Police
Spending Review 2010
What we know
The 43 police forces in England & Wales employ well over 200,000 people, the majority of whom are police officers. Between 1997 and 2008 central government funding to police forces rose by over 40% in real terms, with significant increases in the numbers of police officers, civilian police staff and the introduction of Police Community Support Officers.
The Chancellor has outlined a 4% p.a. cut in the police budget whilst stating the aim to have no reduction in police-officer visibility and availability on the streets. He also reiterated the aims of the Winsor Review of police-officer terms and conditions, and the introduction of directly elected Police and Crime Commissioners.
Deloitte view
There is a risk that the budget cut will mean that police officers are taken from the frontline and redeployed into the back office in the near term. The Winsor Review will not deliver its recommendations until June 2011, and they will take much longer to implement - yet police forces and authorities need to start reducing costs immediately. Over 80% of force costs go on staff, the vast majority of whom are police officers and for whom turnover rates are well below public-sector averages. Because police-officers terms and conditions are much more inflexible than those of civilian staff, many forces will seek to fund their immediate savings from cutting civilian staff doing a range of support and operational support jobs. But these jobs will not go away without wider changes to the way services are delivered, and many forces will need to re-deploy police officers to backfill them. So the proportion of police officers available for ‘frontline’ duties could fall – and forces could be ‘over paying’ for police officers to do jobs that do not require their skills or powers.
The government is expecting to find much of the savings target through greater efficiency in the back office. Yet back-office services comprise a small proportion of force budgets, so forces will have to find new models for delivering their operational services more cheaply. They will need to consider much greater collaboration with other forces and other public services. Deloitte recently supported the forces and authorities of Yorkshire & the Humber to design a pioneering regional collaboration programme, and it was clear that the greatest potential savings lie in collaboration in operating policing capabilities.
Forces will also need to reform their workforces and consider which people, with which skills and powers, are best placed to deliver the re-designed services. Deloitte’s two-year evaluation for the Home Office of the national Workforce Modernisation Programme pointed to the potential benefits forces could realise through re-configuring the workforce alongside policing processes.
The police service has some fantastic leaders. Many excel at crisis-driven leadership in particular, where actions need to be taken quickly, where resources are in direct line command and where, frequently, there are clear right/wrong answers. Policing in the new age of austerity will require new leadership skills – leading without authority (e.g. through partnerships with other public services); the ability to commission services effectively from others, including the private sector; managing risk rather than trying to eliminate it; and, taking decisions when there is no one right answer, leading their teams need to navigate through to the best solution in the context. The police service will need to invest in these new skills.
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