Ed Balls, the Children’s Secretary, insisted yesterday that the Government would persist with high spending on public services through the recession. The police service is budgeting on altogether different assumptions of large spending cuts of up to £480 million. The Metropolitan Police, the largest force, is planning on a reduction in its budget of £366 million in the next three years.

These projections are worrying when bitter economic conditions are likely to act as an incubator for crime and disorder. They raise particularly pressing questions on the allocation of police resources as London prepares for the 2012 Olympics, which will be a showcase and inevitably a huge security operation. The Government is failing the police, and more particularly the public, in three ways.

First, the Government is not being straight about budgetary pressures on public services. Mr Balls is widely assumed to be an aspirant but thwarted Chancellor of the Exchequer. His assurances about spending on public services are implausible, given the awesome levels of public borrowing that the Treasury itself projects. In the Budget, Alistair Darling forecast that Britain would be £175 billion in the red in this financial year. Public sector net borrowing for the year to date amounts to £30.5 billion, more than double the level of a year earlier and the largest figure since records began in 1993. Mr Balls argues that a recovering economy after 2010 will be able to sustain high levels of spending. But, under a government of either party after the general election, there will need to be a fiscal contraction to offset deficits of this size. It is disingenuous to imagine otherwise. Mr Darling is reported not to be undertaking a comprehensive spending review before an election. When budgetary constraints are tight, it is irresponsible and instils suspicion in the providers of public services if government is less than open.

Second, the Government’s assumptions about the police service are hopeful to the point of complacency. In April, the Treasury imposed efficiency savings targets on police forces of 4 per cent compared with an earlier target of 3 per cent. It is an easy phrase but a difficult achievement. Policing is a peculiarly labour-intensive public service. Staff costs make up some three quarters of the Met’s total budget.

There is a good reason for this. The main deterrent to crime is the presence of police officers. There are criticisms that large public events are sometimes over-policed, and that police officers spend too much time on bureaucratic work. If so, these are evidence of a misallocation of manpower rather than of its excess. Residents of housing estates where crime and vandalism are endemic are not wary of obtrusive policing so much as concerned that police powers do not extend as far as them.

Third, while the need for fiscal retrenchment over coming years is obvious, policing is a particularly difficult service in which to find large areas of discretionary spending during an economic downturn. Crime is the fault of the criminal and no one else. But crimes aggravated by boredom, drink and joblessness burgeon in a recession. The police are the public’s protection; it is an indictment of the Government’s failure that they will also bear so much of the cost.