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Government does not have the data it needs to understand the extent of police forces’ financial risk – and the consequences of this on the vital services they provide.

• Read the report
• Read the report (PDF)
• Inquiry: Increasing police productivity
• Public Accounts Committee

In a new report, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) calls on government to support greater transparency while warning of a lack of understanding from government on how policy changes made by government can impact policing on the ground.

Following the publication of the government’s policing white paper, PAC Chair Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP has written (attached) to the Home Office’s Permanent Secretary seeking more detail on how exactly the proposed changes will address the concerns identified in the PAC’s report.

In 2024-25, police forces drew down £276m from their financial reserves, and funded 60% of their capital programmes from borrowing. This trend is expected to continue, with reserves set to fall by £500m (35%) by 2027-28.

The PAC is concerned that forces are borrowing significant amounts compared to their net revenue and about the impact of these pressures on frontline performance.

The PAC warned over a decade ago that the Home Office’s ‘hands-off’ approach to monitoring police forces had limited its ability to ensure value for money. Both the Home Office and the College of Policing accepted the value of greater transparency in evidence to the PAC’s inquiry, but police performance data is still scattered across different organisations and can be out-of-date.

The Home Office further lacks understanding of how policy changes impact forces’ resources. Policing faces growing demand – for example, fraud, sexual offences, and stalking and harassment offences increased from 768,000 cases to 2.1m cases over the past decade.

This is in the context of extra responsibilities absorbed by forces, with officers spending increasing time training on new regulations; evidence to the PAC showed that the new XL Bully dog policy will cost West Midlands Police alone £400,000 in the coming year.

The inquiry underlines the importance of police productivity being treated as an effective end-to-end process. But the PAC found that Home Office had not fully costed the impact of early-release sentencing reforms on policing. There is work across government to help people with drug addictions to not reoffend, but the report notes this has been at a preliminary stage for some time.

On the policing workforce, the report warns that police forces’ response to financial pressures - reducing the number of civilian staff and using police officers in staff roles – is an expensive and inefficient practice, with evidence to the inquiry estimating this costs policing at least £55m/yr.

The Home Office focus on numbers of police officers, rather than effectiveness, leaves chief constables unable to fund specialist staff to support IT changes to modernise their forces, while officers are performing tasks that can be done by civilian staff. With government funding ringfenced since 2019 on the condition forces maintain officer numbers, the PAC finds forces have limited flexibility to recruit people with the necessary skills.

Funding constraints also make the roll-out of new technologies across all forces too slow. The PAC recommends that all forces produce a business plan showing how much money they require to invest in modern IT technology to improve their productivity.

The report further finds that half of police officers surveyed by the Police Foundation last year didn’t believe they had adequate skills to investigate fraud. Further evidence showed poor wellbeing reducing workforce capacity as officers on long-term sick leave increased, equating to 3,165 officers off-duty for considerable periods, at a cost of up to approximately £92m/yr for policing.

Further police savings of £354m have been identified by government – but Home Office had not established by November last year how this would be funded. Government believes it will achieve these savings by 2028-29, but was unable to explain to the PAC the practical steps needed to achieve lasting changes in working practices across all police forces.

Evidence to the PAC’s inquiry demonstrated the inefficiency of police forces running separate procurement exercises, with a lack of standardised equipment across all 43 forces. 

Long-term improvements are also frustrated, the report finds, by government’s approach to funding forces. The Home Office is still using the hopelessly out-dated police funding formula, which the PAC recommended be reformed over ten years ago. With demographic changes and regional variations in funding since that time, financial pressures on forces have increased.

Bedfordshire Police and Warwickshire Police saw government funding/capita fall by nearly 12% since 2015, and the report raises further concerns that funding allocations do not reflect the needs of rural forces.

Chair comment

Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, said:

“The principle of operational independence from government for our police forces is and should be sacrosanct, and underpins the vital work they do up and down the country to keep all of us safe. But operational independence must not equal a lack of oversight.

"Anyone attempting to track overall police financial resilience and performance enters a maze of siloed and out of date information. This is an unsatisfactory arrangement, both for a government which we have found already lacks insight into the impacts of its policy changes on under-pressure forces; and for the wider public, who ought to be able to more easily hold police forces to account for how they carry out their duties.

“The new White Paper on police reform presents an opportunity that cannot be wasted. The Home Office must learn from its past attempts and address the fundamental barriers to improving productivity, and if as apparently planned it results in greater transparency and stronger accountability for performance, that is something this Committee would welcome, given our concerns over government’s historic light touch approach.

"With better information, both government and police forces will be more able to grip the current problems which our report illustrates – a concerning uptick in poor wellbeing for officers; difficulties in recruitment and retention; a lack of consistency in how equipment and technology is used and taken up. Our Committee hopes that our recommendations will help enable better quality crime detection and prevention, which will in turn leave the UK’s citizens safer.”