Reform’s crime adviser tells LBC ‘tax rises won’t have to happen’ but fails to justify £17bn funding for police
Reform’s new crime adviser has told LBC he’s ‘sure tax rises won’t have to happen’, but did not reveal how the party plans to fund its proposed £17bn in funding for policing.
Listen to this article
Reform’s new crime adviser has told LBC he’s ‘sure tax rises won’t have to happen’, but did not reveal how the party plans to fund its proposed £17bn in funding for policing.
It comes after party leader Nigel Farage committed to spending £17.4 billion on policies which he promises would ‘halve crime’ in the UK if he was elected Prime Minister.
Farage said his policies, which include building five ad-hoc ‘Nightingale’ prisons and deporting more than 10,000 foreign criminals, would not be funded by tax rises. Instead, the Reform leader proposed scrapping HS2 and net-zero policies to pay for the increase.
Reform’s new crime adviser Colin Sutton has echoed his party’s leader, telling LBC’s Henry Riley that he is “sure there are things we can find which will mean [tax rises] won't have to happen” to fund the increase.
When asked about the funding increase, which is higher than the Ministry of Justice’s annual budget, Mr Sutton said there is “an awful lot on the debit side” in government spending.
“When you look at the way in which government spending, public spending, local authority spending as well, is set up, there is an awful lot on the debit side, which is there because it's been there for ages.
“Nobody likes to address it. And the name of the party, Reform, is there for a reason. It's because we want to do things differently.”
He then highlighted the government’s spending on hotels housing asylum seekers and green subsidies, saying the party could “start looking at things like that”.
The former senior detective then suggested police officers could pay for their own work-related costs and be reimbursed using an example of a police officer purchasing a widget she needs for a presentation on Amazon, as it is cheaper than the work catalogue.
The presumably made-up example went: “A police officer, she needs to make a presentation, she needs a widget, an adapter to make her computer talk to the screen. She goes online onto the internal intranet, and looks at the catalogue. The piece she needs is 49.99 and it's two weeks to come.
“That's too long for her. She gets her phone out, she goes onto her Amazon account, gets the same thing for £4.99 delivered tomorrow, and she's off and running.
“Now, I'm not advocating that we should make, we should make people pay out of their own pockets. Of course not. But they claim it back. If you repeat that tens of thousands of times a day, all over public service, in every school…”
When LBC’s Henry Riley said the example sounded like “wheeler-dealer stuff”, Mr Sutton claimed the example highlights “the way in which our money is tipped down the drain by public services because of procurement.”
“[Previous governments] haven't addressed the procurement, they haven't addressed the waste,” he said.
“There are things that are just there on the debit side of the balance sheet for both national and local government, which are there because nobody has questioned them for the last 30 years,” he added.
When pushed a third time on whether there will need to be tax rises or public spending cuts, Mr Sutton said: “I'm sure that there are things we can find which will mean that won't have to happen,” without elaborating further.
Defending the proposals, Farage told a press conference in July: “We are advocating cutting huge amounts of public spending, starting with the utterly failed, abysmal HS2 project, which the government is quite happy to spend £50bn to £70bn more on over the course of the next few years. And we’re talking about the cost of net zero.”
But his proposed funding increase has been criticised for being “unfunded” by the Labour government, while the Conservatives accused Farage of offering "tough talk without the faintest idea how to deliver it".