If you thought the Spending Review gives you breathing space to relax the reforms we started five years ago, you could not be more wrong. So said Home Secretary Theresa May. In a speech to a Police Reform Summit on Tuesday, December 8, she said: “The overall policing budget is protected. But not the wasteful and inefficient spending that we all know still exists.”
She said that she, and the public, would not have sympathy for complaints about the cuts to police spending. “Instead, we must redouble our efforts, force a more urgent pace, and deliver a more radical and more sustained period of police reform than we saw even in the last Parliament.”
On whether police forces might merge, she said that if two or more forces want to come together, with local consent and a sound business case, “I will listen and I will take it seriously. But to date, I have not received any formal representations from forces which fulfil this criteria.” rather, she argued that the debate was not about police force structures, but about the capabilities of policing, against serious and organsied crime, cyber crime, child sexual abuse (CSA), what she called ‘the emergence of industrial scale fraud, often originating in other countries by criminals that act anonymously’, and terrorism: “The terrible attack in California last week, in Paris last month, and in Beirut, Tunisia and elsewhere before, reveal the disturbing new face of terrorism, inspired by and linked to Daesh.”
On police making arrangements with others in the emergency services, such as fire and the NHS, she admitted that ‘progress is patchy’. As for technology, she pointed to George Osborne the Chancellor announcing recently that over the course of the next Spending Review period the Government will spend an additional £1 billion overhauling the emergency services network. “This will give officers the capability to access databases, take fingerprints and witness statement and stream body-worn video whilst on the move.”
She spoke also of a Modern Crime Prevention Strategy, to be published next year, which will set out joint working with industry and civil society to prevent crime and save police time. She said: “It will drive a stronger focus on new technology – both as a source of new criminal opportunities, and as a tool for prevention. It will strike a balance between going further to embed the techniques that work to prevent ‘traditional’ crime, and reapply the prevention lessons of the last twenty years to new priorities like fraud and CSA.”
For the speech in full visit the Home Office website.
London comment
As another sign that police face further cuts, Mayor of London, Boris Johnson MP, welcomed the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s November statement, and the ‘focus on keeping officer numbers high’. Johnson said: “Keeping London and Londoners safe is my number one priority as Mayor.
“The Government’s commitment to counter terror funding, neighbourhood policing and the protection of frontline officer numbers in London is of vital importance. Since 2008, through efficiency savings and the sale of underutilised police buildings we have been able to keep officer numbers high at around 32,000, whilst safeguarding neighbourhood policing.
“Further savings will be necessary, as we continue to streamline and reform the Met Police, but this settlement allows us to maintain those neighbourhood teams, whilst keeping officer numbers high, in our fight against terrorism, our drive to continue to reduce crime across London, and our determination to keep this city safe.”
