Dear John,
As your Member of Parliament, I know that good communication is vital and in order to represent you views, I need to hear from you. Each month I receive thousands of emails, hand written letters and telephone calls as well as holding regular public meetings across the constituency and advice surgeries.
Crime and policing remains a key concern for many residents and I thought it might be useful to provide a brief update on the work I have been doing in this area, but also provide you with the opportunity to share your views with me.
Many residents will know that Greater Manchester Police (GMP) has been failing in recent years but the Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) took no action. Under the watch of previous leadership GMP failed to record 80,000 crimes, spent £70m on a botched IT system while failing to arrest criminals or deter crime. Nothing better symbolises the lack of leadership than the lack of arrests that allowed GMP to close the custody suite in Bolton. Independent inspectors placed GMP into ‘special measures’.
I and a number of other Conservative colleagues were appalled at the situation and lack of action from our elected PCC so we intervened with the Home Secretary. As a result we now have a new Chief of Police that prioritises arresting criminals and deterring crime.
We are now seeing positive results. The new Chief has shown strong leadership with the custody suite in Bolton now reopened and it has been consistently full. While the previous leadership at GMP deemed that it was “no longer needed”, we are now seeing a cultural change with the focus on stopping crime and arresting criminals.
We have already seen an increase of over 700 arrests in the last twelve months, compared to the previous twelve months in Bolton, a 32.2% reduction in burglaries and a 28.5% reduction in vehicle theft. The cultural shift can also be seen in 999 response times with GMP now ranked with the quickest response times in the country.
We can also see a welcome return to community policing, with dedicated teams of police officers patrolling neighbourhoods across Bolton, Westhoughton, Horwich and Blackrod. I am delighted that as part of our national police recruitment campaign GMP has now received 1,280 new police officers with hundreds of additional officers on the beat in Bolton.
I hold regular meetings with the senior police officers in Bolton which allow me to keep up to date with the progress that the police are making but these meetings also provide me with the opportunity to feedback your concerns. I would love to hear your views on local policing, so please do fill in my survey below:
https://www.boltonconservatives.org.uk/bolton-west-crime-survey
Yours sincerely,
