Police politics

Ministers will use today’s figures as evidence to justify its reforms, and how the spending squeeze need not have a detrimental impact on frontline policing.

On the other hand, police chiefs will highlight their role as responsible employers – and argue that restricted duties are preferential to suspending the officers concerned on full pay, or placing them on long-term sick leave.

Either way, this is a debate that is only going to intensify as Ed Miliband uses the backwash from this month’s riots to claim that police funding cuts will “weaken the forces of law and order on our streets”.

His approach is likely to engender wider resonance, and particularly with those police chiefs – and members of the public – who have welcomed the speed at which the courts have brought many of the rioters to justice.

What Mr Miliband should have said, in a spirit of fairness, is that his party offered no guarantees over police numbers before the last election, and that Labour’s stance has only hardened, still further, after the riots.

If police numbers are to be maintained, and that is certainly the will of the people, where is the money going to come from? For, while Westminster-based politicians are inclined to place the onus on local police authorities, at least two of Yorkshire’s police forces find themselves at odds with Downing Street over the interpretation of various funding formulae.

Again, it points to the need for a relationship between the Government and the police that is built on mutual trust rather than knee-jerk reactions.