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The speed and scale of the government's cuts have put police forces into an impossible situation, says Lord Hunt of Kings Heath.
The impact of the August riots will be felt for a very long time. Whatever the causes, there is little doubt that putting 16,000 police officers on the streets of London made the biggest difference in restoring calm.
How ironic, then, that police forces up and down the country are facing draconian government cuts in police budgets of 20 per cent in real terms over the next four years.
Worse, they are being front-loaded, so chief constables are having to take immediate action. Many have frozen recruitment and retired their most experienced officers. My own force in the West Midlands aims to reduce its numbers by 1,250. Greater Manchester will see a whopping reduction of over 1,500 officers by 2015.
Although the government claims this can be done without impacting on frontline services, the speed and scale of the government's cuts have put police forces into an impossible situation. We know that in some forces, the police officer cuts being faced are greater than the number of non-frontline officers in their force.
The simplistic notion that frontline services are good and all other activities are bad is also being exposed. There is a real risk of specialist units dealing with fraud, IT crime, organised crime and child protection work being undermined.
And this is happening alongside cuts to youth crime-prevention projects, youth services, probation services, prison places and weakening of police powers on ASBOs, DNA and CCTV.
A recent study by the LSE identified the positive impact of increasing street patrols as a highly effective method of cutting theft and violence. The authors warned that proposed police cuts were likely to undermine forces’ ability to stop crime rates rising.
Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary has estimated that over 16,000 police officers will be lost during the spending review period.
Ironically, the government is not hesitating to spend millions of pounds setting up elected police commissioners, with a real risk of the politicisation of our police forces and the undermining of the operational independence of chief constables.
The recent British Crime Survey showed a fall in crime of four per cent, and of recorded crime of eight per cent, in the year ending June 2010. The government is putting at serious risk the progress made by the last Labour government, and the cuts already made are an ominous sign.
Philip Hunt, a former director of the National Association of Health Authorities, was raised to the peerage in 1997. He sits on the Labour benches.
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