The Chancellor, Philip Hammond, has announced a further £100 million will be made available to police forces in the worst affected areas in England and Wales for knife and violent crime. This is great news. It’s good to see that extra money is being spent on the police.
It’s not so good to see the Lib Dems are still trying to blame police cuts on the Conservatives; a claim they make despite it being patently absurd. I’ve also been forwarded a link showing the Lib Dems complaining about my recent success in securing more police officers on the streets in Westhoughton. Sadly this complaint is hardly surprising given the Lib Dems record but it’s worth remembering (since the Libs seem intent on blaming the Conservatives for “the cuts”) that cuts to the police budget stopped when the Liberal Democrats left Government.
“Since 2015, the overall policing budget has been protected in real terms” – BBC News.
Cuts to police budgets happened from 2010 to 2015, while the Liberal Democrats were in a Coalition – you’ll not find that mentioned on their website or on the videos they like to make. You also won’t hear that these cuts stopped in 2015, when the Coalition ended and the Conservatives took power on their own.
This additional £100 million is on top of the £970 million of additional money already allocated for the police from April 2019. This means more policing on top of the almost 3,000 extra police officers that Police and Crime Commissioners have already committed to recruiting and training. The additional officers I’ve received word that we in Westhoughton (and Bolton borough as a whole) will be receiving come from that almost 3,000 figure; following my successful campaign to get us new police.
So, as always, you have to take what the Liberals say with a pinch of salt. They’ll claim to tell you “the facts” or “the whole story” but it’ll actually be neither.