Plods waste millions keeping their arses covered and ears open The UK police are wasting millions on radios and other items such as belts thanks to wildly varying procurement spends between the 43 forces, an analysis by The Register has revealed. According to figures published by the Home Office, the 43 forces spent a total of £17.7m on hand-held and vehicle radios over the last three …
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Every few months we see stories like this and the OP above has made a good reply.
The other problem is that setting up a group to make a nation wide purchase of belts, for example, for all police officers will cost a lot more than it saves, if it saves anything at all...... well at least history tells us so.
In the end it's mostly better to let local people buy the belts etc. and get the best deal they can.
I think this sort of thing was covered by Yes Minister many years ago :-)
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This kind of nonsense gets peddled annually about government procurement.
Firstly, separate police forces procure separately. If you want everyone to get the same price then procure centrally for all police everywhere.
Procuring centrally for all police everywhere doesn't take account of the operational circumstances of the various forces. For all I know North Yorks police need more powerful and therefore more expensive radios because points of contact are few and far between whereas City of London coppers communicate over much shorter distances, consequently a central procurement setup still doesn't really solve the problem.
For everything that can be bulk bought you have the risk that your bulk buying creates a monopoly supplier that can supply the volume but puts every other possible supplier out of business, and ultimately the price of the goods goes up.
There are probably savings to be made, but what is achievable is usually far below what this kind of naive paper exercise would suggest. One size does not, unfortunately, fit all.
I wondered about that too.
Different forces have different needs and requirements, the idea that one radio is necessarily right for all of them may not be right (I don't know if it is, but is seems possible).
Also, are the cheap radios actually good value? Perhaps the more expensive ones wer harder waring and less likely to break down and the plod in Yorkshire did a lifetime TCO calculation that meant spending more on the hardware was worth it over the long run.
This kind of nonsense gets peddled annually about government procurement.
Firstly, separate police forces procure separately. If you want everyone to get the same price then procure centrally for all police everywhere.
Aha, you don't understand how this game is played. The purpose of releasing this information is to force central procurement.
The article is based on a leaked/FOI data from someone with an axe to grind (Taxpayers Alliance usually) in order to get "people" to say "huh, what a waste of money, we must have central procurement". zomg, what a coincidence.
I am a bit suspicious about the reported radio costings, because it can all hinge on whether the radios - sorry "terminals" in TetraSpeak - are bought outright or leased from an MSP (and no, I don't mean a parliamentarian from north of the border*) and if bought when the purchase actually took place. On top of terminal costs there are also access charges for them to work on the Airwave system, and it may be that some forces included that in the figures and some did not; it would all hinge on the precise wording of the questions they were asked and possibly on the interpretation of the answers. There is not much competition in the "terminal" market, with two (three if Nokia are still in the game) providers of portable equipment and three for vehicle equipment. I don't think Nokia were ever in the "vehicle" market so that company isn't one of the three.
Edit, having just spotted a comment that has just arrived: "more powerful radios" doesn't apply - handset equipment is by definition limited to 1 Watt (IIRC) and vehicle equipment to 3 Watts.
*That would be another can of worms entirely, of course.
This link would suggest the radios are from Sepura and that it's a single contract to supply and support full communications.
In addition this page claims the last purchase by North Yorks police was at £400 per unit (perhaps more recent than the data set used in the report). And that the £120 paid by Merseyside was in 2009 for a bulk order of 5,000 units.
Similar exercise going on in Welsh Local Authority IT. How much per head do you spend on 'Desktops', 'Software', 'Networks', 'Security' etc.? With what going in each box open to interpretation. The suspicion being that the minister will just pick the lowest figure in each column as the savings the sector is supposed to be able to achieve and thus they get their funding cut accordingly.
this is hot air, it seems all organizations have an inborn facility to blow ANY budget out of the water, right to the final frontier, and higher. It's either ignorance about what a real-life cost of an "x" is, or they don't care, or somebody making purchasing decision gets kickbacks. Or a combination of.
On a positive note, this overspent budget does get spent, some part of economy profits. Unless they buy on amazon.
The fundamental flaw with annual departmental budgets across almost all big industries, organisations and government is that, if you don't spend it all one year, the bean counters, rather than allowing you to carry over or 'bank' any surplus for the future, will say "Ah! You're over-funded" and cut your allowance for next year.
Meanwhile, your colleagues in the next department who wisely overspent on their budget, will be given extra for next year [probably the same sum that has just been cut from your budget], as they are obviously "under-funded".
So, because of this "Use it or lose it" attitude, everyone makes sure to 'spend up' their entire budget, every year, often buying the dearer option, or things that aren't really needed.
Why can't we supply them with all the excess,used or last years pantomime outfits... It might not make them look very "authoritarian" but at least it would make for some interesting arrest scenarios..
Captain Hook successfully apprehends Woolworths shoplifter.
Barnaby the Clown arrests yet another drunken football yob.
Big Bird has been on a MacDonalds stake out for the least three weeks..
"He said one of the "low hanging fruits" for IT savings would include plans to start consolidating licensing contracts, mainly with Oracle and Microsoft"
So now you get an NHS CfH 'Enterprise Licence' which you have to renew in full every few years because someone always wants something.
Total goes up, not down.
Oh no! Look at all this fragmented spending! Something must be done!
