No plans to cut police officer numbers in Bedfordshire, says PCC

And he is confident that policing will be funded at an “appropriate level”.

A “police insider” had alleged to the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) that officers are not being replaced when they retire or leave the force for other reasons.

They claimed police numbers had “peaked” and will start to fall as the budget isn’t large enough to maintain numbers.

In response, PCC John Tizard said: “It’s certainly not anything that’s currently planned, [but] we, like every other public service, will be looking at the spending review in June.

“Although I don’t see that there will be lots of additional money for policing, I’m confident the government and the Home Office will continue to fund policing at an appropriate level.

“And I shall certainly be making that case to them,” he said.

The PCC said the force will be using its resources as “effectively and efficiently” as it can and he is “keen” to look at how productivity can be improved.

“How we can maybe get more from collaboration whether that’s through our relationship with Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire, or the seven forces of the East of England or wider,” the PCC said.

“And the government will also through its police reform proposals, which will come out in the white paper in the early summer, be setting out other ways in which police can improve productivity and improve the use of resources on a national basis as well,” he added.

The PCC said this would not mean that officers will go for the easier cases.

“I’ll give you a really good example,” he said. “We’ve introduced an AI-based software system to tackle serious crime.

“Where it may have taken several people days to interrogate lots of databases to find out information about an individual or a particular crime, literally that’s now happening in matter of minutes.

“We’ve freed up through the introduction of redacting reports for court, something like 10 person days a year.

“It means that we’ve freed up officers to do other other work, but it means we’re more effective.

“That’s what I mean by improving productivity – it’s about freeing up resources to do what we need to do,” he said.