Basic right of safe travel

THREE-QUARTERS of all crimes committed in Rossendale go unsolved.

Police budgets are stretched to the limits.

Rossendale has all but lost police stations where it’s possible to go in and report a crime.

If there was anywhere where the police might hope to find support in such dire circumstances, it would surely be from a county councillor who used to be a policeman.

Sadly for anyone who believes that more police equals a safer Lancashire, former Detective Superintendent Graham Gooch, doesn’t seem to support the need to better fund Lancashire Police.

He’s a vocal supporter of Lancashire county council plans to pull funding for 17 police community support officers which LCC supported to help keep people safe on public transport in the county.

Coun Gooch, who represents a presumably crime-free public transport oasis in west Lancashire, said: “Instead of being out on the beat, reassuring the public and preventing crime, they’re acting as security guards on school buses. If they used the money to make people feel more safe, I think we’d be a lot more sympathetic.” I somehow doubt it. Those PCSOs were out on the beat, helping people feel safe on public transport, and preventing crime on public transport (including, it would seem, school buses).

Any problems on public transport will now have to be picked up by other hard-pushed officers.

Lancashire’s ruling Tory councillors are quick to shout about the Labour cuts they have reversed.

If this is the strength of the arguments they have for the new cuts they introduce instead, it’s no wonder they don’t brag about them.

“A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself a failure,” Margaret Thatcher once claimed.

Maybe the Tories at Lancashire county council believe any youngster who finds himself on a school bus doesn’t warrant the basic human right of being safe when travelling.

A disgrace all around.