Every hour an officer spends carrying out work that another agency should be doing is an hour they are not preventing crime or protecting victims.
What I am not persuaded of is that restricting the legal entitlements of children who depend on them constitutes a solution rather than a postponement, and a costly one at that. The consequences of getting this wrong will not appear in the Department for Education’s accounts.
A police force shaped primarily around being liked rather than being effective operates with one hand tied behind its back.
We should be focused on increasing the number of homes, particularly family homes, while also improving their aesthetics. Too many developments look like very tall, soulless, human greenhouses that some of us would not even place our house plants in; they are that ogreish.
When a city becomes transient, something deeper is lost. It is not just about the cost of rent. It is about the quiet erosion of community.
We must pivot from restrictive, punitive measures that disproportionately squeeze lower-income households toward a strategy built on common-sense and innovation.
A housing market that traps people in homes they own only on paper undermines trust, mobility and productivity, while a society that blocks younger generations from ownership risks breeding resentment and disengagement.
If ministers keep making laws that only make sense in Westminster, the people on the front line will always keep fighting those two battles as I did.
All the state interventions in the world, debates about safeguarding young people, youth clubs, and so on will not make a serious enough impact if we keep ignoring the home environments our young people are growing up in.
It will be a missed opportunity if police chiefs allow the perception to take root that British policing is now in the business of picking sides.
One force can complete vetting of officers in two months, while another can take up to eight months. In Bedfordshire, we are part of a closer Tri-Force collaboration with Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire.
Work is under way in Bedfordshire to ensure a common local framework on absenteeism which is to include engagement with the child.
The first part of a series on ConHome this week about the politics of race in Britain today.
My front-line experience will be invaluable to me if I am elected to serve as Bedfordshire’s next Police and Crime Commissioner.
The least we can do is learn the right lesson from his death: public servants must never become so afraid of accusations that they stop seeing what is right in front of them. No ideology, theory or institutional fear should ever obscure that fact.