THE number of police officers in Lancashire could fall after police chiefs revealed their expected budget increase for next year wouldn't cover the force's rising wage bill.

Lancashire Police is facing a hat-trick of money problems - which when added together will make it difficult to achieve Prime Minister Tony Blair's tough new crime reduction targets.

Members of Lancashire Police Authority have been told to expect a 4.5per cent budget increase over the next year.

But with the wage bill set to rise by 5.5per cent over the same period, the authority is facing a cash shortfall.

Normally, they would look to increasing their council tax precept - currently around £100 of a Band D property's annual bill - but the Government has warned it will cap any police authorities pushing for rises above three per cent.

And the police also have to deal with funding their growing ranks of community support officers. Dedicated funding from the Home Office for community officers is also due to run out, with no guarantee yet it will be renewed.

On top of that, the constabulary has to find more than £2million to fund its DNA-led investigations. Funding for the costly DNA profiling - which helps police in Lancashire to solve an extra 1,000 cases each year - is also being stopped.

County police authority chairman Baroness Ruth Henig said: "As it stands at the moment, we will be looking at potential cuts next year if we cannot solve all these things."

And chief constable Paul Stephenson said: "I share the deep concerns at this moment in time over funding."

He also revealed that he was sceptical about how the extra CSOs could be funded and how efficiency savings could be found after several years of cutting back and 'streamlining' backroom staff.

The funding blows come just a week after the Government outlined its five-year plan on crime, with the aim of bringing them down by 15 per cent.

Extra officers have been promised nationally, but no details about when they will be funded or where they will go have been confirmed.

Mr Stephenson said: "There are serious concerns about some of the targets. My concerns don't deal with the direction of the plan, but it is difficult to see how they will achieve some of the targets."

Mr Stephenson said wanting crime reduced by 15 per cent would be a "huge problem for us" if the starting point for the reduction was the figures for 2002/03.

That year was the last before a shake-up in the way crime figures were calculated, which led to more crimes being recorded, and more counted as violent.

As a result, he added, the force would effectively have to cut crime by 30 per cent.

Mr Stephenson said raising the detection rate for crime from 19 per cent to 29 per cent was difficult because the government would not let them include cases where the witnesses did not want to press charges.

If those could be counted, he added, Lancashire's detection rate would be at 27 per cent.