‘Supply line’ under scrutiny but key services to be spared

West Yorkshire Police is to scale back roads policing, crime scene investigation and intelligence units, while staff cuts will leave bobbies on the beat having to fill in crime records themselves.

But Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison insisted many key services would be spared the axe, including 999 emergency response officers, local investigators and the force’s 47 neighbourhood policing teams.

Elite “public protection” units investigating terrorism, murders, rapes and internet paedophilia would also escape the worst of the cuts.

Sir Norman said: “What we are not going to do is go salami slicing around the whole organisation because there are some things which are so central to our raison d’etre that we will protect them as far as we possibly can.”

Thirteen reviews are under way in areas described by Sir Norman as “the supply line” – behind-the-scenes functions which help officers respond to incidents and solve crime.

One of the units to disappear will be the Crime Recording Bureau, where staff take down incident details and enter them into the Police National Computer so that officers can remain on the beat for longer.

“In the brave new world, that is a luxury we cannot afford,” Sir Norman said.

“Police officers are now going to have to fill in their own crime records. We have issued them with BlackBerrys.”

Road policing teams and intelligence units, based in each of the force’s eight divisions, will be reduced and reorganised into three or four clusters which will require officers to travel further to incidents.

Sir Norman said that, to balance the budget, between 1,500 and 2,000 people would need to leave the force by 2014, two thirds of them staff and the rest officers.

Recruitment stopped in mid-2010, reducing training costs, but Sir Norman expects to make between 300 and 400 compulsory redundancies next year and reserves the right to force some of his most experienced officers to retire if a “log jam” develops at certain ranks.

Supervisors have been asked to identify work-shy staff as potential candidates for redundancy.

Sir Norman added: “I believe that 90-plus per cent of my staff are giving 110 per cent day in day out and have done since following the occupation of policing, and it is not right that people are leaving the organisation who are prepared to show the commitment if anybody stays behind that doesn’t.”