By Lucy Phillips
11 February 2010
Police forces will struggle to handle declining budgets unless a cross-party consensus is reached on cutting officer numbers, according to the former head of the Metropolitan Police.
Sir Ian Blair told Public Finance that policing had become ‘too expensive’ and that the make-up of the workforce should be changed to include fewer fully trained police officers. They should be replaced by cheaper community support officers and lower-paid people trained to do tasks such as forensics. A number of other officers, such as those guarding embassies, could also be replaced at a more junior level.
‘You don’t have to pay them the same rate [if] you employ them as police but they only do that job,’ he said.
Blair, who was commissioner of the Met between 2005 and 2008, cited an experiment in Guildford where CID offices had reduced the number of police officers ‘fairly dramatically’ in favour of investigative assistants ‘at a much lower cost and increased productivity’.
But the former commissioner said the changes could not be made without cross-party political agreement because ‘cutting officer numbers is seen as extremely difficult’. He called for an all-party royal commission to be set up after the election.
Blair, who was speaking to PF after giving a speech at the CIPFA World-Class Performance Symposium, also said he ‘fervently’ believed there were too many police forces across England and Wales. But he conceded the number, at 43, was unlikely to change because budgetary arrangements were ‘too complex’. He suggested a model of tiered forces, with smaller forces paying a retainer to larger ones to use resources such as a homicide squad when they needed them.
While emphasising that he was ‘not making a political point’, Blair branded Tory proposals to replace police authorities with elected individuals as ‘a bad idea’. He warned it would ‘endanger a very important aspect of British policing, which is the operational independence’.
11 February 2010
Police forces will struggle to handle declining budgets unless a cross-party consensus is reached on cutting officer numbers, according to the former head of the Metropolitan Police.
Sir Ian Blair told Public Finance that policing had become ‘too expensive’ and that the make-up of the workforce should be changed to include fewer fully trained police officers. They should be replaced by cheaper community support officers and lower-paid people trained to do tasks such as forensics. A number of other officers, such as those guarding embassies, could also be replaced at a more junior level.
‘You don’t have to pay them the same rate [if] you employ them as police but they only do that job,’ he said.
Blair, who was commissioner of the Met between 2005 and 2008, cited an experiment in Guildford where CID offices had reduced the number of police officers ‘fairly dramatically’ in favour of investigative assistants ‘at a much lower cost and increased productivity’.
But the former commissioner said the changes could not be made without cross-party political agreement because ‘cutting officer numbers is seen as extremely difficult’. He called for an all-party royal commission to be set up after the election.
Blair, who was speaking to PF after giving a speech at the CIPFA World-Class Performance Symposium, also said he ‘fervently’ believed there were too many police forces across England and Wales. But he conceded the number, at 43, was unlikely to change because budgetary arrangements were ‘too complex’. He suggested a model of tiered forces, with smaller forces paying a retainer to larger ones to use resources such as a homicide squad when they needed them.
While emphasising that he was ‘not making a political point’, Blair branded Tory proposals to replace police authorities with elected individuals as ‘a bad idea’. He warned it would ‘endanger a very important aspect of British policing, which is the operational independence’.
