Gloucestershire police to share murder teams

Gloucestershire will pool its murder investigation resources with Wiltshire and Avon and Somerset

Gloucestershire Constabulary's murder investigation team will merge with two neighbouring forces from next week.

Murders, corporate manslaughter and deaths abroad are among inquiries that will be handled by the Brunel Major Crime Collaboration from 1 December.

Major crime staff will still be based in Gloucestershire but will have to travel on some inquiries.

The force said the most serious crimes needed the most resources and said it would mean savings would be made.

Thirty major crime staff, including detectives and CCTV analysts, will join 113 from Avon and Somerset and 34 in Wiltshire. The latter two forces have been working together on murder inquiries since 2010.

Assistant Chief Constable Richard Berry said "in this time of austerity" further collaboration represented a "smarter way of working".

Det Supt Andy Bevan, lead officer for the Brunel collaboration, said it made sense to investigate murders regionally as "locally, as Gloucestershire has seen in recent years, murder rates can fluctuate quite dramatically but regionally they are traditionally flat".

There have been 17 murders in Gloucestershire since November 2012.

Gloucestershire Police Federation secretary Graham Riley said the investigations took a lot of resources from a small force and collaboration could help.

But he said it did not always result in savings and meant officers would have to travel across three force areas, which could mean longer hours.

Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and Avon and Somerset already share teams in road policing, firearms and police dog units.

The news came as, in a surprise announcement in the Spending Review, Chancellor George Osborne said there would be "no cuts in the police budget at all".

Gloucestershire had been planning for 20% cuts and was expecting to lose 177 officers and 53 police staff by March 2018.