Too many police chiefs? - A review of police strength and costs in England & Wales 2010

KEY AREAS FOR REFORM

The individual force breakdowns for all of the figures are contained within this report. We were shocked to see the police staff costs running at £2.7 Billion and their overtime bill of 63.2 million… The recently published think tank report conveniently failed to mention it, merely saying that police staffing levels had risen at disproportionate rate compared to the front line resources. A whitewash if ever there was one. Worth bearing in mind that their work on this would have started under Alan Johnsons labour watch, no doubt providing back up for his proposals to reduce the overtime budget.

The research behind this report began with a look at basic salaries, then working backward from the HMIC declarations that including overtime. The overtime splits were established by force, police & police staff and taking all of the above into account, including just over £2 billion for pension contributions, there was still a black hole of around 500 million. How much of this is swallowed up by the secret bonus payments to Chief Officers and SMT’s?

Whilst the HMIC material is useful, it fails to show the overview then break it down line by line. They restrict themselves to saying “force costs were £13.5 billion of which 80% is staff costs” – The rest they leave up to enquirers to dig in to discover the detail behind the headlines.

HMIC returns tell us:-

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143,834 police officers 82,181 police staff 16,503 PCSO’s

When we looked at the Chief & Senior Pay it made interesting reading:-

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SMT Salary (net) = £198 million (4.5% of basic salary totals)

ACPO & SMT occupy 2.5% of strength, yet take 5.1% of basic salary (£224 million) ACPO salaries are equivalent to 957 PC’s 675 Sergeants or 532 Inspectors

SMT (Ch Supt – Ch Insp) salaries are equivalent to 7405 PC’s 5218 Sergeants or 4116 Inspectors ACPO & SMT salaries are equivalent to 8363 PC’s 5893 Sergeants or 4648 Inspectors

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221 ACPO ranks (0.15% of strength) [Yet the ACPO site says there are 349?] ACPO Salary (net of bonuses & perks) = £25.6million (0.6% of basic salary totals) 3,408 SMT ranks (2.38% of strength)

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