Why no Budget money to tackle escalating crime?
AUSTERITY is coming to an end, declared the Chancellor as he presented his Budget this week. Yet even in the supposed new era of fiscal generosity the police continue to endure frugality.
Amid all the spending increases promised by Philip Hammond there was nothing extra for our constabularies. This omission was all the more glaring given that crime is spiralling out of control.
During the Second World War George Orwell wrote that “the gentleness of English civilisation is its most marked characteristic”. How poignant those words sound almost 80 years later as thuggery and thieving sweep across our land.
According to the Office for National Statistics, overall violence rose by 19 per cent over the year to June 2018, with murders up by 14 per cent, robberies by 22 per cent and knife offences by 12 per cent. In a climate of deepening fear, police recorded crime is at its highest since 2005.
An empty bowl from the Treasury is the worst possible response to this crisis. The first duty of any government is to protect its people but the Tories, supposedly the party of law and order, are failing miserably in that task. Indeed, years of underfunding for the police since 2010 have contributed to the present crime wave since so many offenders feel they can act with impunity.
ONLY last week the Home Affairs Select Committee warned the police risked becoming “irrelevant” because they were “struggling to cope” with even the basics of law enforcement. The truth is that financial constraints have stretched the Thin Blue Line to breaking point.
Over the past eight years the number of officers has been cut by 20,000 while figures from the independent National Audit Office show police funding has fallen in real terms by 19 per cent since 2010/11. All this comes at a time when forces must cope with new types of crime such as online fraud, drug-fuelled gang warfare and sex trafficking, as well as worsening social problems such as mental illness.
Shortages of staff, technology and cash mean the police no longer have the capacity to deliver an effective service to the public. That explains why, despite soaring crime, the number of arrests has halved in the past decade. Similarly, the total of charges and summons for law-breaking has fallen 26 per cent in the past three years.
Remarkably, instead of providing more badly-needed money, the Government may implement more cuts, for the Treasury recently imposed a £420million bill on forces to underwrite the police pensions scheme.
The National Police Chiefs Council, which is threatening legal action against the Treasury over this demand, warns of further damage to budgets. The impact could be “crippling”, says Merseyside Chief Constable Andy Cooke.
What is so striking is the contrast between penury inflicted on the police and the profligate attitude towards the Department for International Development. It is a grotesque indicator of the Government’s warped priorities that Britain now spends more on foreign aid than policing, an imbalance for which no citizens ever voted.
This year the budget for overseas development will top £14billion, far more than the £12.3billion spent by the police. While chief constables face the prospect of an additional £420million for pensions, foreign aid bosses got a £230million funding increase in the Budget.
The absurdity of this largesse is that so much of the international development cash is squandered through corruption and waste. Moreover, far from boosting prosperity, the money often encourages a destructive, neo-imperialist culture of dependency. For all the sentimentality that envelops this, aid is a huge vanity initiative, where politicians selfrighteously parade their virtue using taxpayers’ money.
The needs of the British public should come before the preening self-importance of the political elite. That must mean a genuine increase in police funding so the war on crime can be waged effectively again.
There are some areas of policing where reform is needed so that performance improves and money is spent more efficiently. Bureaucracy and paperwork are excessive, while absenteeism remains a problem. Furthermore, police forces have become politicised so the fashionable progressive agenda sometimes prevails over the essential duty of preventing crime.
THAT trend is highlighted in the reluctance to use stop-andsearch for fear of accusations of prejudice, yet the result has been a surge in violence. In the same vein, the Metropolitan Police appears to have downgraded investigations into burglaries, yet boasts “over 900 specialist hate crime investigators working across London’s dedicated Hate Crime Community Safety Units”. The greatest community safety measure of all would be more beat officers.
This week Chief Constable of the West Midlands Dave Thompson warned “further cuts will leave us smaller than we have ever been”. That is hardly true. In 1961 there were 57,000 police officers – fewer than half the total of 122,000 today, yet crime was far lower.
But British society has altered radically since then. In these changed circumstances the police must be given the tools to do their job properly.
‘Society has changed and so has policing’