Police Cuts Are Still Having Consequences

The consequences of the cuts to the police service in the early 2010s are still being felt, Hampshire Police Federation has said, after a former Conservative minister admitted things could have been “done differently”.

In the wake of the Leeds riots, Sir Robert Buckland was asked on GB News whether the previous Home Secretary Theresa May had made a mistake in “taking a machete to police numbers”. He replied: “It was something that perhaps we could have done differently.”

Hampshire Police Federation Chair Zoë Wakefield said that “nobody would listen” at the time, but that the police cuts had consequences.

She said: “The consequences of those cuts will go on for years, even though the last Government recruited 20,000 more officers. Sir Buckland said on TV: ‘We’re now back up to the numbers we were before’, but we’re not. In Hampshire Constabulary, we’re still a few hundred officers off where we were in 2010. And that’s beside the fact that there’s been an increase in population and an increase in demand for police services.

“At the moment we’ve got such an inexperienced workforce, too. A lot of them are really good, but experience in policing is important. The riots in Leeds were horrendous,  but if you can show a huge police strength and put out a whole line of police officers across the road, it makes such a difference.

“Policing is complex but sometimes it’s really simple and can be about visible numbers. At the moment we can’t do that, because there just aren’t enough of us. I don’t think you could say that it’s not linked to the cuts, because so much of the state of policing as it is now is because of all those cuts.”