The true cost of cannabis crime!

Spoke to today at the UK Revenue Protection Agency who kindly invited me to speak at their conference.  This was despite the fact that a few months ago I was complaining publicly that noone was doing anything proactively to deal with energy theft from cannabis farms.  It's the job of the UKRPA to enforce the public debt in this area and to their credit their latest strategy does include a move to becoming more proactive.  My estimate is that we lose about £1200 million in stolen electricity.  That's comparing the data from the police and UKRPA.  Just to put that in context we could open up at least 15 new hospitals, recruit thousands of nurses or police officers or 18 Eurofighters but not enough for a new aircraft carrier!  Seriously this is a massive problem and I was encouraged that afterwards in discussions they were motivated to work closely with academia, the police and other partners to get to grips with the problem  The sad thing is that we know from drug workers in Newcastle that more and more young people are being referred to drug intervention programmes for cannabis and less and less now for heroin and cocaine.  That's because there is a lot of it about, 7800 farms found last year and an estimate of 11800 this year and growing! Literally!

Just seen a post from a member of the public on the Sunderland Echo website saying, "Now Mr Butler has EXACTLY the qualifications required in this post. If we really need this new commissioner then what better than one with knowledge and experience of the job , the cost of the job and the future of the job....unlike either of the other two offerings.

I'm grateful for the kind words of support and this encourages me to stick to my beliefs that given my 30 years police experience in this region I am better placed to represent the public then a career politician.  To me it's just common sense?