Email exposes cuts to policing

Johnson in the dock over funding

THE LEAKED email that West Yorkshire’s deputy chief constable Russ Foster sent to his colleagues, warning of a £30-40m deficit in the next financial year, needs to be placed in wider political and policy context.

This force, one of the UK’s largest, won’t be alone. All constabularies will be going through the same exercise and there should be an onus on all publicly funded bodies to look for sensible efficiencies each year.

But it is Mr Foster’s tone – he requests “all districts and departments to assist, by identifying potential savings options of five, 10 and 15 per cent” – that points to a worrying level of urgency and alarm.

Not only does this warning, and launch of a new ‘Star Chamber’ spending process, follow a decade-long spending squeeze, despite increases in police precepts of council tax bills, but it comes at a time when the demands, and impact, of Covid-19 on day-to-day policing remain unclear as a massive backlog in prosecutions continues to build up.

And it is also at odds with the sentiments expressed by Boris Johnson on the day he became Prime Minister last July when he declared: “My job is to make your streets safer – and we are going to begin with another 20,000 police on the streets...”

Now, while work is taking place to recruit officers to replace those roles that fell victim to previous spending cuts, it also requires a huge “team effort” to protect the public and this includes a great many civilian officers whose work is invariably unheralded and unglamorous.

Equally, it will be disingenuous of Ministers to say this situation is for chief constables and elected crime commissioners to reconcile and resolve. The majority of funding for the police still comes directly from the Home Office and it is now for the Government to decide whether the level of cuts is acceptable – and in keeping with the spirit of Boris Johnson’s various promises to the people.