Only 12% of police are on the beat – true or false?

Inevitably police cuts have become a political football after a week that looked like an apocalyptic version of Supermarket Sweep - what the French newspapers have called "the shopping riots".

Yesterday David Cameron told the House of Commons that 20% police budget cuts would not necessarily lead to reductions in police on the beat. This claim was scrutinised by Cathy Newman on the Channel Four Factcheck, who concluded it involved a “rhetorical sleight of hand".

David Cameron also noted:

Today, as we speak, only 12% of police officers are on the beat at any one time.

It’s a shocking statistic. I verified this figure in a report, Demanding Times (pdf available), by HM Inspector of Constabulary. However, it’s a little misleading and maybe a tad mischievous.

Demanding Times explains exactly what is involved in the 12% figure for police “available” and “visible”:

The majority of officers and PCSOs in visible roles who are not available will be off shift. Some will be appearing in court (to give evidence or act as court liaison officers), others will be on holiday and a few will be off sick.

… 19% of police officers and PCSOs are in the middle and back offices combined. It is to be expected that there will be some police officers in these categories, as they include roles such as managing and processing intelligence, criminal justice, specialist investigative support functions and crime management. They will also be working in roles that benefit from operational insight, such as business transformation projects. Equally, the back office category includes training roles: and forces rely on the brightest and the best from the front line being able to pass on their skills and knowledge. Nevertheless, authorities and forces, taking account of their local circumstances, would benefit from assuring themselves of the need for police officer skills in these two categories.

No one would deprive police of their annual leave, sick leave or being off-shift – particularly after the last few days. Likewise intelligence, investigation, etc are valuable. Of course, there is no doubt scope for reducing red tape – just as there is in most public services. The fact that there is variation in rates of “available and visible” across the country points to scope to spread best practice e.g. in shift management.

There is a strong case for police reform and an urgent need for greater efficiency – the police force is arguably the least modernised territory of the public sector. However, misleading and mischievous use of eye-catching statistics is unhelpful.

Unions and accounting for redundancies – lifting the fog?

The Coalition’s budget deficit programme is causing redundancies to ripple through the public sector as well as quite a bit of the third sector exemplifying the Big Society. The OBR expects 330,000 public sector jobs to go by 2015.

In times such as these it is vital that unions provide workplace representatives as well as rank-and-file union members with the tools to understand what is going on. In the college sector UNISON have published a Guide for UNISON reps dealing with cuts.

The Guide helpfully sets out how the Coalition’s policies are affecting funding for colleges. It is less clear when it comes to explaining college accounts and measures of financial health used by the Skills Funding Agency. In fact it seems to not appreciate how making operating losses inevitably worsens a college’s financial health.

UNISON is right in understanding that further education funders have in the past paid funding allocations in advance to struggling colleges. But can the Skills Funding Agency do that when the whole sector is ravaged by funding cuts? Perhaps not.

On the website of the Universities and Colleges Union website there is useful Insiders Guide to HE sector finances including university accounts (pdf available). It was commissioned by Joint Negotiating Committee for Higher Education Staff to assist both employers and employees in negotiations. The college sector could do with something similar in these troubled times.

TES reports FE colleges in the black in 2009/10 - so what?

The Times Education Supplement on Friday published an interesting analysis on the state of the college sector's finances. The headline was somewhat eye-catching: FE colleges in the black.

The numbers crunched for the article showed:

On average, colleges reported an operating surplus of about £300,000 last year, after two years of deficits. This came despite the lowest rate of income growth for five years.

Of course averages can disguise as much as they reveal. (In particular, mean averages are a crude measure which can be distorted by extreme outliers. The article did not indicate if the analysis used the more useful average of the median - the value in the middle of the distribution.)

Certainly in 2009/10 there were over 70 colleges with operating deficits. That is a lot of red ink - even if the college sector as a whole is in the black.

Comparing like-with-like is helpful although tricky when there is a lot of churn with mergers and takeovers in the college sector. When I compared the performance of individual colleges excluding those that had been dissolved or merged, indeed the figures suggest that three-quarters had larger operating surpluses (or smaller deficits) in 2009/10.

The article asks the question: So are institutions in better shape than their funding body feared?

While 2009/10 was a better year than the previous year, we have to remember that we are talking about financial years starting on 1 August 2009 - over 22 months ago - and ending before the cuts heralded by George Osborne's Spending Review. While Labour had introduced their own cuts in funding rates, the Conservatives are taking the axe to whole programmes such as Train to Gain. The squeeze will be felt in the next four years - not in 2009/10.

