Gargan was speaking at the debate on 21st Century Justice hosted by Think Tank Reform and management consultant Collinson Granton, which took place yesterday in central London.
He stressed the need for a clear strategy to speed up converging IT systems across police forces, and suggested that these improvements could reduce the need for frontline policing cuts.
Gargan said the Police National Database was an excellent example of improving police IT in partnership with the private sector.
The PNC, of course, increases police search capabilities by drawing together data from nearly 200 systems in one place. It’s managed by private sector provider Logica, and allows forces to concentrate on frontline policing.
Here’s the full text of Gargan’s speech:
“British Policing in England and Wales is good. Indeed, by global standards it is very good. We take for granted the proposition that our police will be overwhelmingly restrained, trustworthy, approachable and effective. This has helped us overturn the most basic piece of saloon bar criminology: namely that crime goes up in a downturn.”
“Last year, the British Crime Survey saw criminality levels fall to their lowest since 1989 but, just as the service has reached new heights of effectiveness, attention has turned away from that measure of success towards measures of efficiency.”
“This shift was not immediately welcome to a service that is historically focused on performance over productivity. The ‘examination question’ for chief officers has changed quickly. In a period of 18 months, the presumption has gone from one of reduced growth to budgets, to reductions of four to twelve per cent and more.”
Taking money out of policing
“There are many ways of taking money out of policing. We must do so quickly, but the challenge is also to do so intelligently. Individually, forces have already achieved a great deal but, collectively as a service, we do not have the most impressive track record in this respect.”
“Inefficiency is built in to a system where 43 forces deliver the full range of policing services through structures that are essentially replicated 43 times. Indeed, the current focus on efficiency risks being replicated – and expensively – 43 times over.”
“This disjointed approach to cost reduction has prevented us from achieving true economies of scale that come from doing some, and indeed more things once and at a national level.”
“Take police spending on ICT, for example. Costing up to GB pound 1.4 billion, it represents over 10% of our total spend on policing: the per capita cost being roughly double what one might hope to see in a comparable technical field-based occupation.”
“Attempts at convergence have been undermined by parochialism in forces and a lack of credible delivery from the centre. Yet improvements in police ICT, by accelerating an existing long-term trend towards convergence, could reduce the need for cuts on the front line.”
Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill
“Passage of the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill will deliver greater levels of accountability, but the pushing back of accountability to the local level can be balanced by a consolidation and aggregating up of functions where expensive local variation is not simply unjustifiable, but actually hampers the delivery of our service.”
“Hamstrung by what one Home Office official describes as “the narcissism of small differences”, police forces have little to show for four years of collaboration in terms of hard cash savings. There’s little to suggest that we will see a step change without stronger encouragement, incentivisation or mandation from the centre.”
“We need demarcation, and quickly. One of the reasons that collaboration between forces never realised its full savings potential has been the almost complete absence of a clear strategy about who should collaborate with whom, in what activities and for what purpose.”
“To move forward now, a clear steer is required from the ministerial level. I can remember witnessing my first negotiation between a police commander and the referee at a football match: ‘The green bit’s yours Ref, and the rest of it’s mine’ said the chief superintendent. From that moment onwards, everybody knew where they stood.”
“Our efforts to make the CSR savings from across the police service would benefit from similarly simple clarity for those charged with developing successor arrangements to the NPIA and other elements of the national landscape. A clear strategy is called for, detailing the level at which policing services are to be delivered and supported by credible empowered organisations with a mandate for delivery.”
“This will provide us with the best possible opportunity of mitigating the impact of CSR and maintaining the best police service in the world.”
