Scottish Government

Chapter 6 Resources

Key points in this section

• Although over £1 billion is spent on policing in Scotland, there is limited information on the current high-level costs of different operational policing activities.
• Forces are facing increasing pressure on both capital and revenue budgets, not only from current commitments such as pensions, but also through a lack of robust costing of the impact of changing expectations ( e.g. as a result of new legislation, innovations in specialist services or the introduction of new standards).
• The potential loss of ring-fenced funding through the Concordat may put further pressure on existing force budgets.
• It is therefore difficult to make informed decisions at national, regional and local levels about how police services should be prioritised and delivered.

Background

6.1 Around £1.2 billion a year is spent on policing in Scotland, divided between the eight forces, SPSA and the SCDEA.

6.2 Current funding for police forces comes partly from the Scottish Government, in the form of police grant, and partly from constituent local authorities. The overall level of grant is based on historical expenditure, i.e. previous year's budget plus a small increase. While the formula for distributing police grant between the forces has been reviewed in recent years, there has never been a systematic analysis of what resources are required to deliver a specified level of service in Scotland.

6.3 In conducting this review, we found little evidence to suggest that the high-level costs associated with different operational activities at national or force level were being identified or analysed. For example:

• there is currently no information available on how much it costs on average to arrest someone and detain them overnight in custody before a court appearance, compared to the cost of releasing them on an undertaking to appear at court the next day;
• nor does anyone know whether the average cost in Tayside is any less or more than the cost in Northern;
• we do not have the information to be able to say whether £100,000 spent on crime analysts is better at reducing crime than £100,000 spent on detectives, or what might be the optimum proportions of that sum which should be spent on each;
• we do not know whether the considerably greater unit cost of road policing officers (in terms of training, equipment and other on-costs) compared to community police officers provides a proportionate return in terms of public safety, assurance and protection; and
• critically for the purposes of this review, we do not know whether the pooling of specialist or expert personnel, for example armed support officers, between three or more forces, is more or less cost effective than having them co-ordinated from a single point with outposts at geographically strategic points across the country.

6.4 Until recently there was a similar lack of understanding about the costs of providing support services. However, since their transfer to SPSA, information on the costs of these services is now improving.

Impact of increasing demand

6.5 As discussed elsewhere in this report, there has been increasing demand for both more and increasingly sophisticated police services. However, there is little evidence that the impact of these changes, whether from implementing new legislation for example or from introducing innovative technical services, is properly costed either at national or force levels.

6.6 While forces are to be congratulated for managing these changes within existing budgets, this has led to increasing financial pressure on both their revenue and capital budgets. We received differing views from forces on the extent to which their current resources were sufficient to meet expected service demands.

6.7 Even without significant changes in demand, forces would be facing continuing financial pressures as a result of current commitments, including those arising from pensions and training requirements. These will undoubtedly be accentuated by prevailing macro-economic circumstances.

6.8 In our workshops forces also spoke of increasing pressures on their capital budgets and, in particular, on managing their property assets (the police estate), many of which need to be upgraded and/or are no longer fit for purpose.

6.9 In addition, through the Concordat with local government, the ring-fencing of grants paid to local authorities by the Scottish Government was largely removed. As forces receive part of their funding from local authorities, they will therefore have to compete with other local government services for a share of these monies. They will also need to demonstrate to police authorities/boards and community planning partnerships that the funding they require is being used to best effect to achieve agreed local outcomes.

6.10 The current governance and funding arrangements, and the absence of any regular national mechanism for reviewing police resources, has resulted in forces tackling similar demands in different ways. One example of this was highlighted in Audit Scotland's report on police call management, ¹² which found 25 different ICT systems being used to manage calls to the police across the country. The result has been a lack of integration between ICT systems which prevents information being passed between the different internal systems and limits opportunities for forces to share expertise.

6.11 The Scottish Government, individual forces, and police authorities/boards are aware of the information gaps and financial pressures highlighted above, and work is now underway to address some of these:

• The Scottish Government is working with forces to develop a procedure for consistently and robustly gathering information on the costs of different policing activities - known as activity analysis. However, this has already taken a number of years to gain momentum.
• In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, forces are working together to implement a new police objective analysis, which will gather higher level cost information - it would seem sensible for Scottish forces to consider this approach as part of the work we are recommending on police costs.
• Some forces, for example Grampian, are now beginning to incorporate business analysis into their strategic assessment through the NIM process.

6.12 However, there are further areas in which we believe a more detailed consideration of costs is required:

• the ongoing national analysis of capacity and capability, e.g. through the organised crime group mapping exercise and MICDU, needs to be aware of the costs of current provision and future options;
• the current and future financial impact on forces and their CPP partners from the reduction in certain types of crime, if any, needs to be understood; and
• the financial impact on individual forces of implementing common standards across Scotland needs to be estimated.

6.13 Without robust information it is difficult to make informed decisions at national, regional or local levels, such as the following:

• whether the total amount spent on policing is sufficient to meet current demands;
• what the most cost-effective options are for delivering specialist services; and
• how community planning partnerships should prioritise their collective resources locally to achieve outcomes agreed through their SOAs.

Conclusion

6.14 Identifying resource and cost information does not mean that these factors are all that should be taken into consideration in making decisions about, for instance, the balance between generalist and specialist policing. Other, sometimes less quantifiable but perhaps equally important influences need to be taken into account. These might include, for example, the relevance of services to local circumstances ( e.g. specialist hill search and rescue capability or motorway policing) or current local partnership service provision, or critical mass, or the relationship of the service under consideration to core policing purpose. However, we do emphasise that none of these other factors can be put into proper perspective without a shared understanding of the broad overall comparative costs of resources.