Police forces in England and Wales are facing “difficult and challenging” circumstances, the policing minister has accepted, as some have been forced to cut their number of officers.
Diana Johnson said forces would need to make decisions locally on how many officers to have, days after Essex police said they could get rid of all 99 police community support officer roles within the force, pending consultation, amid a £12.5m budget shortfall for 2025-26.
Lincolnshire police said they had a £14m funding gap next year and were “exploring options”, including potentially reducing the number of officers by up to 1,000 by 2029.
Johnson said the Labour government was “starting from a difficult position” after 14 years under the Conservatives but about £1bn of funding was going to forces from April.
“I’m not pretending that it isn’t difficult and challenging for police forces,” she told LBC radio. “Obviously police and crime commissioners and chief constables have to make decisions locally about what’s the best makeup of their force in terms of police officers … those police forces, and I’m very well aware of Essex and Lincolnshire, those police forces that are struggling, we want to work with them. We want to make this work.”
The government has said it will invest an extra £100m in neighbourhood policing, which is scheduled for the next financial year.
Ministers had announced a provisional 3.5% real-terms increase in funding for police forces with a £987m package in December, but chief constables said it fell short of the £1.3bn they need to plug funding gaps over the next two years.
The National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for finance, Paul Sanford, said the funding settlement presented “real challenges” for policing and would “inevitably lead to cuts across forces”.
Despite this, the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, said the investment in neighbourhood policing marked a “major turning point” for policing.
The National Audit Office has said the “epidemic of violence against women and girls” in the UK is getting worse despite years of government promises and strategies. The watchdog found “disjointed” efforts meant VAWG was a “significant and growing problem” affecting one in 12 women in England and Wales and causing physical, mental, social and financial harm to survivors.
Labour vowed to halve violence against women and girls within a decade; it was one of the party’s key pledges.
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The Conservatives created a team to lead its 2021 VAWG strategy, but a ministerial oversight group for the strategy “only met four times in three years”, the NAO said.
Johnson said the Labour government had a “cross-government approach” to tackling the issue, and called for a societal change.
She told ITV’s Good Morning Britain programme: “So this is a kind of whole approach across society. It cannot just be for the police, and … one of the criticisms in the National Audit Office report was that the Home Office was basically doing this on their own.”
She said the money allocated to tackle violence against women and girls would be all spent going forward, after the NAO found the Home Office had underspent on the issue by about 15% in recent years.
Article by:Source: Aletha Adu Political correspondent
