New government, same funding pressures
Back in March 2024, Leapwise warned about Austerity 2.0. (1) We set out how tight public finances would mean stagnant budgets for many Whitehall departments, even as service demands continue to increase. For policing, there would be no financial uplift to accompany the restoration of 20,000 officers across England and Wales.
Unfortunately, even with a new government, our assessment hasn’t changed. At the election, both main parties competed to show who had the tightest hold on the purse strings: spending commitments were deliberately modest. There was, according to the IFS, (2) a ‘conspiracy of silence’ about the parlous state of public finances. Outside of health, most services will continue to be squeezed.
At the local level, this means police forces will need to make further tough choices about spending. And they will have to do this while facing a more active Home Office pushing them to deliver on Labour’s ambitious missions around public safety – such as halving serious violent crime. So, how can forces find savings once again?
What not to do
Our core message is simple: salami slicing is not a feasible answer. Forces cannot deal with renewed financial pressures by making quick cuts to areas they consider non-business critical.
Policing has tried – far too often in recent years – to salami slice its way to financial sustainability. In some cases, necessary savings have been delivered by making quick decisions to cut budgets in ‘non-core’ areas, including reducing contractual spend, and staff in people, finance and technology functions. But after years of this approach, there’s simply no more fat left to trim.
Targeting enabling functions or roles which the public don’t see isn’t an effective model. Cutting back-office staff means police officers end up stuck handling tasks away from the frontline – policing often fails to recognise that saving money and saving officers’ time are equally important. Cutting vetting units creates a higher risk of misconduct scandals and lost confidence. Cutting training or HR means poorer leaders and a less effective workforce. Short-term gain only guarantees long-term pain.
What is needed is a much more targeted and strategic approach, changing how forces work to deliver genuine savings that hold for the long term. This requires an end to slicing out headcount and hoping for the best.
4 paths to force-level savings
There are 4 paths that forces should explore to help them make savings:
- Manage demand
- Redesign processes and policies
- Examine structures and improve collaboration
- Look at contracts and explore ‘simple’ AI
1. Manage demand
Modern policing is defined by the complexity of its mission. As the ‘service of last resort’, policing picks up the pieces when other public bodies can’t meet their obligations. The growing focus on more complex crime types – from things like modern slavery to online offending – has only added to this. Police forces today can easily become overwhelmed with priorities, with a risk of being spread too thin.
In that context, identifying areas where demand can be reduced or deprioritised can offer a welcome relief to service pressure. For example, Humberside Police’s ‘Right Care, Right Person’ model (now being rolled out nationally) reduced mental health demand on the force, leading to 540 fewer police deployments (3) every month.
This ties into the knotty area of triage – ensuring that victims and communities get the right service that is also financially sustainable. Rapid Video Response (whereby victims report crimes via video link) appears to deliver higher charge rates (4) and better evidence for prosecutions, as well as saving officers’ time. But any triage method requires careful application to ensure that risk is being properly managed and victim needs are sufficiently considered.
Demand management is as important for enabling services as it is for the frontline. In our work with Norfolk and Suffolk Constabularies, (5) we evaluated all their in-progress change projects and identified that 32% could be stopped or paused with no frontline impact. This released 12 FTE (who were re-allocated to other organisational priorities) and resulted in £340,000 of cost avoidance.
2. Redesign processes and policies
Demand reduction isn’t always possible. Many of policing’s priorities are essential to public safety, highly complex, and should be expected to absorb significant resources. In those areas, demand management is at best only part of the puzzle.
Forces should work harder to map what these high-resource areas are and then shift towards a more granular approach. For example, if significant capacity is (rightly) spent on vetting new officers, what are the pinch points? Where is the most time absorbed in this process? With that knowledge, there’s scope for a targeted and strategic approach: identifying what processes and policies can be redesigned or rearranged to make this work less burdensome.
Having worked with several forces to make the business case for investment in process redesign capabilities we have found that in the right structures, and with the right coaching and support in-house process, improvement teams can thrive and deliver big results. It is not unusual to take 25% of time and cost out of a redesigned process – so the results are well worth the effort.
3. Fix structures and improve collaboration
Structural changes are another possible path, though this is far from straightforward. While some forces will benefit from reorganising functions or consolidating similar types of business, others may find this delivers few meaningful benefits.
Collaboration is a decidedly easier way to generate savings in forces. We’ve already talked about the close collaboration between Norfolk and Suffolk, but other forces – such as Surrey and Sussex Police – have done the same. Labour have promised to look extensively at shared services to find efficiencies so policing should expect pressure to look again at collaboration, or potentially regional structures. Yet, it is important to recognise that for every success, there is also a collaboration effort that has either struggled to get off the ground (at significant cost) or fallen apart, as in Warwickshire and West Mercia.
Broadly, we see more benefit in ensuring policing is doing things once nationally where possible. For instance, Blue Light Commercial is already delivering significant procurement savings for policing in areas like fleet and uniform. Organisations like this need to be empowered by ensuring that all forces (rather than less than half) are properly taking advantages of their ability to negotiate better deals for the public. In technology, policing needs to set out a much more consistent set of priorities for investment, convergence in its core systems, and get to grips with those incumbent vendors that are still not delivering solutions that work for the frontline or the taxpayer. Ultimately, some governance and structural change is likely to be required – and the efficiency prize is clear.
4. Explore ‘simple’ AI
There is considerable scope for savings through AI and automation – though with some important caveats. The potential of these tools is obviously vast. Many readers will have tried the latest generative applications themselves and been impressed. It’s no coincidence that private companies and public organisations are trying to integrate them into their existing systems.
But – a note of caution. We are perhaps at the ‘peak of inflated expectations’ (to use the language of the Gartner Hype Cycle (6) ) around generative AI especially. Some of the most advanced and most hyped AI applications are likely to prove extremely expensive and not implementable (as yet).
Forces may find much greater utility and, crucially, savings by exploring the less whizzy forms of AI first, exploring things like simple automation and RPA. Forces should deploy these and identify meaningful benefits. Then, with some expertise and capability developed, look to scale-up and advance from there. Shooting for the moon without the fundamentals in place may entail huge cost and disappointing returns. Small forces should be particularly modest in their ambitions.
From responsive change to cycle of transformation
In the context of Austerity 2.0, forces don’t have the luxury of taking the salami slicer approach anymore – it won’t deliver the necessary savings, but it will hamper operational effectiveness. That’s why we think forces should take a more targeted and strategic approach – aligning with the four actions outlined above.
The challenge is identifying the right opportunities and getting started quickly at a time when ‘business as usual’ demands feel enormous. We know how hard it can be to make time, but also urge any forces not thinking about drivers of long-term financial sustainability and productivity to do so. The pattern we too often see is that leaders are thinking about these options and ideas but then put off planning and design of change too long, find the work too difficult, and then default back to the traditional salami-slicing approach.
Policing and the public cannot afford for this to be the case. Which is why the efforts of forces like Thames Valley Police (7) and Norfolk and Suffolk (8) Constabularies to buck this trend are important.
Please get in touch to share what you are doing in the face of the next wave of austerity, and how to design a sustainable future.
