Recent Bonfires - 89

It's high time we had another bonfire round-up:

Wrong kind of railway management costs us £50m+ "Civil servant failures over the West Coast rail contract will cost taxpayers “at least £50 million”, a report by MPs said today. There was a lack of leadership at the Department for Transport (DfT) and a failure to "get basic processes right" over the West Coast fiasco, the report from the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee said. The department failed to learn from mistakes made in previous projects and senior managers failed to apply common sense during the West Coast bidding process... Bob Crow, leader of the RMT transport union, said: "The stench from the fall-out of the West Coast franchise continues to hang over Britain's transport industry as it becomes clearer with every examination that the ministers responsible for this shambles could not be trusted to run a whelk stall let alone multi-billion Government contracts." (Independent 26-2-13)

Wrong kind of cop shop costs us £21m "A state-of-the-art police station is to cost taxpayers a total of £21 million over the next 30 years, even though it is closed to the public. The front desk at the station, which opened 11 years ago in a 30-year private finance deal, is shut to save costs, and has been replaced by a mobile police van in the car park for eight-hours-a-week. But police are still committed to handing over £700,000-a-year for the station at Ammanford, Carmarthenshire, South Wales. The total cost will be £21m - almost 10 times the cost of building the station. Acting Chief Constable Jackie Roberts admitted the station is 'too costly' and 'does not provide the public with value for money'. (D Mail 27-2-13)

Wrong kind of military kit costs us £6.6bn "The Ministry of Defence is squandering billions of pounds on kit and supplies it does not need while trying to save money by getting rid of troops... MPs on the Commons’ Public Accounts Committee found at least £6.6 billion of stock was either unused or over-ordered... [There are] enough spare parts for the Nimrod MR2 maritime patrol aircraft to last 54 years: the spy plane was scrapped in 2009." (D Mail 28-2-13)

Wrong kind of EU rules cost us £850k "Taxpayers in Britain are paying hundreds of thousands of pounds a year for Polish pregnant women to return to their home country and give birth, new figures reveal. Under EU law anyone living and working in Britain is entitled to free treatment in any other member state. Around 500 Poles returned to the Eastern European nation to have their babies in 2012, with the NHS footing the bill. Each birth costs the NHS £1,631, meaning the births of babies to Polish mothers cost Britain around £850,000 last year. The regulations were originally set up to ensure emergency healthcare was available between member states across the EU." (D Telegraph 25-2-13)

Wrong kind of taxman costs us £33m "The cost of hanging on the phone to the tax office was a collective £33m last year, with many frustrated callers paying more than £1 a call. Figures released by the National Audit Office (NAO) showed that nearly a quarter of calls to the Revenue went unanswered while 6.5m people in the first six months of this financial year were left waiting for more than 10 minutes for someone to help them. Customers who call HMRC from their mobile phone face the steepest charges, paying up to 41p a minute to phone an 0845 number or 40p a minute for an 0345 number. Even those calling from their landlines will pay up to 10.5p a minute, depending on the time of day." (D Telegraph 18-12-12)


This week's bonfire total: £6,704,850,000

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: Bonfires, eu, hmrc, mod, police

Policing - Just Like The Major Told Us

A rather big police error

So now even the police admit they've failed against the yobs. Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constabulary (HMIC) says:

"In the 70s, 80s and 90s every time there's been a cutback the first thing that's gone is the front line on the streets and I think it's been a big error and we've paid for it... anti-social behaviour... and its variants, that signal lack of control on our streets, have grown and evolved in intensity and harm."  

Needless to say, the Major was round first thing to make sure we'd understood - he'd been right all along:

"Isn't this precisely what I've been saying all these years? And you too pig ignorant to listen? We need good old-fashioned coppers out on the beat, not a bunch of pinko social workers filling in forms back at the nick."

Yes, of course, form filling has been a problem for ever, but under hopeless top-down pc Labour it mushroomed into a terminal condition. A condition made much worse by all the command and control systems imposed as part of Labour's tractor production plan.

According to HMIC, over the last 40 years police numbers have increased by well over 50%. And in addition, there has been a fourfold increase in other staff, including those famous numpties in yellow jackets:

And yet this is the very period during which HMIC says "cutbacks" gave rise to the withdrawal of frontline policing. In other words, the police withdrew services during the lean years, but never restored them during the fat.

