My local police force won't even answer burglary or theft calls any more. They have an automated service which gives you a crime reference number over the phone!

"Press 1 for a burglary crime number... press 2 for a theft from the person, for example a mobile phone... press 3 for the loss of an item..."

Option nine is "Minor assault against the person".

The non-emergency number (101) just give you the phone number for the automated service...

Did I mention it's a premium-rate number?

And yet Hammond thought it was quite appropriate to recently raise the 40% tax cut-off to £50k [1] giving an average increase of £390 a year to that bracket, a 1% cut in corporate tax [2], and all the while overall funding for the police has fallen by about 20% when accounting for interest in the past 8 years [3].

I earn to benefit from these tax cuts, and I still think that decision was beyond ludicrous - as does everyone else I know who is set to gain from it. It truly baffles me that we're approaching a period of increasing poverty, where crime will inevitably rise, and the police are getting gutted like this.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/oct/30/budget-incom...

[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/rates-and-allowan...

[3] https://fullfact.org/crime/police-funding-england-and-wales/

> Their response was "This isn't an emergency.

I hope you weren't calling 999 - 101 would have been the appropriate number.

I did call through 101. I was only roughly summarising what they said. I asked if they would come around to inspect the damage and I think the exact reply was something along the lines of "Unfortunately we can only do police call outs for emergencies now. The best we can do is file a report over the phone."