When the sun's shining and almost the whole country appears to be in holiday mode with street parties and bank holidays galore, I am loathe to dampen the mood with news of more Government cuts, but they are too important to ignore.

Last week the official crime figures were published. They showed that incidences of crime in Enfield have fallen over the last decade, with the only exception being car crime. This is, of course, a good thing.

Under the previous Government, nationally nearly 17,000 more police officers and 16,000 new PCSOs were recruited and crime fell by 43%. However the current Government has cut police funding by 20%, meaning that the number of frontline officers will be reduced and the strength of neighbourhood policing that had been built up over time will diminish.

The Tory/LibDem Coalition would like us all to believe that it's possible to hack away at the police budget by a fifth without it affecting the number of officers on our street, but this simply isn't possible.

The Metropolitan Police Service is set to lose a total of 2,337 staff over three years - 1,291 of those are police officers. As the Met is a London-wide force, it's hard to know how the losses translate specifically to Enfield, but a rough estimate implies that there could be 40 less police officers and 33 less police staff serving our borough - an obvious cut to frontline policing.

In tough times, the police cannot be exempt from making savings, but such severe cuts spark fears of the negative impact this may have on crime levels. The numbers of police officers and PCSOs could be protected if the cuts to police funding were not so harsh and over such a short period of time.

We can only garner from this that the Government is far more interested in cutting police numbers than in cutting crime. Cutting too far and too fast puts the fight against crime at risk and threatens to undermine the hard work, over a number of years, to establish strong neighbourhood policing.

What are your thoughts? Do you think crime levels will go up if there are less bobbies on the beat or do you think this is another cut that we simply have to grin and bear?

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