Bad Move

A number of newspapers report this morning that one in four local councils is planning to scale back or even abolish school crossing patrols - the iconic and distinctive ‘lollipop’ men and woman who morning and afternoon guard the road crossings outside British schools.

One council, Northamptonshire, is said to be planning to scrap the service altogether and save over £200,000 per year by sacking 65 people and encouraging local communities to replace them with voluntary patrols.

I have no idea what sort of things are hidden away in the annual budget for councils such as Northamptonshire, but I would have thought such a small sum could have been saved by making cuts elsewhere in them.

At least a dozen children are killed or seriously injured on our roads each year. If the government supports road safety campaigns, then it should set up a system under which no council should be allowed to abandon school crossing patrols if the appropriate savings could be made elsewhere in their budgets.
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Don’t Cut The Numbers

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The Chairman of the Police Federation warns that if the 25% funding cuts proposed by the government go ahead the result could be up to 40,000 fewer police officers over the next four years and that it ‘can't but have a detrimental effect on the service’.

It remains to be seen where the cuts will fall and we will not know until the full review is made public in October. Hopefully, the government will see the need to maintain a full-strength police force in times of economic uncertainty and the possibility of increased crime levels, though already some forces have announced reductions in the number of officers.

One thing the Home Secretary could do is to get rid of the Police Community Support Officers, the so-called ‘plastic policemen’, who have very little powers, don’t carry handcuffs and have no powers of arrest, can’t conduct interviews or deal with prisoners. They appear regularly in the newspapers either for being unable or unwilling to do various things. Such as in the case of the headmaster of a school in Essex who has been told that the local PCSOs may not guide pupils cross the road because they haven’t been trained to do so.

The Home Secretary has an opportunity to review police expenditure and, while making the cuts that we all know are inevitable, make them in such a way as the policemen on the beat are actually benefited by it.

Getting rid of PCSOs or, alternatively, switching them to office work might help. Cutting the ridiculous amount of paperwork police officers are burdened with would certainly help. Putting coppers back on the streets and paying clerks to do the office work would be a major help, even if police have to do a bit more beat-work than at present.

But whatever she does, one hopes that it does not lead to a reduction in the numbers of police actively dealing with crime.
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Two Billion?

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After stubbornly refusing to discuss the issue, ‘Bronco’ Brown has now admitted that government spending cuts will have to be made in order to help ease the current economic crisis. So it was no surprise then that Alisdair Darling followed suit with unspecified mumblings of spending cuts.

And then up pops Ed Balls, Schools Secretary, who discloses that he can save £2 billion on education spending.

Strewth! Why didn’t he make these savings before now?

And what are the other government ministers proposing, and when?
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