Chair’s Opening

We are proud of the progress we have jointly made with Humberside Police to improve the safety of our communities; providing strong, visible and accessible neighbourhood teams supported by high quality investigation and response teams. We are here to serve the local people of the Humberside Police area and have always worked hard to deliver policing that meets the needs of our local communities.

However, while we have always been in a strong financial position to deal with the day to day issues of policing, as we approach 2011/12 and the years beyond, we now have some difficult financial decisions to make. Government has called for significant reductions in costs to all public services, including police forces. Changes will have to be made and there will be difficult choices to make as to how we deliver policing services in the future. Before we consider any changes we want to make sure we have listened, and made sure we are as informed as possible about what the public want from their police force in the future. Although we are already well advanced in planning to meet these challenges, we want to do this in a controlled way which will allow us to reduce budgets while ensuring we maintain the quality of policing service required by local people.

That is why your views and opinions are so important and we want to hear what you have to say before we make difficult financial decisions and take any steps towards making changes. Please therefore take the opportunity to contribute now, by either completing the questionnaire on our website http://www.humberside-pa.org.uk/policing-in-the-21st-century-have-your-say-/ or, if you would prefer a paper copy to complete and send back to our freepost address, contact Gill Pike on 01482 334879 or email gill.pike@humberside.pnn.police.uk. All questionnaires have to be completed and returned by 31 October 2010.

This newsletter contains some important and useful financial information. I hope you will find it useful when sending us your views. I look forward to hearing from you.

Cllr Chris Matthews
Chair, Humberside Police Authority.
 

Budget Considerations and Income - Funding

The ‘Police Grant’ and ‘Revenue Support Grant’ and ‘Non Domestic Rates’ are all received as general grants from central government every year, ‘Council Tax’ is raised locally through the council tax precept, ‘Income’ is generated by providing policing services for a fee and other miscellaneous income. The breakdown is as follows:

Police Grant - £69.994m

Revenue Support Grant - £7.833m

Non Domestic Rates - £53.941m

Council Tax - £48.158m

Income - £10.067m

Use of Reserves - £0.992

Other - £3.675m

Total - £194.660m

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Budget Considerations and Income - Expenditure

‘Police Officer’ and ‘Support Staff’ expenditure includes salaries and associated staffing costs, ‘Other Employee Costs’ includes provisions for pensions and the ‘Other Expenditure’ takes account of all other costs associated with running a large organisation, such things as utilities, building costs, travel, fleet costs, stationery, etc. The expenditure is as follows:

Police Officers - £89.438m

Support Staff - £53.538m

Other Employee Costs - £20.649m

Other Expenditure - £31.035m

Total - £194.660m
 

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Expenditure - Pillars of Policing

Neighbourhood Policing costs include all Neighbourhood Policing Teams, PCSOs, etc. Incident Response covers those team that respond to calls for service and Investigations include specialist CID teams who investigate crimes ranging from shop thefts and house burglaries to murders and major crimes. Protective Services includes the police operational support and specialist teams such as the helicopter, dogs and horses, firearms and traffic sections. Business Support includes all the centralised business support functions such as training, performance development unit, etc. The percentages spent on these areas of business are:

Business Support - 31%

Incident Response - 23%

Investigations - 22%

Neighbourhood Policing - 14%

Protective Services - 10%

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What will happen next?

Decisions from the Comprehensive Spending Review will have an impact on the type and level of service that Humberside Police will deliver in the future, however, we do not want to make ‘knee-jerk’ decisions on service delivery without holding extensive discussions with local people via this carefully timed programme of public consultation. We will be using our Citizens Panel and running focus groups with various sections of the wider community, local business community, elected members from each of the Local Authorities and through our website.

This programme will run between now and the end of December with final decisions being made between January and March 2011. The things that really matter at the moment are the views and opinions you give us that will help shape how we advise the Chief Constable as part of the decision making process.
 

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