The woman known as Suella Braverman (not her real name – is it, Sue Ellen?) has been caught out in a monumental lie about police numbers.

Challenging police across the UK to treat all crimes as important and worthy of investigation, no matter how trivial, the Home Secretary falsely claimed that the government had recruited 20,000 police officers in England and Wales.

This is not true. Watch as Jayne Secker of Sky News skewers her, live on air:

Here’s Peter Stefanovic with more information:

As far as This Writer can work out, with help from The London Economic, there were 148,725 police officers in England and Wales in 2010, when the Conservatives came back to government for the first time since 1997. That’s one uniform for ever 422 people.

This number dwindled steadily over the next few years, with 20,000 officers lost. Then in 2019 came a manifesto commitment to recruit more.

Now, the best information I can find shows 149,566 police officers – an increase, but of not even 1,000, let alone the 3,000 suggested on Sky.

Worse, the UK’s population has risen by nearly five million, meaning there are now 453 people for every police officer.

So in fact there are still fewer police on the UK’s streets – per head of population – than in 2010.

And this makes a nonsense of Braverman’s challenge to the police forces. With lower numbers in comparison with the rest of the population, isn’t it unrealistic to expect them to give up prioritising the kinds of cases they decide to investigate?

In conclusion, Braverman’s statement about the police is a tissue of lies.

They can’t investigate every crime to its fullest extent because there are fewer of them now than when the Tories came to office – and they were overstretched then. Braverman is setting them up to fail – and criminals to get away with their crimes.

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