4POLICE

By Nigel Morris

£500m blackhole asforces fail tofind savings

South West wants change as Great Western franchise is up for renewal

RAIL

NEWS

Opinion

Mobiles ‘donot damageyour health’

SCIENCE

By Chris Stevenson

By Martin Price

Feeble excuses just don’t work, Slasher. In fact, they never didDavidBlanchflower

£1 Split

Police forces face a £500m black hole as they struggle to cope with Government demands to cut their budgets, the spending watchdog warns today. The 43 forces in England and Wales need to save £1.5bn by 2014-15 between them through efficiency savings as a result of the four-year austerity drive. But they have still only identified savings of £1bn, ac-cording to the National Audit Office (NAO), with 26 forces facing a cash shortfall within three years. it said some forces had only planned for three years instead of four, while planning by others “simply did not yield sufficient savings”. Ministers insist the savings can be made with-out affecting frontline policing. But Labour claims the squeeze will lead to 12,000 police officers losing their jobs. Margaret Hodge, the chair of the Committee of Public Accounts committee, said she was “deeply concerned” by the finding. The NAO said the Home Office had improved its financial manage-ment, but warned it was having problems finding savings within the department. It has to save £1.1bn a year by 2014-15, but is still uncer-tain how one-third of that sum can be found, the NAO said.

There is still “no convincing evidence” that mobile phones can adversely affect human health, ac-cording to a major new report released today. The comprehensive review of sci-entific studies, by the Health Protec-tion Agency’s Independent Advisory Group on Non-ionising Radiation (Agnir), states that despite the “sub-stantial” amount of recent research the only established risk is using a mobile phone while driving. Having combed through hundreds of studies, the group found that while there had been a number of reports about the risk of cancer, none of these findings had been replicated.Professor Anthony Swerdlow, chair-man of the of the advisory group and an epidemiologist at the Institute of Cancer Research, said: “We now have much firmer information than we had on several areas, for instance symptoms, cognitive effects and brain tumours.” He added that you “can’t prove negatives” in science but that there was accumalating reassurance” about a lack of adverse health effects.”John Walsh, page 16

GUEST EDITOR

£WishlistMay 2012Early morning trains to Plymouth

2014Better phone signal & Wi-Fi on trains

2019More frequent trains, commitment to elec-trify the rail & New local mainline trains

2024New High Speed Trains

I went on to argue that I am now convinced that as a result of this reckless Budget the UK will suffer a double-dip recession”. It isn’t as if our part-time Chancellor Slash-er Osbourne wasn’t told. But he ignored the warnings by Robert Skidelsky, Paul Krugman, Martin Wolf, Ed Balls and others and even accused us of being “deficit deniers”. Keynes turned out to be right. The Shadow Chancellor has been vindicated. Take care of growth and the deficit will take care of itself. Sadly reducing the

took office that the Eurozone was a potentional basket case. Feeble excuses don’t wash any more. Growth in the UK has been -0.2 per cent over the last six quarters. It is time to give big incentives for firms to invest and hire plus im-plement an enormous programme of infrastructure spending. The coalition still has no plan for growth and now is the time for the competents to take over. At the very least it is time for a new Chancellor who has some clue about economics.

That was a big surprise. Not! Yesterday’s figures came as no surprise to many of

us who have warned these many months that a double-dip reces-sion was coming. For example, I warned on 24 June 2010 that George Osborne’s austerity budget “Kills recovery at birth”.

deficit doesn’t fix growth. Firms can save money by firing all their sales staff but then they shouldn’t be surprised when sales fall.It seems that the coalition govern-ment were “growth deniers” and assumed that slashing public spending would lead to a resur-gence in the private sector. There was never an empirical support for such a proposition.Blaming Europe doesn’t wash as the main driver down has been the construction and even the OBR warned when the coalition

It’s only 8 months to go until the Great Western franchise is renewed, four companies are trying for the contract. Many councils in the Deep South West are optimistic about the upcoming changes. The franchise, currently operated by FirstGroup opted to end their contract three years early in 2011, escaping £826m in government payments. Companies that are in the running for the franchise include: FirstGroup, Arriva, Stagecoach & National Express. If successful they will take on thirteen branch lines with some of the fastest growing passenger numbers in the UK. One of the cities pushing the government for a better deal is Plymouth; their city council has

outlined a list of wishes for the new franchise. The city is a unique case in the South West as it currently has no motorway, airport or high speed links - the fastest train to Plymouth from London is just over 3 hours long. It is claimed that rail investment will bring £94m a year in economic benefits to Plymouth. Business is virtually impossible

for most journeys in the region as there is no Wi-Fi connectivity and limited mobile phone signal. It is hopeful that by 2014 these services will be available on the Great West-ern mainline. Politicians are asking the govern-ment to consider the travelling cul-ture of major cities – Alison Seabeck, Plymouth Moor View MP envisages a metro system for South Devon: “Travelling is not only about getting on a train and getting directly from A to B, but you can do hops between transport links, it is important that the franchise understands that and enables that.” i understands that 48% of every rail ticket is spent improving the track and that Plymouth does not physically see improvements from that money. Seabeck has assured i

that work is spent on the mainline and that extensive work has been underway within the Reading area, speeding up times in and out of London.The new franchisee will be an-nounced by the Transport Secretary in December later this year, they will then start in April 2013.

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London

For every £1 spent on the railway:48p: Maintainence17p: Other17p: Staff11p: Leasing trains4p: Fuel and energy3p: Profit Source: ATOC