Some context for those police cuts

What’s it to be? Take a pay cut, or lose your job? That, as David suggested earlier, is the question being posed by Theresa May to police forces – and it’s a question that they cannot shirk. With the police budget being cut by 4 per cent a year, there have to be reductions of one sort or another. And if they don’t come from pay restraint – along the broad outlines of Tom Winsor’s review today – then there will no doubt have to be extra job losses. This is the argument that George Osborne set out in his 2009 conference speech, only now it’s being deployed from government.

Not that there won’t be job losses as well. Conveniently enough, a memo from the Association of Chief Police Officers puts a number on it all, and has been leaked to the Guardian. According to their projections, the nation’s 43 police forces will shed a total of 28,000 jobs over the next four years.