Public Accounts Committee: Financial pressures are undermining confidence in the police

- Public confidence ‘severely dented’ as forces reprioritise work in response to funding cuts

- The Home Office needs to improve its understanding of the demands on police – and act on it

- The police funding formula must be reviewed urgently and replaced as soon as possible

REPORT SUMMARY

Funding for police forces is down by nearly a fifth since 2010-11 and there are nearly a fifth fewer officers and staff. Inevitably there are consequences and forces are under increasing strain.

Forces cannot do everything and are prioritising their work by cutting back in some areas, such as neighbourhood policing meaning fewer officers on the street.

Public confidence in the police is declining and officers’ personal resilience is under pressure with this reduction in visibility.

Violent crime and sexual offences have increased and forces are dealing with more incidents which are not crime related, at the same time as coping with fewer frontline staff. Forces are feeling the pressure of ‘cost shunting’ as cuts to other areas of public spending, such as health, are passed onto policing because it is so often the first line of response.

Policing by consent relies on public confidence and this is being severely dented. Despite the pressures facing forces, it is disappointing that the Budget did not address the financial sustainability of police forces, particularly in relation to neighbourhood policing which has borne the brunt of cuts. 

At a time when funding is tight, the Department must make tough choices about its priorities for policing. But it is not showing strategic leadership of the policing system and has acted too slowly in response to known financial sustainability problems.

It does not have a national picture of demand for police services and so has a limited understanding of what resources forces need.

The Department’s formula for distributing funds has long been acknowledged as unfit for purpose, as this Committee reported in 2015, but has still not been updated.

In the absence of a proper formula, central government funding to local forces has been subject to crude cuts across the board, which do nothing to take account of the complexities of local circumstances. Local taxpayers are paying more to fund police services, compensating for the 30% central government cuts, while seeing less local policing.

We last looked at the sustainability of police forces in 2015 and it is depressing that the Government still has a poor understanding of the on the ground reality of its funding regime.

COMMENT FROM PAC CHAIR MEG HILLIER MP

“The ‘thin blue line’ is wearing thinner with potentially dire consequences for public safety. Public confidence and trust that the police will respond is breaking down.

“Funding reductions of nearly a fifth have placed severe strain on police forces, which have in turn been forced to cut back. The results are stark.

“The Police and Crime Commissioner for Merseyside told us that the impact of austerity had been immense, causing the loss of force-wide resources such as robbery and street-crime squads.

“In Devon and Cornwall, neighbourhood policing has been hit to the extent that the PCC believes ‘our communities do not feel safe’. The Chief Constable of Durham told us the public feel let down.

“Last week, the Chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council added her voice to those concerned about what over-stretched forces can realistically be expected to do.

“In this context it is not surprising that officers’ personal resilience is under pressure, too – not least from serving as ‘first responders’ as cuts to other public services continue to bite.

“This cannot continue. Government must show leadership and get on with fixing the flaws at the heart of its approach to policing.

“In particular the Home Office must improve its understanding of the real-world demands on police, and use this information to inform its bid for funding from the Treasury. And when it secures that funding, it must distribute it effectively.

“It is wholly unacceptable that, more than three years after accepting the police funding formula needs to change, the Home Office has no firm plans to do it.

“If it is to convince police and the public that it is serious about addressing their concerns then it should set out a plan as swiftly as possible.

“The messages from communities and police forces across the UK are clear. The Government must act now.”

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

The Department’s lack of a comprehensive picture of all the demands forces face undermines its ability to know what resources forces need. The police’s main duties are to protect the public and prevent crime. But only about a quarter of the emergency and priority incidents that the police respond to are crime-related. This Committee said in 2015 that the Department should develop better information on the demand for police services across all forces. The Department has improved its understanding of how much it costs forces to respond to crime related incidents. But there remains no national comparable data on how much it costs police forces to respond to non-crime related incidents, such as responding to mental health crises. This limits the Department’s ability to make informed funding decisions. We welcome the Force Management Statements introduced by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) which should improve forces’ own understanding of the demands on their services. But it is going to take a long time before these statements provide comparable data that can be used to create a national picture of what forces need to deliver an effective service, and it has already been three years since we heard that these statements would be the answer to the issue. 

Recommendation: The Department should develop better measurements of both crime and non-crime demand for police services and use these to inform their bid for funding in the next Spending Review. HMICFRS should write to the committee setting out insights of the demands on police services drawn from the first set of Force Management Statements within three months.

