By Niven Rennie
Director, Social Impact Scotland
It’s difficult to compare one generation of policing with another.
Each believes they are being asked to do more than their predecessors, often with less resource.
I have a great sympathy for today’s service in this respect – it may have better technology available, but the thin blue line seems stretched to breaking point at times, and that technology is very expensive.
Equipment or staff, you can’t have both.
While the police service grapples with funding, the same argument is employed in health, education, social services – across the public sector.
Policing is often the service of ‘first and last resort’. The last line of defence of a public sector that struggles to cope with demand.
The complaint I hear from today’s officers most often is “we are doing the job that other services should be doing”.
For many years this situation has led to calls for more money, better equipment and an increase in establishment.
While I have every sympathy with these requests, they are repeated across the public sector and, with public sympathy for our NHS leading to political choices that tend to favour health, there is not enough money available to meet these funding requirements.
If policing were to be prioritised, the ability of other services to reduce demand would diminish and the current situation would be exacerbated. A vicious cycle.
Indeed, experience over the years would indicate that an increase of provision for response does not reduce demand.
To a certain extent, this is how we have arrived at the current situation. Our public services are in crisis mode, trying to put a lid on a boiling pot. This leads to fatigue, burnout and mistakes.
The answer to this conundrum appears simple – reduce demand, turn down the heat.
Simple in concept, but much harder to achieve because there is no magic money tree.
Public service resources are fully committed; increasing taxes would be unpopular. How do we reduce demand while still meeting the ever-increasing requirement to respond?
This requires us to be imaginative. We can’t keep doing the same thing and expect a different result. A fresh approach is needed.
With more than 75 per cent of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) lying within the private sector, the answers may lie there.
Not by asking Barclays Bank or ScottishPower to don a uniform and assist the police on a Saturday night, but by employing private sector finance to assist in reducing demand.
This has been an approach that has worked globally, but for some strange reason has yet to take hold in Scotland.
The approach is called social impact investment. It utilises private sector money to provide capital investment for projects that aim to transform communities and generate hope and opportunity.
Many of our larger companies are setting aside money for this purpose.
In the main, this money is supplied to voluntary sector organisations which currently provide grassroot services often unseen, very often unrecognised, and extremely underfunded.
If we are to reduce demand, these organisations hold the key.
Their work with communities, across disadvantaged populations, with schools, in mental health and wellbeing support, with the homeless, is priceless.
Their current funding model requires procurement for services or grant funding from philanthropic organisations.
If you think policing is struggling financially, try working in a third sector organisation.
To receive this capital injection, the voluntary service organisation must have proposals for a project that will be transformational in nature.
Its very essence must produce outcomes that will change communities and the lives of the people who live there.
We know that will be the case because we can measure the impact that the project will have.
For example, a project that aims to prevent 100 people a year from returning to prison upon release will produce a range of benefits across the public sector and reduce costs in justice, health, social services, housing and many other areas.
That level of saving can be quantified using a recognised tariff calculator that produces a savings value, a socio-economic gain.
The aim is to save £2 from the public purse for every £1 invested.
A partnership is formed between the service provider, the funder and the government or local authority.
Agreement is reached that if the outcomes are delivered, the original capital will be repaid to the investor from the annual savings and reinvested for the years that follow for the lifetime of the project.
A project that runs for five years will keep 500 people out of prison and produce five times the savings for the public purse.
This can be reinvested, perhaps in policing.
I think we have a choice. Continue along the path we have trod for generations and let demand overwhelm us, or do something different to produce a better society.
There may be alternatives but currently I see none.
If not this, then what?