11 Comments

What's missing, to know whether £65 million is a big number or not: what's the annual budget of South Yorkshire Police?

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author

Yes, maybe I should have out that in but it’s made slightly more complicated because the £65m isn’t day to day budget spending, it’s capital spending. So presumably to make the budget add up it’s not just a simple case of taking £65m from somewhere else. However, as Scientist says below, it’s the equivalent of around 20% of the annual budget.

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It’s roughly 320 million.

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Thanks - the debt service of £16m over four years suggest that about £4m a year should have been budgeted for debt service then?

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I can't imagine anyone is shocked by this incompetence. Very few crimes seem to be solved as it is and this isn't going to help. I presume no one will ever be held to account, as usual.

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I don’t follow why this is a black hole. Even if they didn’t know about it, they took on the debt. So clearly they were always going to have to cut other things back to pay that debt given their budget. Unless they missed an opportunity to get a lot more money from central government because they didn’t know about this debt, whether they knew about it or not makes no difference to what is owed.

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Sep 30Liked by Dan Hayes

What I mean is even if they had known about these debt payments they would still be making the same cutbacks to service it. So cuts should not be blamed on the black hole. The cuts are caused by taking on this debt in the first place aren’t they?

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author

The way I understand it is that it means they thought they had more money than they actually have. Which means that money is going to have to come out of other budgets to pay for these debts to be serviced.

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Can we stop using the term black hole incorrectly please.

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I trust you will be naming and shaming the responsible persons. What with the scandals already surrounding the PCC 'election' we really need to know who is the accountable entity!

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Sounds right dodgy.

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