Much has been written over the past few days on local blogs about how much the council spends on fighting crime and anti-social behaviour - in particular by the bravely anonymous author of the hfconwatch site. Quite why the Labour Party activist (or perhaps Councillor) who writes it feels the need to hide their identity is beyond me, but that's another story.
As local Labour politicians still don't seem to understand the way Police are funded, let's start at the beginning. Council's are not providers of policing. It is not the job of councils to put Police on the streets. In London that is the job of the Metropolitan Police Authority, with funding from both the Mayor (raised through the precept) and the Home Office. To repeat, at no point in the chain is it the job of councils to provide funding for or decide on how a borough is policed and by how many officers.
What H&F Council does do - because we know how high a priority fighting crime is for our residents - is voluntarily pay for EXTRA police officers. The way we do this is by enhancing the number of beat officers in our three town centres - Fulham, Hammersmith and Shepherds Bush. Four years ago we started doing this, funding a mixture of extra PCs and PCSOs - at a cost of £1.7 million a year. This year have moved to a warranted officer only (ie no PCSOs) model and also took advantage of the 'buy-one-get-one-free' offer from the Mayor of London to council's wishing to fund extra cops for 10 of the PCs we fund. So, that means we now get a better resource (all warranted officers with full power of arrest) at a cheaper price. Not the 'cut' Labour allege.
The ignorance of the local Labour Party is also highlighted by their focus on four Sergeant posts to be removed from the borough. Labour are set on a campaign of misinformation as to where the instruction for these posts to go has come from. Let's go back to the beginning - Council's are not the providers of policing in London and the Sergeant reductions, by definition, is not something the Council is doing. The Sergeants decision is wholly on the instruction of the MPA and Scotland Yard. In the context of public sector spending needing to shrink after the economic mess Labour left our country in, added to other borough's losing more officers than 4, this situation is not so bad for Hammersmith & Fulham - and the Borough Comander is quoted in the Chronicle saying there are enough officers in the borough to deliver the quality of Safer Neighbourhood policing that we need.
But it's not just funding for policing that Labour's desperation to screech 'cuts' has led them to so badly misinterpret our budget papers. In particular they highlight four budget lines. I have dealt with two of them which related to our funding of extra cops for our town centres above. The other two have equally simple and sensible explanations that demonstrate how we are delivering more for less cost.
Let's take "Addition savings out of hours review" first, which has a £120,000 saving this year. This is not a cut, but a way of delivering the same service for less cost, by outsourcing the answering of out of hours calls to the councils call centre contractor. Residents will receive exactly the same level of service, but just at a lower cost to the taxpayer.
The other budget line Labour question is about our 'eyes and ears' review - a £300,000 saving this year. Again, not a 'cut' as their socialist tax and spend ideology dictates they should call it, but a restructure of the way our on-street teams work. One of the worst excesses of the way Labour used to structure the council, which we are still unwinding, was their silo culture where no two teams were joined up in the way they worked, but every function needed to have its own team, with managers - no matter how many cross overs in work there actually was. We're determined to break down those silos and barriers and ensure our on-street teams work as one, together and without unnecessary bureaucracy costing the taxpayer literally hundreds of thousands of pounds a year. So to recap, same front line service (in fact better in this case), but lower cost to the taxpayer.
From reading Labour's blogs, comment must also be passed on their maths. Somehow, they have managed to make 300 + 99 +120 + 155 equal 2.2 million. With a grip on numeracy like that, no wonder they left H&F £169 million in debt.
But most striking of all is Labour's hypocrisy. As I pointed out on this blog in June, after a Council meeting where Labour Councillors talked out other motions to the guillotine meaning their own crime motion couldn't be heard, Labour's record in funding cops or community safety budgets was hardly one to be proud of. They now say they would have 24/7 task squads everywhere (cost of this would be about £16 million by the way - so what would they cut or by how much would they hike council tax to pay for that?) - but when they had the chance, they only spent £250k a year on a handful of PCs and PCSOs scattered across the borough. They left cctv on our estates to rot, whilst barely watching the cameras that did still work. It was Labour who gave out the late night alcohol licences that now blight our neighbourhoods through to the early hours. It was Labour who did nothing to support Neighbourhood Watch groups, which now under the Conservatives covers over 200 streets, with a strong network of individuals doing their bit to help protect their neighbourhoods. In short, Labour's record on crime fighting in this borough was risible.
Conservatives are determined to continue ensuring H&F has the best possible response to crime and anti-social behaviour. But unlike Labour, we don't see the key criteria as being how much we spend, but how we spend the money available.
Cllr Greg Smith
Cabinet Member for Residents Services
