Commentary
| DOI | 10.1350/pojo.76.4.279.25824 |
| Date | 01 September 2003 |
| Published date | 01 September 2003 |
| Subject Matter | Commentary |
The
Police
Journal
COMMENTARY
Regular readers of this commentary will be familiar with our
concerns regarding the efficiency and effectiveness of policing in
general, and in particular the policing of England and Wales.
Equally familiar will be the UK Government’s use of New
Public Management (NPM) and the application of Best Value as
a means of driving forward an efficiency and effectiveness
agenda and, our argument, that the issue of police core functions
needs to be properly addressed if best value policing is to be
realised.
This can often be reduced fairly simplistically to an equation
involving establishing, in fairly precise terms, what it is that the
police service is required to do (i.e. the identification of core
functions), followed by an assessment of how this is to be
achieved and a calculation of what it costs. The recent visit of
President Bush to London has served to provide an interesting
example of the difficult, although not unresolvable, issue of
identifying core functions.
The context here is one in which the Metropolitan Police
Authority (MPA) has been advancing a case for additional funds
to increase the number of front-line officers. Against a budget of
£2.2 billion for the year 2003/2004 the MPA intends to recruit an
additional 1,000 police officers, 500 police community-support
officers and release a further 450 officers from control-room
duties to return to front-line policing. By March 2004 it is
intended that the total number of police officers in London will
reach nearly 30,000, representing a 16% increase since July 2000
(www.mpa.gov.uk/news/press/2003/03–012.htm).
Against this backdrop, the Met decided to increase the
number of officers specifically deployed to police the visit of
President Bush from 5,000 to 14,000 at an estimated cost of £5m
on the basis of a perceived increase in the risk of a terrorist
attack http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3275907.stm). It is
debatable whether or not such a police presence in central London
The Police Journal, Volume 76 (2003) 279
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