A POLICE dog and two new officers will be brought to Basildon under the council’s budget for the next financial year.

Basildon Council voted through its budget on Thursday night, which will include funding for the officers and police dog, which will specialise in sniffing out drugs and knives.

The officers will be part of a service level agreement (SLA) between the council and Essex Police, and will be on top of the 215 new officers being recruited by police and crime commissioner Roger Hirst.

Council bosses said the inclusion of more police officers in the budget was a direct response to resident concerns about the level of visible policing in borough.

Andrew Baggott, council leader, said: ““We have set our budget, allocated our resources and created priorities based on engaging with our residents and listening to what they have told us.

“We know that crime and community safety is residents’ number one concern and want money put into tackling crime, with more police on our streets.

“This budget creates the resource to do this and we have talked to Essex Police about how the council can fund two extra officers for Basildon over and above the allocation they are making.”

Mr Baggott said that the new officers and police dog would be exclusively for the Basildon borough as part of the agreement with Essex Police.

The police announced last month that Chief Constable BJ Harrington will recruit an additional 215 police officers over the next year to focus on frontline policing, resulting from a £24 increase in the policing element of council tax per year.

This followed a public survey carried out by Roger Hirst at the end of last year, where more than 71 per cent of respondents said they would be prepared to invest more in policing to help improve the service provided.

Andrew Baggott added: “This is something you hear a lot about from residents when you’re a councillor for Pitsea. People want to feel safe, they want to see officers on their streets.

“If there was a massive police operation which required many officer hands, we of course would lend these new officers to that cause, but otherwise they are guaranteed to be purely based in the Basildon borough.”