Burnham launches campaign against police cuts

The Shadow Home Secretary, Andy Burnham, will today launch a national campaign against police cuts and urge people to sign a petition from the crossbench peer and former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Lord Stevens.

“Our message to the Government is simple – with violent crime rising, now is not the time to cut the Police,” said Burnham. “While some savings can be made, any cuts in double figures will put public safety at risk.”

“Labour has shown in the past how it can fight for our NHS. Now is the time to show we can do the same for our Police. If cuts on this scale go ahead, it will take thousands of bobbies off the beat and signal the end of neighbourhood policing as we have known it.”

Burnham will force a Commons vote later today to halt Government plans to cut police budgets by 25% over the next five years. New figures show that this could result in the loss of 22,300 officers if implemented in the same way as spending reductions in the last parliament.

Burnham believes that while efficiency savings below 10% are possible, a double digit percentage cut would put the public at risk. He will warn the Home Secretary Theresa May that the answer to a recent 16% rise in violent crime and 9% rise in knife possession is not a cut in police numbers.

He will also campaign to get 100,000 people to sign Lord Stevens’s petition ahead of the Government’s Spending Review later this month. It urges “the Government to listen to the public and police officers, drop plans for drastic cuts and protect visible, locally-responsive neighbourhood policing.”

Between 2010 and 2015, the number of police officers in England and Wales fell by 17,000. The Met’s current commissioner, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, has said it would be “a real challenge to keep people safe” if more frontline officers are lost, and Lancashire Chief Constable Steve Finnigan that his force would “not be viable” after 2020 and only able to respond to emergencies.