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Boris Johnson pledges to splash £1 billion on hiring more police officers

Boris Johnson
Boris Johnson

Boris Johnson has pledged to spend more than £1 billion on policing if he wins the race to Downing Street.

The former foreign secretary has said he would like to see an additional 20,000 bobbies on the beat across England and Wales by 2022.

Gordon MP Colin Clark, who is backing Mr Johnson, said the funding boost would give Holyrood enough in Barnett consequentials to hire 2,000 more officers across Scotland.

Mr Clark said: “This announcement goes to show how in touch Boris is with the concerns of people across the UK.

“I hope now that the SNP welcome Boris’s strong announcement with one of their own.

“The SNP should follow Boris’s lead. The extra money through the Barnett Formula would mean almost 2,000 more officers pounding the beat in Scotland.”

The aim of this recruitment programme will be to have more than 140,000 police officers by the end of this Parliament, with a particular focus on rural areas that have seen the biggest reductions in police funding.

Mr Johnson said: “Soaring crime levels are destroying lives across the country and we urgently need to tackle this.

“To keep our streets safe and cut crime, we need to continue to give the police the tools they need and, crucially, we need to increase the physical presence of police on our streets.

“That’s why I will be increasing police numbers by 20,000. More police on our streets means more people are kept safe.

“We want to make sure we keep the number of police officers high and we need to keep visible frontline policing.

“That’s what we did in London and that’s what I want to in the whole of the UK to cut crime and keep people safe.”

The move would be a reversal of the 21,000 cut to policing numbers since 2010.