Faced with budget cuts, police force chiefs north of the border are keen to make big changes, writes MARK HENNESSY, London Editor
FOR DECADES Scottish police forces have jealously guarded their local identities, but financial pressures may end up achieving what previous efforts at reform have failed to achieve.
On Sunday the chief constable of Borders and Lothian police, David Strang, warned that forces could find their budgets cut by 25 per cent in coming years, due to contracting government spending in the UK.
Change will have to come, and quickly – perhaps leading to the police sharing back-office administration costs with each other and with other local government bodies, he said.
Top Scottish police officers are to meet early next month under the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) Scotland umbrella to discuss what reforms can be made to ensure that front-line policing does not suffer.
ACPO Scotland favours the merging of the firearms and road traffic units in the eight forces, who already share human resources and health and safety officers’ staff costs.
However the reforms could go wider, as chief constable Strang suggested that child-protection could be dealt with by combined units of teachers, social workers and police, who already have to co-operate on such investigations anyway.
Equally, forces’ payroll and legal services could be pooled with other police forces, while telephone reception and a host of other administration could go the same way in time.
“But if we’re going to face the challenges and make the savings we need to, then we want to look at headquarters operations, we want to look at shared services,” the chief constable said. “What I mean by a radical new approach to public services is not just looking within the police world, but right across the public sector.”
“Take child protection, for instance – GPs, health visitors are involved in that, [as are] social workers, teachers and police officers. We work very closely and we need to do more of that joint working in a radical new way than simply in our own organisations.”
ACPO Scotland president Patrick Shearer said: “We need to rethink how we work and take urgent and radical action to minimise the impact of cuts on our delivery of front-line services.”
Money pressures are already beginning to bite. Police chiefs imposed a recruitment freeze for vacancies among its 1,400 civilian staff, with only posts regarded as “critical” being filled.
Last April, the police chiefs drew up a plan for voluntary redundancy and early retirement among their 18,000 officers, though they have not yet set a target for the number to go.
In Leith, near Edinburgh, plans for a new headquarters have been scrapped, leaving police to struggle on in an unsuitable building which houses twice the staff number it should.
Some people in Scotland believe the police should first stop wasting money, following a row about a language guide issued to officers telling them not to call women “pet”, or pensioners “old biddies”.
The Appropriate Language Guide, issued in Edinburgh and the Lothians, tells officers: “You should be aware that some people may not enjoy being referred to as ‘one of the boys’ or ‘one of the girls’. In a similar way, you need to be aware that terms such as ‘dear’, ‘pet’, or ‘love’ . . . are best avoided.”