Can anyone clarify – Labour’s proposal for a 12% cut in policing. Presumably part of the plan to halve the deficit. So for a fair comparison with the government policy to eliminate the deficit, Labour’s policy should be considered a 24% cut.

Hmm, so the police aren’t the brutal arm of the repressive fascist state today then?

“And the universal service obligation that many parts of the public service have makes such savings more problematic than in the private sector. We need enough firefighters on duty to cope with all the fires that might reasonably occur, even if we know that most of the time we won’t reach that degree of demand.”

Which is, of course, why half of Denmark burnt to the grounds a few years ago. Oh, except, it didn’t:

http://reason.org/files/c2bbfe415eccfdff424a2bf7c8a20585.pdf

Come off it. The police are massively overfunded. They never walk if they can possibly go by helicopter.

As long as a single PCSO is still waddling pointlessly about there will be more room for cuts to police budgets.

I worked out that Havering in the MET use to have 280 P.C.s(including detecive constables) and Bories said that as there was low crime he would take 30 away, Now there’s 50 Saferneighbour hood ones (90 repsonce p.c.s 25 admin ones, 55 detectives including Child abuse, rape teams and motorvehicle ones, that excludes the Safer ftansport and town market teams that make up 20, so that means there are another 10 that man the raidos ,of those 10 they could be replaced by civilians,of the 25 admin including those who gather inteleigence look after welfare of Specials, are jailers I could see about 5 being replaced by civilians, so thats 15 out of 250 thats about 7%, Even if they got lawyers to do the Police traffic paper work, it still woul’dnt be cheaper,

Whatever the merits of the process, surely nobody on a liberal blog is really arguing that we don’t need fewer policemen? You can’t move for them in London, scowling around in their paramilitary get up. In what sense is this place supposed to be ‘liberal’?

@2 has it right. The left always complains about how heavy handed the police are, and how they enforce the will of the ConDemNation. So surely it’s a good thing they’re not getting as much public money to spend on water cannons and rubber bullets to suppress heirs to baronets occupying posh tea shops?

I’m not sure if the point is the detail re:police numbers or rather the larger issue – that the coalition uses “cuts to back-office” staff as a convenient excuse across the board, whereas what this article shows is that it’s not quite as simple as chucking out a few paper-pushers and watching the savings come in. That’s how I read it anyway.

I see that the government is going to privatise Birmingham’s prison:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12920843

What I don’t understand is why the government isn’t also privatising the police. I feel confident that selling off rights to run the police would fetch billions into Osborne’s exchequer and do much to quickly pay down that apparently intractable budget deficit.

“If you sack a back-office worker whose job needs doing, you end up diverting someone from the front-line to do it. The net result is a cut in front-line services.”

[This was a Party Political Broadcast by the TUC on behalf of the white collar, £50k+earning, padded pension, Public Sector. Because blue-collar workers don't give trade unions the time of day any more]

More seriously, this argument is predicated on the idea that every police back-office worker’s job actually needs doing. It may be there’s even some well-meaning legislation that demands that back-office job be done.

Do we say “Oh dear, that’s that then”, or do we consider whether the back-office job needs to be done, and amend the legislation as needs be? It may be the front-line survives perfectly well without it.

To dismiss that as some “trivial truism” – some contemptible remark, fshaw those beastly scum at the Daily Hate might have said it y’know, barely worth thinking about old thing – when dear old Gordon well and truly flushed our money up the wall, is a pathetic position.

I now invite the honourable member from Broadmoor to label me a ‘brownshirt’, a ‘troll’ and a ‘corporate butler’ (I like that one) for not saying “Taxing Fortnums at 110% would solve it all!!!”

7@ when have the police ever used either water cannons or Rubber bullets on crowds in the mainland ?,they don’t even own any water cannons they sold the Norhtern Ireland oens off a few years ago, are stab proof jackets Paramiltiary, and its not cnetral london thats going to suffer with polce cuts, afterall every Prime minister questions or protest the outer london ones come to westminster and the pouter london boeoughs have higher crime that day,

10@ apart form some of the receptioists at More middle class safer neighbour hood police station’s I cna’t think of any polce staff job that could be scrapped and would’nt be miseed, do you have any expamles?

@2. TorquilMacneil

“Hmm, so the police aren’t the brutal arm of the repressive fascist state today then?”

Complaining about the worst excesses of the police force is not the same as saying we shouldn’t have a police force at all.

In other news: there are colours other than black and white.

You’re welcome.

There is something odd going on about policing, and for the life of me I cannot understand it. Before these cuts, we have been repeatedly told that we have more police officers (in total) than ever before. Yet how do I square that with my immediate outer city neighbourhood. We are plagued by low level anti-social behaviour by youths hanging about: it is usually just noise, but occasionally becomes minor criminal damage. Sometimes serious vandalism. No police are ever seen on patrol. We are supposed to have a neighbourhood police team. Never seen them, dont know who they are, I know what they are supposed to do but as far as I am concerned the cuts have already removed them! And this is the problem. Locally the police are a joke, they will get little support against the cuts from me and my neighbours because we get nothing from the police in return – excep annual demands for the precept.

