Yesterday, Julia Mulligan, the Police and Crime Commissioner for North Yorkshire Police, tweeted criticising a report from last year which looked at the costs of Police and Crime Commissioners compared to the preceding Police Authorities.
In addition, she stated that she had “met [the] researcher who did it and he admitted [it was a] poor report. After leaving TPA!”
The researcher who produced the report, Harry Fairhead, is still employed by the TaxPayers’ Alliance and has never met Mrs Mulligan. We have requested that Mrs Mulligan delete her demonstrably false tweet but she has refused to do so.
Mrs Mulligan’s original dispute was that the research contained an anomaly as the figure for the year in question was artificially inflated due to grants received for the implementation of victims services, one of the responsibilities PCCs took over from Police Authorities. The figures were put together using responses from Freedom of Information requests and official accounts. They were thus the figures provided to us, and the wider public, by the PCC and grants for all PCCs would also have been included, making any comparisons fair.