Looking for lost people ‘a waste of police time’
Chief constables’ shock claim as officers on patrol hit 30-year low
POLICE chiefs have warned Ministers they cannot cope with further savage cuts and may need to stop looking for missing people or taking patients to hospital, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
A leaked document sent by chief constables and crime tsars to the Treasury claims that forces are spending £620million a year on looking for missing people – many of whom have run away from hospitals or children’s homes.
It tells how constables are being forced to wait at A&E departments for more than three hours at a time with injured patients because there are not enough ambulances or doctors.
The top-secret briefing says austerity cuts mean other public services are ‘increasingly looking to the police to fill the gaps’. Meanwhile, forces are taking ever more 999 calls as violent crime starts to rise again along with sex abuse, fraud and terrorism.
It can also be revealed that the true number of frontline officers is at its lowest for 30 years and chiefs are even struggling to find enough detectives to staff elite units tackling serious crime and terrorism.
Last night Paddy Tipping, Police and Crime Commissioner for Nottinghamshire, said: ‘The police can’t do everything and there has to be a debate about their priorities. If you’ve got professional bodies running hospitals and care homes and people are going missing, questions should be asked of them.’
Steve White, chairman of the Police Federation, which represents rankand-file officers, added: ‘The police are left picking up the pieces where we should be concentrating on keeping the public safe.’
But former Home Office Minister David Mellor said the police could easily carry on their core functions by scrapping some senior ranks or avoiding wasteful investigations. He said: ‘The police are very badly run and instead of getting their own house in order, they’d rather scare the public.’
New figures published by the House of Commons last week reveal that the true number of frontline police officers across England and Wales was 118,779 in March this year – ‘the lowest level since 1985’ if it takes into account those on career breaks or maternity leave.
This is far lower than the 124,066 claimed by the Home Office. There has been a fall of 19,670 officers since 2010 as police lost £2.2billion in Home Office funding. Now they are braced for fresh cuts of 1.3 per cent a year.
But as they prepare for Chancellor Philip Hammond’s Autumn Statement on November 23, chiefs have told him less must be expected from the police.
The 16-page report, written jointly by the National Police Chiefs Council and Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, shows chiefs are particularly concerned about the burden of ‘non-crime’ work.
Forces carried out 250,000 investigations into missing people in a year – costing an estimated £620million, the document states.
Data from just nine forces showed they had used police cars 2,000 times in a year to take patients to hospitals instead of ambulances. At the same time, recorded crime rose seven per cent in the year to June 2016.