£1.8bn 'snooper's charter' fails to get Treasury backing

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/dec/28/snooper-charter-fail-treasury-backing

Consider the closure of police stations (about half of all stations within the London area for example) and then read the article: funding for this scheme will apparently have to come from existing police funding.

I would be surprised if anybody at the home office could claim with a straight face that this won't have an impact on the front line services offered by the police, especially when pretty much nobody outside of government believes the estimates that the civil service have put forward. Even Microsoft seem to have shown quite some scepticism, and after the complete farce that was the west coast mainline bidding process who can blame them?