Large UK police force

Challenge to produce better, deeper cost reduction plans

This police force was faced with a requirement to make large cuts in operational expenditure across its operating footprint, making its contribution to reducing UK budget deficit. A cautious culture and lack of clear framework against which to assess risk was restricting management’s cost cutting ambition, with many cost reduction tools being regarded as infeasible or ‘too risky’. David challenged the client’s caution on using tools such as outsourcing, process change, organisation redesign, resource scheduling and reductions to the scope of services offered, and clarity on how to reduce risk to encourage management to propose more aggressive cost reduction plans.

David followed two tracks, (1) reviewing call handling functions spread over six sites and (2), understanding the rationale and assumptions behind existing cost reduction plans. By listening to a sample of calls and interviewing call handling staff, the first track provided insights into the type of demand served by the call handling functions. Much demand was not police work and, provided controls could be put in place to manage risks, costs could be significantly reduced by declining to provide service, e.g diverting cases to social workers. A key issue was the definition and operation of suitable controls to avoid ‘cause celebres’ where service was declined incorrectly. This track also generated other major findings.

• Staff scheduling was inefficient: due to cautious scheduling in order to be able to deal with unforeseen peaks; and constrained shift patterns and working practices
• The contact centres were spread over too many sites and needed to be aggregated to deliver economies of scale
• The ability to re-deploy staff onto ‘non-voice’ work was required to realise benefits from more efficient scheduling

Review of existing plans indicated that the scope of the cost reduction initiatives proposed was missing some key opportunities and, secondly, assumptions underlying benefit estimates were overly cautious. By helping management to define the missing opportunities, for example defining the value creating rationale, and providing benchmarks to challenge cautious assumptions, management was able to provide a plan for deeper cuts.