Forces are finding it harder to deliver an effective service and there is a risk that problems with forces’ financial sustainability may not be spotted soon enough.Forces are operating with nearly 50,000 fewer members of staff, including 15% fewer officers, than in 2010. Forces are struggling to deliver an effective service: it is taking longer for forces to charge offences; forces are making fewer arrests; they are doing less neighbourhood policing, and public satisfaction is declining. Increasing numbers of police staff are experiencing poor mental health. Forces are selling off more of their assets to try and raise some funds for capital investment and increasingly drawing on their reserves. The Department assessed forces’ financial resilience in 2017 and is doing so again as it prepares for the government’s next Spending Review. But the Department’s approach to assessing forces’ financial sustainability does not provide the systematic and regular monitoring that we would expect. The Department relies on HMICFRS to tell it whether forces are efficient and effective, but HMICFRS does not assess forces’ financial sustainability. We are not convinced that the Department would be able to say, at any given time, how financially healthy the police system is, or which forces are most at risk of failing to deliver an effective service because of their financial position.

Recommendation: Following on from its 2017 assessment of financial resilience, the Department should immediately establish a regular review process for assessing forces’ financial sustainability. It should set out how it will use information and data collected by HMICFRS to inform its assessment. 

Even though the Department’s approach to allocating funding to Commissioners has been out-of-date and ineffective for several years, the Department still has no firm plan to change it. The formula the Department uses to calculate how much funding forces should receive from central government is out-of-date and needs reforming. The Department accepted this in 2015, describing it as detached from the real demands on policing. The Department did start some work to review the funding formula, but that work stopped in early 2017. Now, more than three years after accepting that the formula needed to be changed, the Department has no firm plans in place for actually doing so and tells us that reform of the funding formula cannot be rushed. In the absence of a proper formula, central government funding to local forces has been subject to crude cuts across the board, which do nothing to take account of the complexities of local circumstances. Currently there are huge differences in funding between areas. Local taxpayers are compensating for the 30% central government funding cuts, while seeing less policing. The Department needs to change the formula so that it takes account of all the demands on police forces, funding from local taxation, forces’ efficiency and their financial resilience. 

Recommendation: The Department must urgently commit to reviewing the funding formula, and after consultation, deploy a new funding formula as soon as practicable.

The Department takes away 11% of police funding to fund national programmes, but we are not convinced that this ‘top-slice’ on funding is used effectively and projects face a ‘cliff edge’ when funding runs out. In 2018-19, the Department ‘reallocated’ £945 million of central government funding for commissioners – a top-slice of 11% – to be spent on national priorities. Some £495 million of this top-slice funds police technology programmes, including the development of the Emergency Services Network (ESN) which, in June 2018, was at least 15 months behind schedule. Eventually, the ESN is supposed to save £200 million a year, but not before the Department spends over £1 billion extending the old Airwave system. Delays to the introduction of the ESN have cost forces money as they are having to continue spending money running the Airwave system. Other national programmes funded by top-sliced funding include Special Grants and the Police Transformation Fund. Projects funded by each of these can face a ‘cliff edge’ when national funding runs out and it is difficult to keep projects going locally out of already very stretched budgets. Furthermore, police transformation funding has not always been distributed in time for forces to use it effectively. The Department recognises that the police transformation fund has not worked as well as it should have and claims to have made improvements to the process for getting funds to forces more quickly. But we are not convinced by the Department’s approach of top-slicing transformation funding from the total police budget and then distributing it to a small number of projects, rather than allocating it to forces to manage themselves.

Recommendation: The Department should set out how it plans to improve the delivery of national projects, in particular by streamlining its processes and fully engaging with forces and others when developing support products that will be used by them.

The Department does not have its own national, long-term strategy for policing and as a result there is no clarity about how it will support forces to deliverPolicing Vision 2025. The Department says that it supports ‘Policing Vision 2025’, the strategic direction for policing set by forces themselves. It stresses the importance of that being a police-led strategy and its own role for setting national priorities, such as for cyber-security and counter-terrorism, and has no overarching strategy of its own. Yet forces do not feel that they are properly supported and want to see more serious commitment from the Department to support them in delivering the vision. No-one is suggesting that the centre should be telling forces what to do and getting involved with operational or day-to-day decision making. But it is not incompatible with the devolved model of policing and local accountability, and indeed would complement it, for the Department to have its own long-term plan for policing. Such a plan would include setting out how it will support police forces to be financially sustainable, as well as making the wider support that forces can expect clear to all. We heard of the particular example of council tax harmonisation when forces are seeking to merge, an issue that cannot be resolved locally and has prevented mergers taking place, and which is crying out for the Department to step in and show more leadership. There is also a gap in the Department always being clear which activities, such as transformation funding, are best funded at a national level and which are better channelled directly to forces.

Recommendation: Within 12 months the Department should develop its own national strategy to complement Policing Vision 2025, setting out what support forces can expect from the Department in the context of a local accountability model, which activities will continue to be undertaken and funded at a national level, and why.