a cut of over 15%.
Local Tories have enlisted the support of Tobias Elwood MP, who has promised to raise the issue of the “undemocratic” precept rise with the Home Secretary, angered that the Tory-dominated Police & Crime Panel was unable to raise the two-thirds majority they needed to block it.
From my position, the PCC– in the face of further damaging government cuts to the lowest-funded force in the country – engaged with the Dorset public to ask whether local people were prepared to support their local police force to the tune of just £3.60 per year for a Band D household. The proposal received public support.
Just as we have seen local political infighting on this issue, the same has been seen nationally. The delay and infighting from Government has put Police and Crime Commissioners and Local Authorities in an impossible position with only a month left to set their budget. Eric Pickles and Theresa May like to talk about localism, but calls from Police and Crime Commissioners for clarity over regional funding have repeatedly been ignored in Whitehall. In those circumstances meaningful planning becomes impossible.
Savage government cuts, together with the politicisation of police governance has led to financial uncertainty and damaged morale. Neighbourhood Policing, one of Labour’s greatest achievements, is being progressively undermined as the impact of what the Government is doing and is in danger, in the words of the Steven’s Report, of returning policing to an old and discredited model of reactive policing.
Simon Bowkett is the South Dorset Labour Prospective Parliamentary Candidate. Follow his campaign at www.simonbowkett.co.uk and on Twitter @Simon_Bowkett
