News Does this make any sense to you?

[cHodAX]

BBC News - Views wanted on £134m police cuts in Greater Manchester

Ok, so GMP have had a budget cut of 4%, yet they are having to shed 25% of the workforce over the next 4 years? Now maths isn't my strong point but 4x4=16 right? Also the budget has been cut 4% annually, surely that means they need to cut 4% of expenditure and not 25% of everything?

 

[Roo Stercogburn]

Well your arithmetic assumes that there is a direct correlation between the amount paid to the workforce and the amount being cut. They might have decided that they need to keep most of the infrastructure and its associated costs but reduce manpower.

Most organisations' biggest costs are in salaries (I think).

There's also probably an element of trimming the deadwood. Goverment workers tend to be a lazy backward lot.

 

[ECA]

4% applied to which figure? If it's the 1st years, then yes 16%, if it isn't then it's less than 16%.

100>96>92.16 etc.

 

[soze]

Police Helicopters cost around £5m and cost upwards of £1.5m to run it for a year. Cars cost upwards of £30k to outfit. Add to that all the other equipment and that's where the budget goes.

It seems like soon the Police will give up on crime prevention altogether and just be there to tidy up afterwards.

 

[ford prefect]

Actually, those figures aren't exactly accurate, almost all forces have been asked to make a 4% cut per year for the next four years, they haven't been hiring front line police staff for a couple of years now, and in the next few years an awful lot of police jobs will go. I know in a lot of areas paid social service jobs are being replaced with untrained volunteers when dealing with mental health cases too.

There are a lot of very worried people out there actually. Over the past decade the police implemented a serious in-house promotion and training structure, so there are a lot of highly trained Seargents and DI's ect on this "Fast Track scheme" and they are likely to be among the first to go, so a bit of a waste in some quite specialised training really.

Also, each police force has a Major Incident Team, which is a team of really top notch investigating and interviewing officers that do all the difficult cases - Manslaughter, Murder ect. Now the MIT's go through money like there is no tomorrow - they can be paying for dozens of staff overtime for days at a time, the costs of forensics, A dedicated Crown Prosecution Service, in some cases the opening of a dedicated custody suite - the list goes on; they are having a 60% cut across the board too apparently which is very dramatic.

 

[cHodAX]

You can bet they will find plenty of money to chase software pirates down though!

 

[ford prefect]

You can bet they will find plenty of money to chase software pirates down though!

The MET yes, everyone else? Gimme a break. Most forces have like three people working their computer crimes units, and the last time I needed to get hold of them (I needed a clients facebook account taking down), no-one in Cardiff Bay Police Station (brand new monsterous privacy invading thing - police station of the future apparently) had any clue how to get hold of them or where they were based, I had to tell them. Similar story in Birmingham and Liverpool too.

 

[Raven]

I think this will hit the outsourced canteen companies hardest. With the police actually having to leave the station now and again, its going to be disastrous for their income.