NPIA outlines £200m IT savings plan
Plods tighten belts
Posted in Management, 5th July 2010 08:03 GMT
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The chief executive of the National Policing Improvement Agency has outlined plans to save £200m by 2015 through 'better use of technology and procurement'.
Peter Neyroud said the agency will make IT savings of £25m during 2010-11, out of total savings of £1bn across all areas of the agency by 2015.
In May, the NPIA was told by the coalition government to make £30m worth of cuts. Speaking at the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) Association of Police Authorities (APA) conference in Manchester, Neyroud said he wanted to ensure that "policing offers maximum value for money at a time when austerity measures are biting". But he acknowledged that the agency's savings plans were "ambitious".
"Our challenge is to do more with less by being more intelligent and efficient in how we deliver policing services. Collaboration, sharing and central procurement will be the hallmarks of how the NPIA helps the police service to achieve significant savings in the future," Neyroud said.
The chief executive called for police forces to share back office functions like finance and human resources, revealing that the agency plans to save £75m by 2015 through shared services.
Neyroud concluded that his ambition was to see every pound spent on the agency converted into a minimum £2 saving in the police service.
The NPIA supports a number of front-line police operations such as the police national computer, the national fingerprint database, the Airwave radio system and the National DNA Database.
This article was originally published at Kable.
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COMMENTS
Or alternatively...
We could simply scrap the NPIA altogether and save £500 million a year immediately, without any need for speculation.
Something that has always bothered me
There's something that has always bothered me about these kind of announcements. 35M in savings? Where exactly do they get these kinds of savings? Savings BILLION pounds across the agency? It leaves me with some serious questions.
Who was running the agency (or indeed any agency or corporation or what have you) with that kind of excess floating around? Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the people in charge of corporations and government agencies supposed to be running everything as close to the bone as possible all the time?
So who failed? And why aren't their heads on pikes?
The other side to that is...are these "savings" imaginary? Are they in fact short term cuts that go too far that will lead to long term costs as agencies scramble to recover from the multi-year funding deficit and provide basic services?
I was under the impression that people went to University and got all sorts of fancy degrees so that they could create things like budgets that were – to the dollar – exactly what needed to be spent. Not a dollar over, not a dollar under, but what needed to be spent.
Over and over we wobble through this “spend too much, spend too little” crap…when do the bankers and MBAs and all these folks start actually earning their salaries? As it stands, a simple blue collar Sysadmin such as myself could do as good or better a job running these places as these folks seem to.
Fail, because, well…
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