A BOBBY on every beat - that's the pledge from Gwent's chief constable. From this week, every town or village in Gwent will have its own dedicated officer.

But Keith Turner says police must be diverted from serious crime issues to meet that demand.

Mr Turner told a meeting of Gwent Police Authority: "We don't get a great deal of criticism about the way we deal with serious crime, but we've been having a lot of criticism about the fact we don't seem to be as responsive or as visible as we should be.

"So we have decided to nominate ward managers for every council ward in Gwent."

He added: "Something will have to give at the serious end of things. These are not new resources, they are resources currently committed elsewhere.

"If we are no longer able to deal with drug traffickers and organised crime, we'll have to seriously reconsider our stance.

"If they take hold, the anti-social behaviour we complain about now will pale into insignificance."

In October we revealed that Mr Turner wants 400 extra staff to stem the rising tide of serious crime.

He admitted being "neglectful" of communities, but warned a huge increase in government funding was needed just to keep levels of policing as they were.

The main task of the beat bobbies will be to build up a picture of ward crime hotspots, and discuss issues with councillors, police authority members, head teachers and other community representatives on a regular basis.

In our Argus editorial on Friday, we said that what people want are police walking the streets to give them reassurance.

And Mr Turner told the meeting: "If we only had a mediocre performance we could do this and perform at the level we were before.

"But individual officers already detect so much more than the next force to us and more than three times the national average."

And he stressed: "I can't whip the galley slaves any harder and make them pull harder on the oars. We can't improve on our performance. This is about listening to people who represent the community to capture the low-level stuff that's there.

"This is going to cause some level of downturn in performance, but this is what the public have been asking us for, for some time."

Police authority member and Caerphilly councillor Christine Forehead said: "This is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that we've been asking for."