SO the government has climbed down over their proposed changes to police funding.

Well actually what they said is not that they have changed their minds about police funding but that they were calculated on the basis of “wrong figures”.

As a result the proposed cuts to the money our police received from central government country have been put on hold for a year.

Clearly this is good news as they would have hit Cumbria police harder than any other force in the country. But really is this any way to run our police forces?

Let’s pass on from speculating over whether the Minister would have spotted these “wrong figures” if people had not campaigned so hard to get him to change his mind.

Let’s also ignore the issue that if “wrong figures” really is the issue then it shouldn’t take a year to sort it out, surely someone with a calculator could do this in an afternoon. If they can’t then I would argue that the government is making things a bit too complicated to allow our police forces to actually plan what they will be doing in the future.

It was never completely clear how the new figures were being calculated. However, we cannot afford to be complacent. The proposed changes to funding have not gone away completely. They have simply been put on hold to return in 12 months’ time. Added to which at the end of this month we will be told the results of the government’s public spending review.

We have already heard that several ministries have already accepted cuts of about 30 per cent, so we can expect to see the announcement of further cuts in police funding over the coming years.

I am working as hard as I can to ensure that whatever the new plans offer they take account of the fact that policing a large geographic area like Cumbria is more expensive than providing the same service to a concentrated area in a city.

The government’s plans to close courts down around the county which simply add further costs to providing a police service, make this case even stronger.

Of course if the police can be more efficient that is not a bad thing. But what I want is to ensure that we still see the police around that we have currently.

Police perform an important deterrent role, not just responding to crimes but preventing them from happening in the first place. Losing any officers from being out and about can only result in criminals feeling that Cumbria is a bit of a soft touch where the police spend most of their time driving for hours to be in court.

We have been lucky over the years to have a great police force that has kept crime low. They should be celebrated for this, not punished. What we need is for this to continue, not for the government to see this as an excuse to reduce the service we receive.

Rest assured I will be pressing as hard as I can to ensure that this message gets through.