Well, the fundamental solution to that is centralised procurement on a ubiquitous system.
Wait, hasn't the government tried this somewhere before? Oh, that's right. They tried this with the Medical Research Council.
A centralised procurement system, based on an Oracle solution. Not just that, but attendance management, pay roll, and a whole slew of finance and admin systems, all rolled into one.
The idea that this should free up the small research units and institutes from requiring their own costly admin staff for dealing with the day-to-day running. If successful, it was to be rolled out to the other science councils, too.
Long story short, it was an unmitigated disaster. Running wildly over budget, the cumbersome system has alleviated the need for admin staff in individual units by practically 0% drastically limited our choice of suppliers and caused no end of other issues. Especially after they fired most of the staff at Swindon who were supposed to be running it.
On top of that, the MRC had a major barney with the contractor, so the whole system is largely unsupported. This means every time a java update comes out, all the custom written components (which are primarily used by our admin for paying us, etc.) break!
Currently, the recommendation from head office is for us to stick with IE8!
You can take that recommendation and shove it up your $^&*" so far that your "£^%&^ bursts, and you get infected with !"($^% until the )(*&$% runs out your (!£$&!!!
Wait, doesn't this also imply that our head office are currently using IE8? the head office that now centrally stores all my salary and bank details?
Sorry, but every time somebody sees a few cost figures like the ones in this article, they swing around to the same failed idea. It's like the Trident programme. It may seem expensive and/or wasteful, but when you really weigh up the alternatives, it's still the most cost effective option.
The idea that this should free up the small research units and institutes from requiring their own costly admin staff for dealing with the day-to-day running. If successful, it was to be rolled out to the other science councils, too.
The logic of combining the support services of the research councils was entirely valid, and other organisations have made improvements in both cost and quality of service by using a shared services approach. For those interested, there is an excellent National Audit Office report on this fiasco that can be found with a quick web search. Key findings were (paraphrasing the findings) that the Research Councils were a bunch of parochial numpties who wouldn't work together, that the costs were underestimated (very little scope change), and the savings overestimated and in particular predicated on unproven procurement savings. The procurement of the project via Fujitsu was a shambles (eg they won the contract despite coming second in the competition), and made the mistake of using an IT company to implement what was basically a business process project.
If the research councils hadn't been such arseholes, the project would have cost about one quarter of the final cost (FFS, the organisations already had systems and processes in place, how can you spend £130m on a back office transaction processing system?). The Research Council bunglers managed to fritter almost £4m just setting up the holding company for the shared service operation. Despite a supposed turnkey contract of about £18m they managed £13m of unbudgeted design and build costs and a further £13m of overspend with Fujitsu, they then spent £11m on "project management".... and so it went on. The most alarming thing is that over and above the (relatively) minimal hardware costs and redundancy costs, all of the costs were staff time. The gross overrun alone (of £50m) is somewhere around 800-1,000 man years of billed effort.
Shared services, done right, is a good, cost effective option. But once the concept crosses the event horizon of the public sector, the costs stretch out towards infinity, schedules extend forever without snapping, and money just falls into the dark, super dense singularity that is "public services".
For several years all the police IT departments did a large comparative cost exercise using the SocITM activity definitions (as an arbitrary but standard method of counting). It took a lot of coordination before we were mostly consistent in what went into each counting bucket.
The results were fascinating - not as sticks to beat ourselves with but as the basis of further discussion. A large cost for say networking was often because they had just had to make an incremental investment. A low cost could be because they had flogged the life out of it and were about to make an incremental investment.
It was a valuable exercise because it led to questions, not targets (or not at the time). If one force appeared to have a low support cost, it led to further investigation. A lot of the variation came down to different conditions though - network costs in a big rural area were always going to be higher than in a small urban one. North Yorkshire is not the place you want to be in charge of providing network, radio or mobile bandwidth.
Some forces chose to buy their Airwave radios with GPS modules in, some without. Some bought them without and fitted them later. Airwave with GPS can make police deployment more effective (if you map the incoming data right), but the radios appear to cost more.
The problem is, as has already been said, that if one force can apparently spend £100 on radios, they will all be set that as a target. I'll bet that if we go out and buy 120,000 of the cheapest radio possible the breakage rate might rise to eliminate the saving (all accidental, of course). There is something in having kit that you have confidence in.
... and just take a look at the latest grumble about police cars not being fitted with blue lights or sirens.
"... and just take a look at the latest grumble about police cars not being fitted with blue lights or sirens."
That's because they've all been given to middle management types
Last year my belt broke and I was going to be late for a train. Debenhams I thought - they'll be open and sell belts, so I grabbed the first reasonable looking thing I could find.
£27. Twenty seven of my finest English pounds for a belt.
I bought it because I was in such a rush. I haven't since found out what special features this belt has over any other black leather belt with a small metal buckle.
My state (#46 of 50 in the US), has tried centralization with IT products and services, guess what it has not saved any money. In fact it has cost more. Not that it it is all bad, several of the agencies that were either understaffed or just set up web/mail servers and left them on with no real maintenence have better service. However for some of the ones that had very good setups it was more of a pain, since they had their staff transfereed to the new agency and then contracted back two them, then it adds more people in the approval chain for new software/hardware purchases and means they have slightly less control over the people doing critical work for themm
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