What happened of course, is that the average cop has been spending less and less time actually out on the streets. As we've mentioned before, Mrs T's brother was a cop, and when he started as a young PC at Holborn in the late 50s, he'd routinely work 10 or 11 hour night shifts walking the beat alone (these days he'd have a watertight case under the Human Rights Act).

But the subsequent reduction in hours, plus all that paperwork, plus the demands of the burgeoning police bureaucracy, has had serious consequences for policing the streets. In today's police force as few as 6% of the total police strength are actually available at any one time to do what we most want them to do - ie patrol our neighbourhoods and respond quickly to calls for assistance.

HMIC has published this very interesting chart, summarising a survey of larger police forces. It shows what proportion of the police strength is actually available for neighbourhood patrols and response at various times during the week. And it shows how that proportion is derived from the total strength (click on image to enlarge):

So on Friday night at half-past midnight - ie a peak time for drunks smashing up town centres and pissing through your letterbox - only 6.4% of the total police strength are actually available to deal with things. Of the rest, half are permanently deployed on other matters, a further 42% aren't rostered for duty that night, and of those that are, a further 2% are off sick, on holiday, or on restricted duties. Which leaves just 6% available to do the job when we need it done.

And there's more. HMIC gives us some chapter and verse on the bureaucratic thicket down at your local nick - the over-specialisation, the silos that hamper coordinated action, the useless but time consuming local area partnerships, and the sheer wibble that pervades everything. Here for example is the chart of the model Police Management Structure for a borough, complete with its Professional Standards Champion, its Borough Partnership Manager, and its Victim Focus Team (click on image to enlarge):

It's the triumph of box-ticking over actually getting the job done.

Now nobody wants to be here, including the police themselves. But as always the question is WTF can we do about it?

As regular readers will know, Tyler has always been a big fan of elected local sheriffs - accountable to local communities for what happens on the streets, not what boxes have been successfully ticked. And we very much hope that Mrs May will implement the plan as promised.

But local sheriffs will only work if they are allowed to. There must be an end to centrally set tractor production targets, an end to fixed national terms and conditions (Ts and Cs - see this blog), and in due course, an end to reliance on central funding. Sheriffs must be free to experiment and discover what works in their own local communities.

That really is the only way. It's the only way we can be sure of local policing for local people. And at a time of big budget cuts, it's the only way the police will possibly make the leap in efficiency they must now deliver.

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: police

Ts and Cs

Too much time spent singing

As we've blogged many times, the police are spectacularly inefficient. Detection rates are less than 25% - half what they were in the 60s - there's a wobbling mountain of paperwork, real coppers on the beat have been replaced by numpties in yellow jackets, police stations are being closed all over the shop, and you're only really safe if you buy your own private security.

Yet the police now cost us around £20bn pa - £800 for every single household. And as the Home Affairs Select Committee pointed out, over Labour's first decade their funding increased by 40% in real terms, but the number of police officers increased by just 11% - only one-quarter of the increase in money (see this blog). The rest has disappeared into some dark pit. Indeed, police forces such as Surrey's have moved into what's known as "mixed economy policing", under which they dispense with police officers altogether and replace them with cheap civilian staff instead.

One of the reasons for high police costs is what's known as Ts and Cs - Police Terms and Conditions of employment. These are the national arrangements governing everything from pay, to working hours, to those famous index-linked pensions at age 50. They encompass all the various Spanish practices under which police constables can boost their pay to £60 grand pa via various allowances and overtime payments. For example, an officer can apparently earn £100 simply for answering the phone and making a decision while off-duty. Overtime alone now costs us £500m pa.

Given that police budgets are facing the axe, this is a pressing problem. Which is why a couple of weeks ago, Tyler attended a discussion on how police costs might be cut.

The star attendee was a serving Chief Constable who has featured on BOM before. She was very impressive, clearly doing a very diffcult job, and Tyler could well understand why she occupies such a senior position. And there were others around the table with plenty of expertise on the police and their problems.

So what was concluded?

Well, the good news is that everyone agreed that police costs can be cut. And everyone agreed that Ts and Cs are a problem that needs to be grasped: it is insane that Surrey has to lose all its best officers to the Met simply because the nationally negotiated London pay weighting leaves Surrey unable to compete.

But there, the agreement stopped.

Those associated most closely with the police felt that costs can only be cut if the public are prepared to accept a different type of service. Which roughly translated means fewer policemen and a greater reliance on cheaper civilian staff and those yellow-jacketed guys. It also means yet more amalgamation and pooling of resources between police authorities, sharing of back office functions (eg payroll and HR), and - yes, I'm afraid so - yet another shiny new national computer system.

