How social services can lose track of young girls to the extent they are trafficked and exploited over a number of years, only to that then be investigated with lines of enquiry long lost due to lack of things being picked up in due time, is almost certainly due to lack of resources.
Don’t take it from me though.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/award-winning-policeman-blasts-theresa-over-5728171
I’ve had my fair share of disagreements with 5-0 over the years, but to say that in the past 10 they haven’t utterly been utterly devastated in resources is incorrect and I feel sorry for them. People are being abused, killed and raped needlessly due to the sorry state our government has put our social services and policing in.
Social services have been useless for years, this isn't new, nor is it solely funding related. Funding changes do make a good excuse though when challenged on poor performance, especially if it meets the narrative that suits.
Likewise the police figures are not as simple as you claim, although they have undeniably fallen at the headline level, actual impacts vary significantly by area and role, not to mention is was just regression to the mean in action.
https://fullfact.org/crime/police-numbers/
What I dispute though, is the idea that simply raising funding from the state for law enforcement and the like would result in a miraculous shift in outcomes, because these problems are long term, have existed through both high and low funding and so on.
Ideally, stopping people falling into these situations should be prioritised over trying to clean up the mess afterwards, and that most definitely goes far deeper than simply throwing money at things.
There are also genuine discussions that could be had about freedoms versus risk, privacy versus justice and so on that all get masked by the 'evil Tories cutting money' narrative.
Note this isn't a defence of the Tories, nor is it a claim that more money, well spent, won't help, but it is about focusing on actually trying to improve the lives of vulnerable people.