Yvette Cooper faced fresh questions over how she will pay for Labour’s flagship policing pledge.
The Home Secretary said an extra £100 million would pay for the recruitment of 1,200 new officers.
But Labour is understood to want 3,000 new police officers, meaning forces will either have to find additional savings or the Home Office will have to stump up more cash.
Leading Tories have warned that the pledge, which will be a core of Sir Keir Starmer’s reset speech today, “is not properly funded”.
Sky News Presenter Kay Burley asked Ms Cooper: “How are you going to pay for them?”
The Home Secretary told her: “I’m announcing today an additional £100m new funding to kickstart the recruitment of the new police officers next year.
“We want the neighbourhood police officers to include the PCSOs and new officers and also to be redeploying officers back onto the beat, because what we’ve seen over the last 14 years is really the decimation of neighbourhood.”
Ms Burley said: “If I could go back to your opposite number saying you’re not putting enough money forward to create these 13,000 neighbourhood officers in order to be able to train and pay those new officers and PCSOs… What would you say in response?”
Ms Cooper said: “So we’re putting forward next year, an additional £100m for police forces.
“We also have a major programme around policing efficiency and collaboration across forces that will also generate further savings.
“But this is the plan over the course of this Parliament.
“That £100m is sufficient to fund recruitment of around 1,200 new police officers.
“But we’ll be working with police forces on how they actually make the most of that and get the impact of that, drawing in additional officers to get them back onto the beat.”
The Conservatives said only a third of the 13,000 new recruits would be full police officers, while the £100 million would not cover what was needed to pay for them, leading to cuts elsewhere.
Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said: “The Conservatives recruited over 20,000 extra police officers and gave the police an extra £922 million for policing this year, ensuring the police could protect the public and prosecute more criminals.
“Starmer has once again misled the public by claiming to recruit an extra 13,000 officers when the actual number is 3,000, and even that is not properly funded.”
Labour has already pledged to recruit 13,000 new police officers, PCSOs and special constables, which would bring the total police workforce to a level above its 2010 peak.
Police numbers fell following the 2010 election, before rising again after 2019 as the Boris Johnson government pledged to recruit 20,000 police officers.
Asked why Sir Keir Starmer needed a “reset” after five months in office, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said: “The Prime Minister is setting out today the plan for change and these really major milestones, that they capture the priorities for people across the country, the things that we’re determined need to change over the next few years.”
She told BBC Breakfast: “Before the election, we set out the big missions for the country.
“In my area, that was around making the streets safer, around reducing serious violence and also restoring confidence in policing.
“But now what we’re doing, after the Budget and the spending review, is setting out ‘what does that mean in terms of the real major milestones, the difference that we want people to see in their own communities, in their own towns’?.
“And for us, that means 13,000 more neighbourhood police and PCSOs (police community support officers) back on the beat because we know that neighbourhood policing has been decimated in communities across the country under the Conservative government, and that’s what we’re going to be putting back on the street.”
