Call for safeguarding of police numbers

Cath Hollands, who chairs Wiltshire Police Federation, demanded a guarantee from Government that the force would be left with enough officers to respond promptly to 999 calls and deal with any increase in offences.

She spoke out after Home Secretary Theresa May refused to guarantee that police numbers – currently around 140,000 across England and Wales – would not fall as a result of Government spending cuts. Mrs May said: “In the environment in which we are in I am not going to make any commitment on numbers.”

Home Office officials have reportedly discussed proposals to slash the number of officers by about a fifth to make cost savings.

If the cuts fell evenly across England and Wales, it would mean Wiltshire’s force shrinking by 232 officers, leaving a total of 972.

Federation Chairman Mrs Hollands, a police constable, has called for a study to establish how many officers were needed across Wiltshire to "do the job properly" before any further reductions were made.

She told the Swindon Advertiser: “We are losing officer numbers and our concern is that nobody is looking at how many officers we need to do the job properly.

“Wiltshire is not recruiting and the number of police staff [as opposed to officers] is rising dramatically.

“There are risks involved in cutting the number of officers on the frontline and what the Home Secretary should have said is that we will maintain officer numbers as they are now.

“What we need is a guarantee that we will have enough officers to respond to 999 calls.

“There is a risk that if officer numbers are cut then that response is going to be thinner, with officers coming from further away.

“We have done really well to reduce the number of crimes in Wiltshire and the danger is if more people lose their jobs there could be general unrest and the potential is there for crime to rise.

“If we haven’t got the resources to match that rise we could be in a difficult situation.”