How Workforce Optimisation Can Safeguard UK Police Officer Jobs and Service Levels
By Karl Judd, Business Development Manager of GMT Corporation
At a Skegness Town Council meeting earlier this year, councillors questioned the town’s police inspector on how his staff would maintain policing levels in the wake of significant staffing cuts. At the meeting, Inspector Terry Ball responded, “I would like to have more staff, but it is accepted that we need to make reductions, but that does not mean that we are going to get a reduction in service—maybe we can give you even more than before” (Skegness Standard).
To Inspector Ball’s point, in many cases it should be possible for the police service in England and Wales to deliver the majority of the savings required by the UK government without losing staff from the front line and even improving public service at the same time. By deploying the same proven workforce optimisation technologies that many organisations use today, police forces can realise significant budget savings by making resources more efficient—as Home Secretary Theresa May has previously suggested.
By 2015, the UK government is planning to cut its £11B funding of the police by 20 per cent. Three-quarters of the total police budget is spent on staffing costs, similar to the contact centre industry. According to official statistics, more than £381M per year has been paid every year for the past five years in police overtime alone. More efficient deployment of officers can have a significant impact on overtime expense. An independent review of police pay and conditions has recommended huge cuts in staff bonuses, including savings of £60M a year in overtime, but with these cuts come fears that up to 28,000 jobs will be lost.
As enshrined in our law, police officers cannot be made redundant, but this law gave rise to introducing more inflexible contracts, forcing early retirement upon some of the country’s most experienced police officers, creating redundancy upon civilian staff and, ultimately, running the risk of jeopardizing citizen safety.
Having successfully deployed workforce optimisation technology in the diverse public and private sector environments, including UK police forces, bank branches and contact centres, we helped these organisations greatly reduce their costs through improved staff utilisation with no degradation and a marked improvement in client service.
My experience suggests that the same cost savings and efficiency gains in the contact centre can be true in an operational policing environment. Why? The starting point for such technology is to understand what demand is and, subsequently, to forecast accurately when such demand will arrive throughout the day, week and year. Some sceptics have said this is not possible, but we have proven that, given sufficient volume, you can consistently forecast such demand at accuracy in excess of 95 per cent and even up to 98 per cent. Without such an understanding, how can responsive organisations, such as the police, start to plan their associated resource profile?
It is the legacy and rigid working patterns followed by the police that currently determine how many officers are available to the public; they are not driven by demand. This can result in front-line overstaffing during the week (resulting in unnecessary paid hours) and understaffing at busy periods, for example, Friday and Saturday nights (resulting in reliance on costly overtime – or equally problematic ‘time-off-in-lieu’ – to fix the hole).Workforce optimisation technology can provide a picture of ‘when’, ‘where’, ‘how many’ and ‘what type’ of staff are required to support ‘demand’ from the public. Such an optimisation of police resources could save the government millions of pounds whilst safeguarding the number of officers on the front-line as well as in other vital non-front-line and civilian roles.
As public sector budgets are significantly reduced, UK police forces are under unprecedented pressure to maintain appropriate service levels. However, by following a more demand-driven staffing model as used in other organisations, the police can make more efficient use of their operational resources—reducing costs whilst safeguarding service levels and jobs.
ABOUT GMT
GMT’s workforce management and performance optimisation solutions create competitive advantage by enabling companies to improve customer service and sales across their enterprise, while decreasing their labour expenses. GMT serves enterprise clients across multiple vertical industries worldwide, including Eurostar, Active Health Partners, Ingenico, West Midlands Police, Contact 1-2-1 and Yarra Valley Water. GMT is privately held with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, and offices in the U.K. and Australia. For more information, visit www.gmt.com.