Frontline police cuts should be 'last in queue'
Updated on 20 July 2010
Frontline policing will not escape the effects of the financial crisis the Chief Inspector of Constabulary, Sir Dennis O'Connor tells Channel 4 News. In a hard-hitting report he warns policing needs a massive revamp.
Policing in England and Wales needs a massive revamp to ensure front-line services can be maintained in the face of savings of £1bn, according to reports by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) and the Audit Commission.
"There is no time for a Royal Commission," says the HMIC report, entitled Valuing the Police: policing in an age of austerity. "The police leadership needs to rise to this challenge and the public need to be informed of the hard choices ahead."
And the report calls for a "total redesign" of the police service to allow for "nurturing the thin blue line" in the face of cuts.
But Sir Dennis O'Connor, HM Chief Inspector of Constabulary and the report's author, told Channel 4 News he was concerned that "once you get beyond a certain percentage of efficiency (...) then you start looking very hard at the people - who might be those who are the visible patrols the public see. At that point, I think it becomes very problematic.
"I would suggest that we ought all to consider those to be the last in the line rather than, as they've been in the past recessions, first in the queue."
He continued: "Police presence, visible presence, is so fundamentally important. Peel knew it. It was true then, it's true now."
At present just one in every 10 of all police officers is "visible and available" to the public at any one time, the report warns, despite the fact that policing has enjoyed year-on-year budget increases over the past 40 years.
Valuing the Police: policing in an age of austerity
- Download the HMIC report (.pdf)
Sustaining value for money in the police service
- Download the Audit Commission report (.pdf)
Hard choices
Sir Dennis said this was "a testimony to making lots of choices about providing visible presence, on the one hand, and then a whole lot of special, specialist services which have accrued to the police over time".
He told Home Affairs Correspondent Simon Israel the average borough police command could nowadays contain up to 20 "sets of specialists", all with different roles. "All of those roles need looking at very hard," he said.
His report highlights the poor organisation of shift patterns in certain areas of the country. In some forces just six in every 100 officers are on a duty visible to the public during peak Friday night hours, while larger numbers are at work on quiet Monday mornings.
Sir Dennis blames the shift imbalances on the low availability on the use of police community support officers (PCSOs), who do not work after 8pm, as well as risk management and bureaucracy.
In one case study, the report describes a burglary which involved 30 officers and staff, and a rape case in which 24 officers and staff were involved in the first 12 hours.
Not prepared
Just one in five forces is prepared for the level of anticipated cuts, the HMIC report states, and it warns that one in three forces is inadequately prepared. Sir Dennis O'Connor told Simon Israel: "People must have begun to realise that the world would not be the same with the financial crash."
He said: "For quite a big proportion of the larger forces, and a substantial number of the smaller forces, not to have looked at the scenarios, and what that means and how hard it would be, is something of a concern.
Sir Dennis's report urges the government to focus cash on putting officers and the beat, and suggests cash could be withheld from forces who do not spend wisely.
He told Simon Israel today's report was intended to send a signal to police forces that "you really, really must think very hard about what you're going to do over the next three or four years, because we don't think this is easy to do".
ACPO's Sir Hugh Orde said in a speech at the end of June that police would have to "share the pain" of public sector cuts, and that "hard choices" had to be made. He predicted that front-line patrols could not escape cuts.
'Police authorities just want to get on with the job'
Today's reports are very useful. They highlight a number of areas where police authorities really want to give intensive scrutiny to what’s been going on, Rob Garnham, chairman of the Association of Police Authorities, told Channel 4 News.
Police authorities have a track record of delivering efficiency and effective policing for people. In the past we've had to work in an arena of increasing government targets and statutory duties, and we've been distracted by trying to satisfy everyone.
We now want to get on with the job – but then other distractions come your way, such as changing the governance model. The government has chosen the model of directly elected individuals to replace police authorities.
We've said there can be improvements in the way policing governance is carried out. But we think we've done a good job in recent years, delivering on every efficiency target, on budget savings - and crime is down.
At the very time policing needs police authorities and the governance we provide, we're in a real period of uncertainty, and there's a risk people will take their eye off the ball.
The public want us to keep them safe from harm and to stop crime, but they also want to see us tackling the financial crisis. Everyone knows we've got to address it. Police cannot be exempt.
Up and down the country I know police forces are making massive savings already. In my own force, Gloucestsershire Constabulary, our current medium-term financial strategy is looking at £10m worth of cuts. And we know more pain is to come.
So the work's going on. Let's solve the financial crisis first and let's deal with the issues highlighted in today's reports. That's the matter in hand.
