Suspects freed in Salisbury due to lack of custody unit

Crime suspects are being freed in part of Wiltshire due to a lack of a custody suite within a 30-mile radius, according to the Police Federation.

The Salisbury custody unit was closed in 2014 and the nearest one is in Melksham, nearly 29 miles (47 km) away.

The federation said officers are reluctant to leave the area low on staff in order to transport suspects.

Wiltshire Police said officers rarely need to make the journey because there is a civilian prisoner transport team.

Insp David Ibbott of the Police Federation - which represent 120,000 officers across the UK - claims the closure of the Salisbury unit has led to "the drop of arrests in Wiltshire".

He said officers will not "turn a blind eye", but will "think very long and hard" whether they are going to leave their colleagues "understaffed and vulnerable to other incidents that might occur".

"If you're driving to Melksham, it could be an hour away. You could be stuck in that custody unit for two or three hours, then you've got to drive back and during that period of time your colleagues are left without back-up," he said.

Insp Ibbott also claimed the civilian prisoner transport van is only designed to take one prisoner at a time and is often driven by police officers, due to a lack of civilian staff.

The custody unit in Wilton Road, Salisbury, was closed in 2014 in a bid to make £3m of cuts. Since then, prisoners are transported to the Bourne Hill unit in Melksham.

Wiltshire's Police and Crime Commissioner Angus Macpherson said custody units are "extremely expensive places to run", and he could not justify spending more than £10m of public money to build a new facility between Melksham and Salisbury.

He added that when it closed the Salisbury suite was under-used and in need of "significant renovation".