@12. Ah, you’re right. There’s not a single possible back-office job that can possibly be slashed. And the amount of fucking paperwork coppers do is impossible to cut. Instead coppers must monitor height, race, sex, width, transgender or nay, and all the bollix one can think of. Anything else would be a travesty of justice.

Before you start your sneering, ordinary decent common sense tells us there is more paperwork than a mobile police force can deal with. That I, an ordinary citizen, (not a policeman) have not a clue as to the accuracy to it (though I have sat at a police desk, waiting for some of its backlog to be cleared so I could deal with a real issue) is an example of its stupidity.

In short; cut the paperwork, cut the back-office full-sop, then cut front-line officers in proportion. If they are down to spend half their hours on paperwork – slash the paperwork, then cut the paybill in half.

Perhaps @JonhPRied [sic], having been on the smug haute bourgeois smash-up on Saturday, know all your rights from A-Z and can inform us as to why a copper should piss away 6 hours on papers, rather than just cracking you on the head with a truncheon in Oxford Circus to serve you smug middle-class leftards right, and carrying on his shift as needed?

There are no doubt places where back-room support services could be organised more efficiently. That goes for front-line tasks too. But this is just a trivial truism for any organisation.

Far from being a “trivial truism”, this is where process re-engineering starts. The private sector is constantly making itself more efficient in this way. There is no reason why the public sector should not do the same.

“If you sack a back-office worker whose job needs doing, you end up diverting someone from the front-line to do it. The net result is a cut in front-line services.

Indeed I can remember when the fashion was the other way round. Backroom staff were recruited in order to free up front-line staff, so they could spend more time facing the public rather than doing paperwork.”

Yep. Not rocket science, is it? And what could be more wasteful than paying a trained police officer, or nurse, or teacher £20 an hour to do work that an admin assistant could do for £10?

Unfortunately, “we should be spending our money on more police officers/nurse/teachers, not on bureaucrats” is an easy sell. It’s this sort of thing that demonstrates the sad necessity of spin doctors – if the Tories are putting out a press release that reads “Success! Fewer bureaucrats, more nurses”, Labour need to put one out that reads “Scandal! Nurses now spend 20% more time on paperwork”.

@14 Not sure what constabualry your from, I knw that undfortunatly some safernighbourhood teams aren’t proactive at all It depends say theres a dozen tower blocks and 2 esttes plus one lots of local shops in one safer neighbourhood area that area might only be 6 square miles, then there might be one next door thats full of smei deatched houses and say 4 junior schools, that area might be 10 square miles and both SNT’s have 3pc’s 2 pcso’s and a Sergeant, it aslo dpeends on the avearge age of the people in that SNT some have lots of oaps. and htey concentrate on stopping burlars pretending to coemread the gas meter and commit burglaires that way, some council estate if teh P’cS just go in ,in shifts walk around all the tiem ,thats stops Kids from other estates coming on their bycycles to drive around all the time, Other SNTs working with neighbourhood watch and stop robberies at local shops,
now In London Boris said theres not so many crimes in outer london I’ll take the SNT polcie to inner london, and hten he took them all on the Buses and trains,actually this took form toen centres ,but it stopped so many stabbings on the Buses,
regarding paper work,theres thing that prevent police after arrest getting on with it, How long the queue is in custody,is theri an aporpriate translator ,adult, Even wih human rights and no queue, the polce can get someone into custody and out within an hour and a half,
not sure the thing about bashing police up was directed at me for, I was apolice oficerto 10 years ago and left after ayear ,i know how many police there are as a Cllr.

Parasite: “There’s not a single possible back-office job that can possibly be slashed. And the amount of fucking paperwork coppers do is impossible to cut. Instead coppers must monitor height, race, sex, width, transgender or nay, and all the bollix one can think of. Anything else would be a travesty of justice.”

Do you *seriously* think coppers really spend lots of their time on diversity monitoring? Like, you know, a similar percent of their time to the percent of cuts in police funding being enacted? Even if you axed all diversity obligations of all types and abolished all laws banning discrimination or spending any money attempting to monitor it – I am certain the difference it would make to police budgets would be basically trivial compared to the size of the cuts.

The idea that backroom services are basically just a load of crap and nothing useful is ever done behind a desk (unless, of course, it’s a private sector desk) is pernicious. Without people to organise the police force’s activities, it would very rapidly collapse. They need cars. They need buildings. They need databases. They need paper and pens. They need finance and HR, or the wages won’t get paid.

I think the main area for efficiency savings in the public sector generally is in forward planning. I’d say trying to produce a 20 or even 10 year plan or prediction for almost anything is pointless. The future is unknown, and it can’t be predicted, no matter how many studies are commissioned from expensive (and often fraudulent, to be blunt) consultants to predict it. But that choice isn’t in the hands of public sector managers; the vast majority of these things are requirements from central government, and therefore won’t be touched by the cuts. Tory ministers, just like Labour ministers, seem to like the illusion that the future can be predicted by neutral technocratic statistics, telling them what they are doing is just hunky-dory (as those studies always do).

well said jungle