The Guardian view on security and the spending review: no case for a policing U-turn
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Version 0 of 1. In the era of Margaret Thatcher, the politics of a Conservative government spending review were straightforward. Back then, the overriding purpose was to cut taxes and shrink the welfare state while maintaining spending on defence and law and order. Whitehall budget battles between the Treasury and individual departments were often hard fought, but as the former chancellor Nigel Lawson approvingly recalled on Sunday, no departmental budget was sacrosanct, not even defence or the Home Office, and certainly not health. Today things are different, and George Osborne’s defining spending review this week will thus be ideological in a different, arguably post-Thatcherite, way. The current chancellor, like Lord Lawson, also wants to shrink the public sector. But, even after this year’s election victory, these are not politically or economically expedient times for tax cuts, while today’s no-go departmental areas are very different from the past too. Health, pensions and overseas aid take precedence now. Under Mr Osborne it is the non-protected departments that remain under toughest pressure. These include some, like defence and the Home Office, whose battles with the Treasury would have outraged the authoritarian side of Lady Thatcher’s worldview. Police spending has been at the heart of the Whitehall budget wrangling this autumn for a rich variety of reasons. The most important of these is that, in the years since 2010, the old axiom that more police means less crime – a reflexive response for Thatcher-era Tories and New Labour alike – has been discredited. Police leaders have continued to argue that spending cuts will mean a rise in crime, but the facts have stubbornly failed to bear them out. With pressure for cost-saving still intense, and crime falling steadily across the developed world, the police have therefore been squeezed as hard as any other labour-intensive public service and, indeed, much harder than some. This was, and remains, a broadly justifiable approach, for which the home secretary, Theresa May, deserves respect. Since the Paris attacks, however, the demands for security have intensified and police leaders have claimed that the cuts threaten the state’s ability to protect the public. The two things – counter-terrorism preparedness and police spending – have sometimes become conflated. Some of this is understandable. Some of it is unjustified, and even opportunistic. Police forces still have £2.1bn in reserves, a figure that has increased in the past year in spite of the cuts. And viable neighbourhood policing is still sustainable too. Memories can be short in the political arena. It is has not always been remembered, since the Paris attacks, that Mr Osborne’s July budget had already committed extra spending resources to defence, counter-terrorism and intelligence in the wake of events such as the beach attack in Tunisia. But the Paris attacks have inevitably re-energised the issues on the eve of the spending review. The increased threat means the public expects properly funded counter-terrorist forces, including police, and rightly so. Events may also be opening the way for more military spending in the international fight against Islamic State too. The government clearly must not let its guard slip and it equally clearly cannot afford to be thought to be asleep on the job. It does not follow that spending cuts and the counter-terrorism agenda mean that neighbourhood policing, which can mean different things to different chief constables and police and crime commissioners, is doomed. Neighbourhood policing remains the biggest and best strategic change of direction in the service’s recent history. In its best manifestations, it means far more than the anti-terrorist intelligence-gathering capability on which the loudest recent warnings have focused. It is vital that the spending review does not provide an excuse to wreck this most local form of policing. Whether it does so will depend initially upon local chiefs and commissioners. London faces the biggest test. Elsewhere, however, big cuts in police budgets will create pressure for mergers that many commissioners and chiefs will not like, and which the Home Office is politically reluctant to promote. But the questions are difficult to duck. It is not true that the enhanced terrorist threat requires a U-turn in police spending or strategies. But this week’s cuts are bound to generate fresh debate about whether and how far England and Wales should follow Scotland towards a merged national police force. |