Those of us on the outside - or at least, Tyler - didn't like the sound of this at all. For a chunky £800 pa why should households have to accept fewer police officers patrolling their streets and tracking down their bad guys? Who sets the priorities? And why on earth should anyone believe more bigness will make the police any more efficient?

Tyler decided to ask the elected sheriff question. Wouldn't it be better if we had elected sheriffs so the police could know how best to shape their service to meet local preferences? And wouldn't direct elections incentivise the police to deliver what their communities actually want?

"Ah, if only it was that simple," came the response. "Local policing like that can't work because criminals have cars." General dismissive titters round the table.

And you can see they do have a point there. Local police who give up hot pursuit at the county line are not what any of us want.

But most crime is local crime. And for serious national crime, such as terrorism, we could surely bolster the national policing arrangements already in place. The car chase point hardly seems a show-stopper.

The truth of course is that the police don't want locally elected sheriffs because they don't want to be at the beck and call of local politicians. They'd rather manage themselves according to their own preferences and objectives.

But in reality, they are not free to manage themselves. They have to answer to their paymaster, which at the moment is Whitehall. And Whitehall has proved a very bad sheriff. Yes, it's poured in vast amounts of cash, but it's insisted on vast amounts of micro management to go with it. From stop and search paperwork, to Activity Based Costing bureaucracy, to inflexible national Ts and Cs, Sheriff Whitehall has weighed down the police with so much useless baggage they can hardly move.

This is precisely how we've wound up with such an inefficient police service so detached from the communities it serves. And this is precisely why we are desperate for locally elected sheriffs, targeting local priorities, answerable to local communities, setting local Ts and Cs, and ideally, providing most of the cash from local taxpayers (see forthcoming book from the TPA - How to cut Public Spending (and still win an election) - which includes a chapter on how localism can improve public sector efficiency).

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: police

Private Sector Cops

£3.50 per week - cheap at the price

Back in 2006 we blogged how the well-heeled residents of leafy Primrose Hill in London had got so fed up with the Met's non-policing of their streets, that they'd clubbed together to hire private security patrols. For £1,000 pa per household, they were getting high visibility 24/7 patrols, and a "meet and greet" service if they came home late.

At the time it was a novelty, but with the public sector police having pretty well given up on our streets, we predicted a rosy future for private sector suppliers.

Since then the business seems to have spread far and wide, expanding from the poncy areas of London to as far afield as problem estates up North. Here's a report today from Darlington:

"For longer than they can remember, the law-abiding residents of Skerne Park have been plagued by teenage thugs. But in recent years the problem has become much worse. In the last 12 months alone, antisocial behaviour in their area of Darlington soared by 20 per cent.

Now the residents are hitting back by employing a 'private police force' (pic above)... They are paying £3.50 a week each for patrolling teams of wardens equipped with head cameras and wearing high-visibility uniforms. They will react to calls as well as monitoring the estate by car. So far more than 300 residents have backed the scheme."

In Southampton, a private security firm has recently offered the same service to local residents for just £3.15 per week. Their uniformed officers are equipped with handcuffs and stab vests, and the service includes "dedicated patrols of eight officers up to 60 times every 24 hours in every community that signs up, special patrols outside schools, escorts to shops and banks, emergency response to alarms and other incidents, and dog handlers to disperse street gangs."

No, I promise I'm not making this up. The business does seem to be booming (eg see here and here).

And it isn't just local residents who are hiring these companies. Commercial businesses have also been driven to club together in order to make their areas safe - as in this example from Bognor Regis (Bognor Regis, for goodness sake).

Right now, the biggest growth potential seems to be with councils hiring them in a deperate attempt to head off residents' anger at having been abandoned by the regular police.

In Tameside, Greater Manchester, the Labour Council has already hired a firm to patrol with dogs in one trouble spot. Billericay Council is seeking a firm to patrol the yob-plagued area around its town park. And Ramsden Bellhouse Parish Council has hired a private firm to patrol the parish at a reported 50% saving compared to the official police.

All of which is entirely understandable.

But it's also deeply troubling.

For one thing, who exactly are these private security people? The industry has a somewhat chequered past, and one of the key players has recently been charged with impersonating a police officer. Prospective buyers most certainly need to beware.

More fundamentally, WTF should we have to do this at all? WTF can't the real police do the job we pay them for?

