MP, Labour’s Shadow
Chancellor, commenting on being in denial about Tory
cuts to the Police on the Today programme this morning, said:
“This is a national emergency with rising violent crime,
stabbings on our street, police chiefs calling for more resources
and police officers, and our tin eared Chancellor is acting like
a management consultant, telling the police they just need to
spend their money more efficiently.
“After nearly a decade of austerity which has decimated our
communities and the slashing of 21,000 police officers, the two
most senior members of the Government are in total denial about
the impact of police cuts. You can’t protect people on the
cheap.”
Ends
Notes to editors
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· Transcript
of Hammond on the Today Programme below
: This isn’t just about
money, I am not saying resources don’t have anything to do with
this challenge but what we need to see now is a surging of
resources from other areas of policing activity into dealing with
this spike in knife crime and that is what you do in any
organisation when you get a specific problem occurring in one
area of the operation you move resources to deal with that. What
the public want to know is that this Friday night, this Saturday
night there are going to be more police officers focused on
dealing with knife crime and that means necessarily fewer police
officers that will be dealing with other lower priority areas of
activity.
If you have got an immediate problem and this is an immediate
problem you cannot solve it by recruiting and training more
officers that takes time. What you have to do is redirect your
resources, change your priorities to deal with the immediate
priority issue.
As we go forward of course we’ve got to look at this issue we’ve
got a depending review coming up this summer that will set
budgets for the next three years, I said in my autumn budget that
better fiscal public finances that we’re achieving now means that
we will have more money available to spend on public services and
if we get the right Brexit deal done and a smooth exit from the
EU so that we can release the money we have set aside to deal
with the possible disruption of a no deal exit that will give us
more money still that we can put into public services over the
next three years, we are in a good place to address these issues
The immediate challenge not over months or years but over days
and weeks is to deal with this surge in knife crime we can only
do that by reprioritising existing resources that are already
trained and employed and out there.
