Andrew Dismore

Dear editor,

I read with disdain Conservative Cllr Oliver Cooper’s pathetic attempts to pull the wool over your readers’ eyes by trying to defend his Party’s atrocious police funding  record by quoting dubious national figures out of context.

The facts are these.

The Conservative Government is enforcing  £1billion of cuts to the Metropolitan Police since 2010, leading to London losing 3,000 police officers, more than 3,000 PCSOs and 5,000 police staff, closure of police stations and mergers of Borough commands.

The Metropolitan  Police  Commissioner, Home Affairs Select Committee, Public Accounts Committee and now even the Home Secretary have admitted that the Met. won’t be able to tackle violent crime without more Government funding.

The Home Secretary’s  announcement  last week of £172 million ‘additional funding’ represents only a tiny fraction of the swingeing  Government cuts suffered by the Met. Police since 2010.

A large share of this funding is for additional  pressures on police pensions which are  of the Government’s own making in the first place – and more than half of the announced funds  doesn’t come from the Government  in any case but is made up, yet again, of above inflation Council Tax increases, the Conservatives once more using smoke and mirrors to claim credit for something that is not theirs.

The breakdown is as follows:

• £45.7m for specific pensions funding (so not available to support police activity or numbers)

• £11.7m increase to the National and International Capital City grant  (merely  a partial reimbursement of money already spent on e.g. security  at Parliament and for the Royal family , and a fraction of the total which  the Government  itself acknowledges is unfunded)

• £80m from more Council Tax, with power  to increase the police share to £24 for a Band D property (i.e. additional taxes for Londoners, not paid by Government)

• and finally a £33m increase in core grant funding from Government (a drop in the ocean compared with the £1 billion they have cut so far).

The harsh reality is that the Government is continuing to shunt the cost of policing onto London’s council taxpayers, which it’s clear will not fill the massive financial black hole and will hit London’s poorest hardest.

Moreover, the Government has failed to confirm funding for future years, meaning  the funding cliff edge remains . the consequence is that  the number of police officers in London will continue to fall over the years ahead.

We’ve had months of warm words from the Home Secretary about the desperate need for more Government funding in order to tackle violent crime, now proved  to be empty rhetoric. Mayor Sadiq Khan is right to call on the Government fully to reverse their £1bn of damaging cuts to the police made since 2010.

Yours sincerely,

Andrew Dismore

London Assembly Member for Barnet and Camden