Cuts with criminal consequences

The police say a Royal Commission is needed to determine the full extent of their responsibilities

By Jon Silverman

“No one wants us to stop doing anything. That’s the big issue in policing. Tell us what we should stop doing.”  The speaker is a chief constable with scars on his back from budgetary battles in the Metropolitan police who now finds himself in far too many Value for Money meetings. And, like many of his colleagues in the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), he argues that the police should be “measured on outcomes, not on how we achieve them.” A Government mired in a mountain of debt is in no mood to agree and has published a policing white paper which prescribes in unusual detail the ways in which it expects the service to make “efficiency savings” of at least £100 million a year from 2010/11 and an eye-watering half a billion pounds a year from 2014.

The clash of outlooks has already produced one confrontation. Jack Straw’s snide remark, in a radio interview, that some officers prefer to stay in the warmth of a police station rather than get out on the beat, is reminiscent of his sneering at Hampstead liberals all those years ago when he was making a name as a hard-hitting Home Secretary. Predictably, the Police Federation called it “irresponsible and inflammatory”. But his underlying point, that the police habitually cite the demands of bureaucracy and form-filling to mask their own reluctance to do things more efficiently, touches a raw nerve. That phrase “the last unreformed public service” still has a currency in Whitehall even though it was first heard more than a decade ago. So, does the Government have a right to be exasperated ?

Eighty per cent of the overall policing budget goes on staff costs, which explains why there is such a current focus on cutting overtime. The white paper demands that the police save at least £70 million per annum by 2013/14 through “more effective deployment and more robust internal management of police overtime.” Only constables and sergeants qualify for overtime. All other ranks are salaried. And there’s little doubt that some of the improvement in detection and clear-up rates in recent years has come about because of overtime work. It’s a truism in policing that if you throw resources intelligently at a problem, it will bring a dividend. So, reducing overtime may have consequences.

Then, there’s “rationalisation of back-office support services”. The white paper envisages annual savings of at least £75 million a year by 2013/14. Shirt-sleeved IT staff in centrally-heated offices will always be a popular target for culling but amongst their number are crime analysts and fingerprint experts who help solve crime and have a direct impact on front-line policing. Tackling cross-border crime more effectively, a current priority, would be harder to do without the intelligence support provided by the back-office. So you slash and burn at your peril. And, in any case, with only 20 per cent of the policing budget spent on non-staff costs, the room for manoeuvre is limited.

But the largest unresolved issue in modern policing is force mergers. After Charles Clarke’s unsuccessful attempt to drive through a radical merger programme to reduce the number of forces in England and Wales from 43 to around 20, the Government’s approach is now to go softly-softly, encouraging voluntary mergers and giving every possible stimulus to collaboration between forces. On some issues, such as organised crime, the Welsh forces combine routinely and there is a close partnership between Essex and Kent. Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire – prime candidates for full merger – are in discussion about melding their Major Investigation Teams. The impetus is cost saving. For example, dealing with murders, in accordance with the rigorous guidelines laid down in the ACPO Murder Manual, is hugely expensive, not least in overtime payments. “Can we sustain this level of spending?”  a senior officer asked rhetorically at a briefing for journalists. On the other hand, the murder rate in England and Wales is the lowest for 20 years so there may be a human price to be paid for introducing “efficiency savings.”

The nightmare scenario for the police service after 2012/13 when the money gets even tighter, is a sharp reduction in (expensive) sworn, warranted officers, the shortfall being made up by an increase in (cheaper) Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs). It would enable the number of visible bodies on the beat to be maintained but you couldn’t send PCSOs to police inflammatory anti-military protests in Wootton Bassett or siphon them into firearms units in areas with high levels of gun crime.

All of which explains why every level of the police service argues that the time is overdue for a Royal Commission to determine what the police are for ( the last one reported in 1962 when Dixon was still patrolling Dock Green). “Tell us what we should stop doing”, pleads the harassed chief constable quoted at the beginning of this article. In other words, policing is too important to be left to the mercy of a Government driven by short-term preoccupations, like winning a forthcoming election and shrinking the red ink on the Treasury forecasts. But as long as two thirds of the entire Home Office budget goes on the police, the paymaster will insist on calling the tune.

To find out more about this article, visit: http://police.homeoffice.gov.uk/police-reform/white-paper-2009/

19 January 2010

Jon Silverman. Professor of media and criminal justice at the University of Bedfordshire,