We're currently spending around £19bn pa on the police. That's around £750 pa per household, or just under £15 per week. Yet the police are so inefficient and/or misdirected that they can't even provide these desperately needed local street patrols, which we now know would cost us £3.50 or less on the open market.

Roll on elected sheriffs. We need to re-establish some local power over our local police.

Their priorities should be our priorities - not those of Whitehall or some unelected quangocrat.

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: police

News From BOM Correspondents - 19

Ford Zephyrs not good enough for them these days

It's been too long since we did a round-up, for which we apologise. Frankly, events at The Golden Trough in Westminster have been so extraordinary and so distracting that everything else has sort of paled in comparison. But that's no excuse - we have to stay on the waste case, because it sure ain't gone away.

1. NHS "Productivity" Unit

DM Andy has the story of this... er... "efficiency" unit. It costs us £350 grand pa, for which we get one highly paid quangocrat director and one part-time secretary.

That's it.

Lifelong socialist Andy works down at the sharp-end of the NHS, and he's tearing his hair out. He asks: "Why are we wasting money like this and giving the Tories and the likes of Burning Our Money such an easy target?"

An excellent question, Andy.


2. Public Sector Pensions

The S Times has been back probing this old favourite:

"ALMOST 34,000 public sector workers have retired with £1m pension pots, twice as many as previously thought...

...Almost 400 retired staff from Glasgow city council and 223 from Kent county council have pension pots worth £1m or more...

... Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, has a pension now worth £5.4m, the largest in the public sector. He is among more than 20 civil servants and quango bosses who have accumulated pensions worth £2m or more.

Three BBC board directors also feature in the top five. John Smith, who heads BBC Worldwide, the corporation’s commercial arm, has accumulated a £3.1m pension pot after 18 years’ service."

So let me see... 34,000 times at least £1m equals at least £34bn.

(HTP Steve B)


3. Troughing Quangocrats

Also in the S Times:

"The head of a government regeneration agency ate 112 meals at taxpayers’ expense as he visited some of the country’s finest restaurants over 20 months... John Walker, the former head of English Partnerships, sent in a bill of £1,152 for service in a Belgravia pub and restaurant, charged £843 for service at Shepherds, the Westminster restaurant, and £569 at Pomegranates in Pimlico.

He spent nearly £3,500 in one eaterie alone as he racked up costs of more than £18,000 on restaurant and food bills.

Those on Walker’s guest list from April 2007 to November 2008 included the former cabinet ministers John Prescott and Hazel Blears, civil servants from the communities and local government department, a civil servant from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, three executives from the Olympic Delivery Authority, the chief executive of the Housing Corporation and the director of policy at English Heritage...

The expenses of the most senior officials at more than 120 nondepartmental public bodies reveal how some, such as Walker, spend big sums on dining out with employees from other taxpayer-funded organisations."

Remember that as you tuck into your Great Depression beanz on toast.

(HTP mister hungry)


4. Troughing MPs

It's way beyond parody, but Michael Chapman-Pincher has produced his own singalong tribute on YouTube. Here's Part 1 of 3:




5. Cops in Jags

From a breathless MSN Cars:

"Watch out, watch out, there's a big cat about...

Jaguar is now offering police forces across the UK the chance to go hunting criminal in style.

Police-spec 3.0-litre Diesel S XFs are out being evaluated by the UK's blue light brigade right at this very moment.

We reckon the slinky 275hp Jaguar will become one of the most powerful diesel police cars to ever roam the British mean streets - unless there are any bobbies out there rocking BMW's 286hp 535d. Either way, the XF's parallel sequential turbocharging should provide all the necessary in-gear, as well as emergency, response."

Yeah.

Enraged BOM correspondent Scott W says:

"My local force seems to have a love affair with high end BMW's so I bet they will be on this gravy train. Totally unjustified when the majority of their policing is done in an urban area.

How can we allow this waste to continue? How many bobbies could we get on the beat if we prised the police out of their premium motors? Do you see the police in other countries driving around in such things? No."

And now that Morse is sadly departed, our cops have no need for Jags either.

Fun at night

Tyler needs to leave it there in order to watch the Euro results.

Just how badly will Labour do?

Will their hopeless wibbling "plotters" summon up the balls to do something? Anything.

Will the quite superb Mandy crush some more BBC pundits like he crushed his old Labour mate Andy Marr this morning?

How perfectly delicious.

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www.gudanggrosiran.com Categories: nhs, pensions, police, quangos