I will not identify individuals because those individuals could be held to account by Ministers. The information I receive is accurate. It comes directly from the relevant persons, but I am not going to identify who those persons are. What they say in private is very different to what they’re prepared to say in public to the likes of you.

Although Labour’s general election campaign chairman in Wales has said that Labour’s 2017 manifesto will give Welsh Ministers a bigger role in policing, he also denied that Labour’s shadow Home Secretary, Diane Abbott, had got her facts wrong when she said,

We don’t think it’s right, at this time, to devolve policing, but this is something there’s constant discussion about inside the Labour Party.’

In 2013, Labour’s shadow police Minister and former police Minister, David Hanson, warned that devolving control to the police would be a major step with many challenges, and that reducing crime was more important than deciding which Government manages the police. New figures from Cardiff University show the number of people injured in serious violence dropped by 10 per cent last year, and by 40 per cent since 2010. Policing has already been devolved to police and crime commissioners, empowering local communities to have their say on policing priorities and to hold an elected representative to account. The call for devolution of policing by Labour and the separatists is a blatant power grab, which would deliver the opposite of real devolution. This First Minister refers to the devolution of policing to Manchester as a model for Wales, but those are only the powers of police and crime commissioners, and we already have devolution to them in Wales. What he’s therefore actually talking about is taking yet more powers from the regions of Wales and centralising these in Cardiff, giving themselves power to hire and fire chief constables. Well, given Labour’s record of creeping and often intimidatory politicisation of devolved public services, this is a truly chilling proposition.