Earlier today the Chancellor George Osborne announced that the government will protect overall police spending, and saying that police budgets will not be cut over the course of this Parliament.
The Chancellor also said: "now is not the time for further police cuts, now is the time to back our police and give them the tools to do the job."
Response from Alan Charles, PCC for Derbyshire:
“From our early analysis it appears that the Chancellor’s statement could be somewhat misrepresentative of the actual situation.
“For example, even our standstill position is predicated on PCCs setting an increase in the amount raised from local taxpayers of 2%.
“The Chancellor also unveiled several levies and a number of other measures today, such as a much vaunted increase for armed response teams and the work to tackle terrorism, but he failed to specify whether the money was coming from the Government’s purse or the already beleaguered police budgets.
“So, we need to see the detail and that won’t happen until we receive provisional notification of the amount of grant we will actually receive in mid-December. At that point we will have some firm facts to work with and until then it is still a wait-and-see situation.”
Ends
Posted on Thursday 26th November 2015