Key points

With MPs due to vote on whether to award police a cash settlement later on Wednesday, Jeremy Corbyn, as usual, avoided the obvious subject – Brexit – and pressed Theresa May on rising crime and cuts to the police service. He said recorded crime was up by a fifth since 2010 and violent crime up 20%, but 21,000 police and £2.3bn had been cut from the police service when May was home secretary.

Corbyn confronts May over rising crime and police cuts at PMQs - Politics live Read more

May said she was ensuring crime was recorded properly, and that the then shadow home secretary, Andy Burnham – now mayor of Greater Manchester – had said the police budget could take up to a 10% cut.

Corbyn, however, said the inspectorate had found that police were failing to record tens of thousands of offences, 6,700 community support officers had been cut, and the chief constable of Bedfordshire had said he did not have the resources to keep people safe. May, he concluded, had presided over the highest rise in recorded crime for a quarter of a century.

May said she had overseen the creation of the National Crime Agency, and police taking more notice of vulnerable victims, modern slavery and domestic violence.

Countering May with more statistics, Corbyn said gun crime was up 20% last year, and that the chief constable of Merseyside had said he did not have sufficient resources to fight it. May said police budgets were being increased by £450m, and Corbyn “hasn’t got that good a record of extending the police powers to allow them to do their job”.

Corbyn said budgets had fallen £413m, and other cuts – to youth workers and youth clubs – were contributing to the rise in crime. Why had May cut both prevention and cure?

May said Corbyn had voted against changing the law so anyone caught carrying a knife for a second time would face a custodial sentence. Knife crime fell in London when Boris Johnson was mayor, and it was up under Labour’s Sadiq Khan.

Corbyn said crime could be dealt with by an effective probation service, community service orders and the rehabilitation of offenders. May – as she often does – retorted that only a strong economy could pay for good public services, and that if Labour were in power, Britain would face a capital flight and a run on the pound.

Snap verdict

It was the sort of routine points-win that Corbyn achieves quite regularly these days – by asking focused questions about public spending, buttressed by awkward quotes from Tories or Tory-types – but what made this a bit special was that it was a win on a traditionally key Conservative battleground.

When Corbyn was elected Labour leader, his supporters would have expected him to do well at PMQs on health or housing, but it would have taken a brave call to predict him winning on law and order. Yet during the general election campaign, one of the turning points came when the terrorist attacks gave Labour the opportunity to hammer May and her government over police cuts (Tory and Labour strategists assumed at the time that the attacks would benefit May, but in fact the opposite appeared to happen). Corbyn successfully resurrected those arguments on Wednesday.

It was risky, because as a former home secretary May is more confident on this ground and her response to the increase in recorded crime (“because I pushed for that as home secretary”, she claimed) was effective. She could also parry Corbyn’s attack on knife crime. But her overall weakness was exposed by the fact that she had to resort to quoting Burnham, who is now longer even an MP, to defend herself against the charge she has cut police spending. It didn’t work.

Best lines

After seven years of cuts, will the prime minister today admit that her government’s relentless cuts have left us less safe? You can’t have public safety on the cheap.

Corbyn concludes his points on police cuts.

That’s what Labour would do – bankrupt Britain and the police would have less money.

May retorts with a familiar refrain.