BRITISH POLICE have been ordered by home secretary Alan Johnson to cut overtime pay bills by a quarter and save hundreds of millions elsewhere from their budgets in an effort to cut costs.
Unveiling the plan designed to save more than £500 million a year within five years, Mr Johnson said police spending had increased by 60 per cent – or 20 per cent in real terms – during the 12 years of Labour Party rule, but future increases on that scale would be impossible.
Police forces should group together to buy supplies, get discounts by purchasing one model of patrol car, co-operate on helicopter services, the Home Office document, Protecting the public: supporting the police to succeed, declares.
However, former chief constable of Northern Ireland Sir Hugh Orde warned that senior officers must have freedom to move money around their budgets if they were to provide the best service.
Urging politicians not to lay down specific targets for overtime cuts, Sir Hugh said overtime allowed forces to target resources in times of crisis: “It’s completely ineffectual to try and recruit a standing army to do that. We need that flexibility. We need to give chief officers the freedom to spend their money wisely, to focus on the front end of policing, and overtime is a vital part of that,” he said.
Meanwhile, the home secretary said police should patrol streets individually to increase their visibility, but he said he did not expect this to occur in neighbourhoods where officers might be in danger.
Officers in each of the 43 police forces in the UK should wear the same uniforms, rather than buying their own, while forces should also be required to buy goods and services from a Government-approved suppliers list, Mr Johnson believed.
The proposals would make it easier for some of the forces to merge, but would not require this – a move that Mr Orde, who is now head of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), has said displays a lack of leadership by politicians. “There appears to be no will across the political spectrum for mandating the big issues such as amalgamation,” said the former PSNI chief, who has taken an increasingly public role since he became president of Acpo.
Earlier this week, he warned that spending cuts will get worse: “The tail is going to be long with this recession and . . . in a few years we may be in a worse position than we are now. I don’t think we’ve seen the worst yet by any stretch.”