So perhaps "doom-laden predictions about the state of college finances" cannot be discounted in 2011 on the grounds that the college sector on average had a less bad time in 2009/10.

Public sector jobs disappearing more quickly than forecast

Yesterday's depressing unemployment figures from the Office for National Statistics revealed that public sector employment in the UK fell by 132,000 last year. About half were central government - about half of those 66,000 were in the education sector.

Worryingly, at the macro level, the loss of jobs in public sector is running at more than twice the rate predicted by the Office for Budget Responsibility. (The rate is even higher than the initial OBR estimates.) Clearly the OBR has been caught off-guard by the front-loading of the grant cuts to local government and the responses of councils. This may be only a timing effect but in these uncertain times it may affect confidence more generally.

The OECD on Housing and the Economy – arguments and evidence

Yesterday I stumbled on an OECD survey Housing and the Economy: Policies for Renovation. The report seemed to have been overlooked by the UK press apart from the Financial Times. Even Inside Housing appears to have overlooked it.

The report recommends reforms to financial sector oversight, taxation, land use policies, rental sector regulation and social housing provision. It argues that these changes will improve the functioning of the housing market and benefit the economy more generally. (The relevance of the report can be seen in US’s jobless recovery where negative equity is hindering the ability of America’s unemployed to move for work.)

As housing has been a casualty of the financial crisis and now the deficit reduction plan, it might have been expected that this objective, balanced and well-researched report might have been read by someone. Even if it had not been carefully studied, chunks could easily be copied and pasted to provide fodder for arguments on all sides.

Advocates of the Coalition’s housing benefit curbs could point to:

Where housing supply is constrained in the short run, however, part of the benefit of government rent allowances may shift from renters to landlords without necessarily enhancing housing availability for needy households. Indeed, there is some evidence that rent allowances are passed onto higher rents.

Opponents of the government’s moves to weaken security of tenure in social housing could signpost:

means-tested social housing systems may potentially reduce job seeking incentives amongst the unemployed, or discourage low-wage workers from seeking higher paid jobs if social housing is withdrawn or rents are increased as earned income grows.

Even abuse and manipulation of the report might have been better than being ignored.

The report is written to draw conclusions from across the OECD’s membership of advanced industrial countries. Inevitably this means that the report’s recommendations may not all be relevant to all 30 countries. Even where the recommendations such as looser land use policies, freer rental markets and more reliance on rent allowances than social housing may be appropriate, there are practical and distributional concerns. However, the study is worth reading with an open mind.

Bracing weather - the "double freeze": pay rises and increments

Today’s Financial Times reports on proposals from a group of NHS chief executives for a "double pay freeze" - that is, a two year pay freeze for staff earning less than £21k and a freeze on incremental rises which over two thirds of NHS staff enjoy. The good news would be a promise of no compulsory redundancies – the article notes scepticism over whether all NHS organisations could afford that guarantee.

Similar plans – whether or not the NHS proposal happens – may be seen elsewhere – perhaps in education where funding cuts for some organisations may be serious enough to require radical action but not so deep as to require compulsory redundancies.

The NAO on staff costs in "a period of spending reduction"

Last week the National Audit Office published A framework for managing staff costs in a period of spending reduction. Its a timely guide - less than two months until the Spending Review on October reveals where the axe will fall in terms of Whitehall departments. The NAO suggests that the guide is relevant to the "wider public sector" beyond the central government departments who are the primary audience of the NAO.

I have only had a quick scan of the report but I noticed that the "context" warns:

In their planning assumptions, departments have been asked to produce plans of what budget reductions of up to 40 per cent would entail. We expect departments to need to explore the more radical strategic and sustainable cost reduction options ... in order to deliver savings on this scale.

It goes on:

however, delivering cost reduction of this nature usually demands higher implementation costs and longer timescales. This increases risk and therefore requires a clear strategy from the outset, as well as strong project management and control if expected savings are to be delivered.

The report identifies the challenges in conducting staff cost reduction activity. It also stresses the key elements required including high quality management information and robust data analysis.

Spring of discontent?

I might have been a bit too busy to blog recently but I have been reading other people’s postings. As we see outbreaks of industrial unrest, it is worth having a look at Rene Lavenchy’s blog.

Rene Lavenchy writes for Tribune and appears to have excellent sources. Last year the blog was ranked ninth in the Guide to Union Blogging (pdf available). A few weeks ago I was doubtful when I read that a deal was set to be agreed between the Royal Mail and the postal workers’ union – then a modernisation deal was announced yesterday.

As public sector pay, pensions and jobs are in the line of fire, how unions are able and willing to respond will be a vital issue for all of us.