David Ruffley

POLICE numbers are falling at their fastest rate in seven years because of a pounds 3 billion funding hole, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.

Home Office figures due out next Thursday will lay bare how ministers are relying increasingly on community support officers with fewer powers to carry out day-to-day policing tasks.

THE cost of police overtime has more than doubled to £411million a year under Labour because of the mountain of paperwork tying officers to their desks.

This would pay for 8,220 more beat bobbies for a year.

Last night ministers were blamed for failing to cut red tape and their handling of jail overcrowding, which has seen officers guarding criminals in police cells. Tory police reform spokesman David Ruffley, who obtained the figures, said: "This overtime is being used to do ever more paperwork.

JUST nine people were punished under Labour's anti-hunting legislation in the first two years after it was introduced and none of them was part of an organised hunt.

The news comes after the ban on hunting was left in tatters when a judge suggested it was virtually impossible to bring a conviction against those accused of breaking the law.

POLICE officers were paid £412million in overtime last year - more than ten times what the Government saved by refusing to back-date their pay rise.

The astonishing bill, which has more than doubled since Labour came to power, piled further pressure on Jacqui Smith.

The Home Secretary saved around £40million by not backdating a 2.5 per cent police pay offer to September.

But critics said she could have saved far more by reducing bureaucracy to cut the overtime bill - without alienating huge numbers of rank-and-file officers.

ALMOST 61,000 prisoners were locked in police cells last year to ease jail overcrowding -a 13-fold increase on 2006.

It costs taxpayers Pounds 385 a night -Pounds 30 more than a Superior King room at The Ritz hotel and Pounds 284 more than a jail.

Shadow police reform minister David Ruffley uncovered the figures. He put the bill for celling prisoners at cop shops since last year at Pounds 17million.

He said: "Police stations are being clogged up and police time wasted. Every single police station had to look after prisoners last year."

David Ruffley MP has thrown his weight behind the campaign to re-open Haughley Post Office.

There is very strong support in the village of Haughley for the post office to be re-opened. The post office closed in September 2007 when postmistress Maureen Edwards retired.

David Ruffley MP has today released the results of a survey he has been conducting on his website www.tellDavidRuffley.com on the future of the Bury St Edmunds Christmas Lights.

So far over 150 people have completed the survey and some of the key statistics are as follows:

• 94 percent of people think the town should display Christmas lights

• 87 percent of people believe not having Christmas lights would damage trade in the town

• 62 percent of people believe businesses and traders should contribute more towards the running costs of the lights

Following the MP for Stowmarket's continuous lobbying for five years, David Ruffley MP has welcomed the decision by the Rt Hon Rosie Winterton MP, Minister of State at the Department for Transport, to approve £12 million of government funding for the B1115 Stowmarket Relief Road.

David said:

David Ruffley MP has today slammed Gordon Brown for causing disarray in local government in Suffolk after vetoing the Ipswich Unitary bid in an 11th hour u-turn.

David said:

'Gordon Brown promised us competence in Government, but what he has given us is the first run on a British bank for over 100 years, half the adult population's personal details lost, and an election that never was. Now after pushing through a unitary bid that I, and many other Suffolk MPs, opposed he has performed an 11th hour u-turn and changed his mind.

A POLICE station has closed every week since Labour came to power in 1997, Government figures reveal.

A total of 550 shut their doors for good over the decade. Of the surviving stations, only one in eight is open round the clock.

They have been replaced by police kiosks, mobile vans and offices in community centres.

The figures emerged two weeks after schoolboy Jack Large was stabbed to death outside an unmanned police station in Essex.

David Ruffley, Tory police spokesman, said station closures undermined confidence in the police.