A Letter To And From The The Tory Chairman 

Last updated on May 8th, 2023 at 11:42 am

Reading Time: 4 minutes

I know you might find this difficult to believe, but I have a friend, a real person.

This friend wrote a letter to the Chairman of the Conservative Party about the budget cuts, particularly with reference to Policing.  Below is that letter, and the reply to it.

Make yourself a brew, sit back and enjoy;

I am a retired police officer living abroad. I watch with great sadness how our police are being dismantled. This weeks horrific news of an officer dying whilst doing his job will become a regular occurrence as numbers become dangerously low. I understand the need to balance the books but how much will you have to spend when crime grows to epic proportions, when terror groups get stronger and more destructive because we haven’t got the manpower to deal with it. Where we can no longer work in conjunction with MI to stop the terrorists BEFORE they kill civilians and destroy our cities. I worked in anti terrorism I worked in intelligence I worked in op Trident dealing witth the black on black drugs related violence. It is all manpower intensive. You need numbers to react so the matter is dealt with quickly and efficiently with the minimum of disruption and the safety of all is paramount. If you want to make Britain great and keep it that way then let us have the resources we need to do the job right. It is not just any job it THE JOB the unseen unheard work of the greatest police officers in the world needs to be given the respect from you and your party they deserve . Please rethink and stop the cuts Yours Sincerely 

Here is the reply

I am writing on behalf of the Chairman’s Office, who has asked me to thank you for your email. It is good of you to get in touch and make us aware of your thoughts. 
Police funding from central government revenue for this year will be over £8 billion, and I believe that the last Government took the decisions which will ensure that the police are provided with the resources they need to carry out their important work. Funding for the Police Innovation Fund will be £70 million. The police have achieved significant reductions in crime with reduced budgets, at a time when many – including the Labour Party – said that crime would go up.  

The police reforms the last Government introduced have seen the biggest change to the policing landscape in a generation. These reforms are working and crime is falling. Policing has been put back in the hands of the public through directly elected Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs), Chief Constables have been given greater operational independence by scrapping national targets, and police skills are being improved through the new College of Policing. 

Under the new Government, we will now finish the job of police reform to help back officers fight crime unimpeded, such as extending the use of police-led prosecutions to speed up justice and enabling fire and police services to work more closely together. A consultation on reform of the current arrangements for allocating central Government funding to the 43 police force areas in England and Wales was also initiated. The current model for allocating police funding, the Police Allocation Formula, is complex, opaque and out of date. The Government believes that the formula should be replaced by a simplified model as soon as it is appropriate to do so. 

I am very encouraged to see that the latest crime statistics show that nationally crime has fallen by 7 per cent in the last year, and by more than a quarter since 2010 – to the lowest level on record. 
The statistics were published in July by the Office for National Statistics. The bulletin reports on two independent measures of crime which are police recorded crime and the Crime Survey for England and Wales, which is based on victims’ experiences rather than police figures. 

England and Wales are safer today than they have been for decades, but there is always more to do. I am glad that my colleagues in the Home Office recognise the need to keep pace with the way crime is changing and are improving our ability to tackle emerging issues. The Government will now finish the job of police reform to help back officers fight crime unimpeded, such as extending the use of police-led prosecutions to speed up justice. I also look forward to seeing work which will improve the response to cyber-crime, and to enable fire and police services to work more closely together, so that the police have the ability to reduce crime even further. 

Thank you, once again, for taking the time and trouble to get in touch. 

Yours sincerely, 
Shannon Holland-Houghton 

Office of the Party Chairman 

Conservative Campaign Headquarters

The repetition in the final paragraph is not a mistake by me, it’s obviously a bit of Copy/Pasting that’s run amok and slipped through unnoticed.

Still spouting out the CRIME IS DOWN mantra, still trying to convince us that all is well, Police Reform is a good thing and they intend to finish it.

Sir Bernard Hogan-Who sees it slightly differently. Announcing that Met is likely to lose anything up to 8,000 officers under  the ‘Reform’ agenda, he had this to say;
It’s a lot of money and a massive change and as a result of that I genuinely worry about the safety of London.
We think we can expect to lose somewhere between 5,000 to 8,000 police officers.
For the past four years we have taken cuts in budget and we have just got on with it.
We have not waved shrouds – we are the only force to have kept police officer numbers up, today they stand at about 31,800.
I don’t have a huge amount of time for BHH, but I do know who I’d rather believe out of the two options above.

Maybe when they’ve finished their Copy/Paste practice they could have a go at not lying to the public, that might go down well.

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2 thoughts on “A Letter To And From The The Tory Chairman ”

  1. Taken from the Daily Telegraph Online announcing latest Crime figures
    If the computer offences were included in the new headline figures it would mean crime had more than doubled to 14.1 million offences.
    Overall violence against the person recorded by police rose by a quarter to 830,000 incidents, the data showed.
    Possession of a knife or sharp instrument rose by nine per cent to 10,154 incidents.
    Sex crimes recorded by police showed a 41 per cent jump – an extra 27,600 offences – continuing a trend seen over several years reflecting increasing willingness among victims to come forward to police.
    In the year to the end of June police recorded 569 murders, a rise of 44 on the previous year.
    Mr Flatley said the number of homicides was subject to fluctuation.
    Overall police recorded crime rose by five per cent year-on-year, to 4.3 million offences.

    Jon Flatley, the ONS head of crime statistics, said: “Clearly from these figures some crime has moved online.

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