Thin blue line to tread

8 Aug 11
The police face budget cuts and a major service reform, combined with ever-rising demand, yet public awareness of their plight is likely to remain low
By Alison Scott | 1 August 2011

The police face budget cuts and a major service reform, combined with ever-rising demand, yet public awareness of their plight is likely to remain low


Police forces and police authorities face the twin pressures of managing funds in an era of cuts and a major reorganisation. This puts finance practitioners in the front line of the national debate over the future funding and structures of public services.

If parliamentary inquiries are any measure of how busy a public service is, then the police service is clearly one of the more hard-pressed. Recent inquiry subjects for the Commons home affairs select committee include several that touch directly or indirectly on police affairs, including finance, police and crime commissioners, specialist operations, counter-terrorism and the work of the chief inspector of constabulary.

The same committee is currently holding an inquiry into the government proposals first set out in Policing in the twenty-first century: reconnecting police and the people and now included in the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill. The MPs are assessing the effect the changes would have on the efficiency, economy and effectiveness of the police.

In the Lords, peers have been considering and amending the Bill and have voted against a key aspect – the proposal for police authorities to be replaced with directly elected police and crime commissioners.

With the tradition of non-political policing so well established in this country, there is a danger that all the challenges facing police forces and authorities today will not receive the attention they deserve. This is even more likely given the service’s admirable reputation for coping with limited funds while meeting a limitless public appetite for more (and more visible) policing.

Cuts in funding are causing real difficulties for all public services. But the public perception of the police service’s role in the era of cuts is likely to be distorted when they see officers handling demonstrations by workers or service users from other parts of the public sector. Few will stop to think how the service itself is coping with its reduced funding.

CIPFA’s police panel is aware of a sense that this year will be relatively manageable, with work being done on the efficiency front, for example. But the final three years of the Comprehensive Spending Review period will involve much planning to ensure affordable spending in the long term.

This, it seems, will have to take place at the same time as finance officers in forces and authorities prepare for and implement the changes proposed in the Bill. In particular, each force area would have to have both a police and crime commissioner and a police and crime panel.

These changes would create some real challenges for financial management and much of the detail remains to be determined.

For example, current proposals include the creation of two new ‘corporations sole’ – one under the chief constable, the other under the police and crime commissioner. Both would have their own chief finance officers, accounts and budgets. The police and crime commissioner would set the police precept, which, in practice, would be spent by the chief constable.

At present, the only detail to have been confirmed is that the chief constable will be responsible for employing all police officers. It remains to be seen whether two sets of accounts – and, hence, two audits – would be needed or whether arrangements for group accounts could remove some of this potential duplication.

Similarly, it is unclear whether duplication can be avoided in financial regulations, internal audit and financial reporting systems.

The Bill as currently drafted has two chief finance officers, one reporting to the chief constable and one to the police and crime commissioner.

The potential for confusion and disconnection between the governance arrangements of both organisations is clear.

In a situation where there is tension between a chief constable and a police and crime commissioner, there is a real danger that the CFO could be dragged into a political argument, particularly when the tension is over budgets.

A draft protocol suggests that the police and crime commissioner would have supremacy in such areas, but this has yet to be encoded in regulation, so it will be some time before the practical implications emerge.

It is vital to address these issues, otherwise the potential to raise public awareness of the challenges faced by their local police force in managing on limited resources will be lost among internal arguments between the two separate organisations.

Alison Scott is assistant director for local government at CIPFATransparent

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