Police can make savings by taking a flexible approach

IN response to report “Thousands of police ‘to be retired’” (Yorkshire Post, March 29), it would be possible for the police service in England and Wales to deliver the vast majority of the savings required by the UK Government without losing staff and even improving public service at the same time.

Technological solutions exist today that would enable police forces to realise significant budget savings by making back-offices, support services and front-line staff more efficient, as Home Secretary Theresa May recently suggested.

By 2015, the Government is planning to cut its £11bn funding of the police by 20 per cent. Three-quarters of the total police budget is spent on staffing costs, and, according to official statistics, more than £381m per year has been paid every year for the past five years in police overtime alone.

More efficient deployment of officers can have a significant impact on overtime expense. An independent review of police pay and conditions has recommended huge cuts in staff bonuses, including savings of £60m a year in overtime, but with these cuts come fears that up to 28,000 jobs will be lost.

As enshrined in our law, police officers cannot be made redundant, but this law gave rise to introducing more inflexible contracts, forcing early retirement upon some of the country’s most experienced police officers, creating redundancies from civilian staff and, ultimately, running the risk of jeopardising citizen safety.

Based on my experience of workforce optimisation technology in diverse sector and private sector environments, we have helped organisations greatly reduce their costs through improved staff utilisation with no degradation. My experience suggests that the same can be true in an operational policing environment. Why? The starting point for such technology is to understand what demand is and, subsequently, to forecast accurately when such demand will arrive throughout the day, week and year.

Without such an understanding, how can responsive organisations, such as the police, start to plan their associated resource profile?

It is the legacy and rigid working patterns followed by the police that currently determine how many officers are available to the public; they are not driven by demand. This results in front-line overstaffing during the week (resulting in unnecessary paid hours) and understaffing at busy periods, for example, Friday and Saturday nights (resulting in reliance on costly overtime to fix the hole).

An optimisation of police resource could save the Government millions of pounds while safeguarding the number of officers on the front-line as well as in other vital non-front-line and civilian roles.

Government, the choice is yours. Either maintain the status quo, leading to forced retirements, civilian job losses and potential crime increases, or adopt a different approach supported by more flexible working, leading to saved jobs and better service.