Reducing costs in policing

25 November 2010 by Rod McLaren

Two stories last week on reducing costs.

1. Changes to stop forms will save 800,000 hours

[Home Office press release:] New proposals laid in parliament today will save an estimated 800,000 hours of police time each year.

The first steps to scrap the stop and account form used by police – and save an estimated 450,000 hours of time each year – were taken today. In future, seven items will need to be recorded [on stop and search forms] rather than twelve. This will save around 350,000 hours of time each year.

In 2008-9 there were 2.2m stop and accounts and 1.5m stop and searches. If 350,000 hours saved by recording 5 fewer items in 1.5m stop and search forms, then frontline policing is spending about 3 minutes per recordable item on a stop and search form. This gives vendors selling forms software (eg Helimedia, Airwave) a very rough baseline metric to beat in order to show cost savings to forces.

2. Police forces using Airwave texting rather than radio to save money

Airwave’s excess charging for going over the contracted monthly radio minutes are high, so forces are encouraging officers to use Airwave’s SDM messaging (like text messages) as a cheaper alternative.

Officers in one rural force have been told that a penalty charge of up to £2 a second is imposed as soon as the number of calls they make goes over a pre-arranged limit.

According to Dorset Police Federation chairman Clive Chamberlain, the punitive levy has led to a series of cost-cutting measures [...] ‘It was imperative to have a secure communications system. But it has come at a very high price. The advice we’re being given from the top is to send texts as much as possible because it’s going to cost a lot less money.

‘There have been a series of briefings at which a senior officer has said it costs Dorset £2 a second whenever we go over the limit. We are being told that texting more has the potential to save tens of thousands of pounds because it costs only 4p to send 1,000 texts.’

Airwave’s comment is that “£2/second” doesn’t tell the whole story, and are presumably prevented contractually from explaining the mitigating details. Update: Airwave has rebutted the story’s details, stating that each [radio] transmission costs less than 1.5 (one and a half) pence – though that’s still expensive compared to some tariffs on commercial mobile networks.

As we’ve discussed before, Airwave isn’t the only mobile platform running across UK policing – BlackBerry are doing well and non-Airwave Windows Mobile have had a little success. The opportunity is for mobile platform/software vendors to displace Airwave text messaging with services that are richer, faster and cheaper because they run on off the shelf hardware (BlackBerry et al) on commercial networks (3G).

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Disclosure: Airwave are a customer; we also develop and sell our own software products for police services in the UK, mostly on the BlackBerry platform.

UK policing spending plan 2010-2015 MoD Green Paper on Equipment, Support and Technology