Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:00 pm on 23 March 2021.
Llywydd, I thank Jack Sargeant for those very important points, and he's right: the record of the Conservative Party for a decade is of defunding the police across the United Kingdom. Between 2010 and 2018—all years in which the Conservative Party ran the UK Government—police numbers in Wales and England dropped by a staggering 21,732 officers. That's nearly 500 fewer police on the streets here in Wales because of the deliberate decisions of the Conservative Government. And even if all their current plans were to succeed—as Jack Sargeant has said, not a single one of the 62 officers they promised in Alyn and Deeside have yet materialised—even if they were to succeed in full, those numbers would not recover to where policing numbers were before the long Tory years of cutting police budgets and police numbers. I'm very proud of the fact that since 2011, successive Welsh Governments have funded 500 police and community support officers, and if this Government is returned in May, not only will those 500 officers remain in place, but we'll add to it with another 100 officers, so that there are more people on the beat, on the streets, in every part of Wales.