Drones could be sent out to 999 calls instead of police officers to speed up response times, Jeremy Hunt said as he announced investment aimed at making public services ‘more efficient’.
Victims of crime could also report them by video call, the Chancellor added as he unveiled a £230million package to roll out new ‘time and money saving technology’ in his Budget statement.
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Mr Hunt told MPs: ‘Police officers waste around eight hours a week on unnecessary admin – with higher productivity, we could free up time equivalent to 20,000 officers over a year.
‘So we will spend £230 million rolling out time and money saving technology which speeds up police response time by allowing people to report crimes by video call and where appropriate use drones as first responders.’
The Chancellor said violence reduction units and hot spot policing ‘have prevented an approximate 136,000 knife crimes and other violent offences as well as over 3,000 hospital admissions’.
He told the Commons ‘every crime costs money’ so £75million will be earmarked ‘to roll that model out in England and Wales’.
Mr Hunt also said £170 million would be used to fund ‘non-court resolution, reduce reoffending and digitise the court process’, while £165 million would be invested over the next four years to increase the capacity of the children’s homes estate.
An additional £105 million over the next four years would be used to build 15 new special free schools, Mr Hunt added.
Elsewhere, hospitals were handed £3.4billion by Mr Hunt to boost productivity by expanding use of artificial intelligence and improving outdated IT systems.
The Chancellor said the move will ‘unlock ten times that amount’ in terms of improving NHS efficiency.
He also announced an extra £2.45billion for day-to-day health service spending, which will cover areas such as wages.
‘The NHS was there for us in the pandemic, and today with nearly £6billion in additional funding a Conservative government is there for the NHS,’ he said.
Welcoming the news, NHS England chief executive Amanda Pritchard said the extra funding ‘ensures we have the support we need to make continued progress on our key priorities for patients’.
In his Budget speech, Mr Hunt said making changes to the NHS ‘on the scale we need is not cheap’. The £3.4billion capital investment will start next year.
He told the Commons it was needed to modernise NHS IT systems ‘so they’re as good as the best in the world’ but would also unlock £35billion of savings.
‘With that new investment, we will slash the 30 million hours lost by doctors and nurses every year through outdated IT systems, we will potentially halve form-filling by doctors using AI…
‘We will fund improvements to help doctors read MRI and CT scans more accurately and quickly, speeding up results for 130,000 patients every year and saving thousands of lives, something I know would have delighted my brother Charlie, who I recently lost to cancer.’
He said all hospitals would use electronic patient records, ‘making the NHS the largest digitally integrated healthcare system in the world’.
Mr Hunt, delivering a statement aimed at reviving both an ailing economy and reversing the Conservatives’ opinion poll deficit, said he was offering ‘permanent tax cuts’ in a ‘Budget for long-term growth’.
He also aimed to deliver ‘more efficient, better value and higher quality public services’.
Mr Hunt made a 2p cut in national insurance for workers and the self-employed the centrepiece of a tax-cutting Budget with an eye on this year’s general election.
He said the cut, which will come in from April, will result in the lowest effective personal tax rate since 1975 and could result in getting the equivalent of 200,000 more people in work.
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