Value for money

Our strategy is to provide useful information on Value for Money that will encourage police to improve and will inform the public. Our approach is to provide information on:

• Responsiveness of police priorities and resources with the public need
• Workforce organisation and deployment
• Benchmarking using comparative information
• Plans the police have in place.

The information will be obtained from Value for Money Profiles and Inspections.

Where are the police?

Explaining HM Inspectorate of Constabulary's Value for Money Profiles

HMIC has asked the public what they most want to know about police. The answer is clear. They want to know where nearly 160,000 full officers and police community support officers (PCSOs) actually are, and what they do.

They also want to know how the 43 forces in England and Wales spend more than £13 billion and whether they're getting a good deal for their taxes.

This part of HMIC's My Police website offers a 'Value for Money Profile' for each force showing how they use their people and spend their money to deliver local policing. It shows that costs and performance can vary, sometimes widely. Charts showing these variations can be found in police force variations in staffing.

On My Police, the public can see how well their police are performing on crime, how worried residents are about anti-social behaviour, and compare their force with similar forces.

They can then use the profiles to compare what they get for their money with the 'deal' the public get in other areas. This will matter to you if you can see that a similar force area, with comparable levels of budget, has lower crime rates.

As a member of the public, you can't visit a 'policesupermarket.com' site to shop for an alternative police service. But you can ask why your police authority and force seems to be spending relatively more and looks like it is providing relatively less. If enough people ask why, then the issue will be hard to ignore.

What can the profiles tell you?

Overall there are over 243,000 police staff in the 43 forces - around 143,800 full officers, 16,500 PCSOs and 82,190 civilian support staff. Staff account for about 80 percent of all police spending.

No forces are exactly alike, but we can compare those facing similar policing challenges using, for example, their average cost per head or their average crime rates. If your force is outside the average - perhaps because it has a low number of officers or because its costs in some areas are particularly high - there may be a good reason. But you are entitled to ask why.

The profiles show members of the public and the police service how many officers and civilian staff their force has, how this has changed over time and what they are working on.

They show the national averages and allow people to compare their force with these figures. The national averages indicate that over a third of officers and civilian staff are working in the community, for example in neighbourhood teams, responding to 999 calls or undertaking community safety duties such as crime prevention or working with schools.

How officers and staff spend their time:

47% Aiding the public

• 36% Working in the community
• 4% Policing roads
• 7% Taking 999 calls and tasking (control room)

31% Dealing with criminals

• 13% Investigating crime (for example CID)
• 4% Specialist functions (such as air support, firearms, dogs)
• 4% Gathering intelligence
• 2% Processing forensic evidence
• 5% Preparing cases for court (criminal justice)
• 3% Holding people in custody

22% Providing support

• 8% Operational support
• 11% Business support
• 2% Training
• 1% Other (such as catering and stores/supplies)

The profiles show that there are wide variations in costs and the use of staff between forces. Some forces have:

• more than three times as many HR staff per 100 total staff as others
• more than twice as many control room staff per 1,000 residents as others
• more than three times as many PCSOs per 1,000 residents as others
• more than twice as many community officers per 1,000 residents as others.

Informing the public and driving improvement in policing

The profiles work on various levels, but their main purpose is to pose questions that lead to improvements. They enable:

• members of the public to ask the leaders of their police about the choices they have made and where their police are
• Police Authorities and Police Forces to investigate reasons for differences in cost and performance, enabling them to take action to get a better deal for the public
• HMIC to focus its future inspections in the right areas

The profiles are being published now because HMIC believes the drive to achieve better value for money has to accelerate in the current financial environment and these profiles will shine a light on the choices being made by forces and authorities spending taxpayers' money.

Health warning

This data is supplied by the police forces themselves. Collecting and producing the information relies on individuals. The material in the value for money profiles has been checked more than once with forces, but you should be aware that there may still be some errors. For a fuller explanation of the sources and quality of the data, see 'Some data is better than others - a discussion of data quality in HMIC's Value for Money profiles'.

By examining the variation in costs and use of resources and their effects on delivering effective policing we will ultimately be able to determine whether more can be achieved with the money available to police forces.

Context is important

The information in the profiles is meant to trigger questions. But you can only reach answers, and truly assess a force in the round, if you also understand the context in which it polices its area. There are often good reasons for differences in costs or staffing levels: for example some forces may contract out a particular function such as custody or IT. (You can check whether this is the case for some functions by looking at the Supplies and Services costs on page 7.) And particular local circumstances may explain different crime rates or patterns. The issue is usually whether these are sufficient to explain the scale of the difference.

It is also vital to understand that different policing environments create different demands. Some forces undertake national functions which benefit everybody. For instances, the Metropolitan Police Service plays a key role in co-ordinating counter-terrorist investigations. Existing financial returns used in the profiles do not separate the cost of national policing, but the staffing analysis does show those staff assigned to local policing and those assigned to national functions.

Be warned, but don't be deterred

Be aware (especially if you're tempted to hit the print button!) that each profile contains around 45 pages and 150 charts.

It is a substantial amount of information. But don't be daunted. You just need to decide the areas you're interested in and use the index and content page to find your way around the profiles. Each page has a short explanation and simple bar charts are used, with each bar representing a force. The force whose profile you have selected will be highlighted in black, with other peer group forces highlighted in blue and the rest in light blue, if you have selected a comparison against all forces.

There are two parts to each force's profile; the first part compares the selected force with all forces in England and Wales and the national average. The second part compares the same information with its most similar group (MSG) of forces - its 'peers' - and the peer average. The purpose of the MSGs is to try and compare forces with similar demographics which helps to explain differences in crime levels. The purpose of the national comparison is to show the most similar forces set against the national picture. Another reason is that some measures depend on the size of the force, rather than local demographics. The numbers of business support staff, for example, will depend on the number of total staff.

Looking at rows of numbers is hard work, so we have organised related bar charts into a tree-style format. Bar charts showing totals are on the left, with branches leading to more bar charts showing information broken down progressively from left to right.

We have done the sums for you

Each bar chart has a line across it indicating the average performance or cost, so you can see if your force is above or below. And we have done most of the sums for you, so you can see the impact of any differences from the average:

• How many extra crimes are there as result of higher than average crime rates?
• How many more crimes are solved?
• What is the extra cost?
• Are crimes falling faster or more slowly than the average?

Your forces

You'll find the 43 individual force profiles in the Value for Money Profiles section, along with a User's guide to HMIC's Value for Money profiles to help you read them. Browse, read, be informed and, hopefully, enjoy.

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