Nottinghamshire Police Authority

Impact of the Funding Cuts - 13/06/2011

The Funding Position
Nottinghamshire Police Authority and Police Force need to make savings of approximately £42.3 from the £200m budget over the next four years. Of this, £23.3m needs to be found before March 2013, while a further £8.0m must be saved by March 2014 and another £11.0m by the end of March 2015.

Thanks to advance planning changes are already taking place to help us achieve these cuts while continuing to drive up performance. All our plans focus on protecting the frontline and targeting the work of our support staff to improve efficiency and value for money.

What is changing?
We have already said that in the future policing will have to be delivered differently. There will be fewer officers, fewer staff and indeed fewer buildings and vehicles across Nottinghamshire and Nottingham City. However, these measures alone will not deliver the necessary savings, so we are making changes to the way the force is structured which will improve local policing and cut costs.

Divisional Changes – Four become two
From April 2011 we will move from four operational policing divisions to two. “City” Division boundaries are unchanged while a new “County” division will be responsible for policing the rest of the county.

The new structure will enhance neighbourhood policing and performance and, with our partners, we will deliver a truly localised policing service. The change will also remove management layers, cutting costs without negative impact on frontline services.

Workforce Changes
As approximately 80% of our budget is spent on people it is inevitable that there will be reductions in the number of people in the workforce.

A freeze on recruitment, redundancy schemes and the use of Regulation A19 which requires police officers (who cannot be made redundant) with 30 years pensionable service to retire have all been introduced to help us cut the number of staff.

We anticipate that by March 2012, we will have 214 fewer support staff and 144 fewer officers.

Overtime costs will be cut, saving approximately £0.5million during 2011-12, while officers will make greater use of new technology to save time and administration.

Managing the Demand for Services
Management programmes are improving the way we respond to calls for assistance, helping the right people to be in the right place at the right time. This will cut costs and improve performance.

Police Premises
A recently completed review of the Nottinghamshire Police estate has shown that some stations and contact points are poorly used by the public, expensive to maintain and not suitable for modern day policing. The Police Authority has approved plans to close a number of police contact points across the county in favour of shared locations. These will be highly visible to the public and more cost efficient to maintain such as shops and local authority premises.

In addition, we will review opening times, making sure that at least one station in every local authority district is open each day from 8am – 8pm.

Police Vehicles
A review of police vehicles will see cut backs in the number of vehicles owned or hired by the Force.

Centralised departments
Centralisation of various departments will see a streamlined approach to service delivery. The Finance and Corporate Development teams will be merged and there will be a smaller, centralised HR department.

Working with Partners
There are plans in place to develop the ways in which we work with our neighbouring forces and partners to drive out financial efficiencies and deliver performance improvements.

Looking ahead
We will continue to review key areas of force business, looking at processes and systems to bring lower costs. This will include departments such as operational support (firearms, helicopters and horses), force crime and intelligence and the criminal justice service to identify how we can improve performance and reduce expenditure.

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