That must be the technology because you sound loud from across the water also.
What I thought I would do, Chairman, would be to set out the context of Staffordshire Police and the situation in the U.K. and then tell you how we have responded to it here in Staffordshire.
Members may be aware that the spending squeeze in the U.K. is affecting all elements of the public sector, including policing. To give you some context, the budget of Staffordshire Police was about £184 million in April 2010. The squeeze means that we will be taking approximately £38 million out of that budget over a period of four years. The challenge is for us to dramatically cut our cost base and to maintain high levels of operational delivery. In my budget, 86% is spent on staffing costs. Therefore, a reduction of approximately 20% means that we have to cut into salary costs. To that end, there will be effectively 300 fewer police officers and 300 fewer police staff members, non-police officers, by the end of the four-year period. There is potential for a further squeeze beyond 2014, for which we are bracing ourselves.
This has meant that here in Staffordshire Police we have not recruited any officers into the police force for some three years now and we are managing the shrinking of the organization by not recruiting and requiring officers to retire when they reach pensionable service age. This is the same across the country. Police officer numbers in England and Wales now are at about an 11-year low. By 2015, there will be approximately 15,000 fewer police officers in the U.K. than there were at the beginning of the process in April 2010.
What that has required us to do is basically to go back to first principles. If we were to try to continue to police in the way that we have always done so with significantly fewer people, we would simply fall over. The scale of the cuts has required us to take a transformational approach to the delivery of policing and to redesign policing delivery in ways that had previously been unthinkable.
In terms of first principles, what I did here in Staffordshire was to ask what is policing built upon? Very clearly the model that we have undertaken here in the U.K. is very much about local policing solving local problems. So I was able to commit in years one and two of the spending cuts that we would not reduce any neighbourhood officers. In other words, every other part of the business had to be scrutinized to take the hit. It has required us to re-engineer our business processes and to collaborate more effectively with other police forces and crucially with other public sector agencies.
If I may say, even with the taking of already well over £15 million out of my budget, crime has continued to reduce, public confidence has continued to increase, and public satisfaction with the service that we are delivering is still very high, at about 88% of people who receive a service from us being either satisfied or very satisfied, and that is in the teeth of the significant cuts we're facing.
We have had to look very closely at not necessarily the numbers of officers we have, but the productivity of those officers and how we have deployed them. We have reviewed things like our shift patterns, we have done away with the concept of things like double-crewing unless it's absolutely necessary, and we are thinking about how we can make our services more accessible to members of the public in different ways. For example, if I can take £1 million out of my estate costs, it means I don't have to take that £1 million out of salary costs. So we're looking at, wherever possible, if we can share public access points and buildings with other public sector agencies. It seems a madness to me at a time of such public sector austerity that in one town we may have a police station next door to a town hall, next door to a library, next door to a school, when we ought to be thinking much more dramatically about the rationalization of public estate.
In terms of our business processes, it was at this point we engaged with the private sector. The consulting company, KPMG, worked with us to do two things. One was they brought expertise to us around business process redesign to take out inefficiencies in some of our core processes such as core handling, prison handling, and crime management. They injected significant pace and professionalism and expertise into this work for us. The second thing they did was they built up a capacity within my force so we did not become dependent upon the consultants going forward. It was difficult because we had to pay significant amounts of money up front at a time when there isn't a lot of money about, but the return on investment was significant. The lessons for private sector engagement are the following. We had to be crystal clear about what was required, we had to build capacity and not reliance, we had to challenge them on innovative ways of paying for their services, and we had to think of new models of engagement with the private sector that are beyond simple consultancy and outsourcing.
I would like to make just a couple of final points, Chairman. One of the things that I think this affords us is an opportunity to have discussions that we probably ought to have been having anyway about the use of public money. There is much closer cross-public sector delivery in some of our crucial areas of activity. One example I gave when I was over, a month or so ago, was in relation to a multi-agency safeguarding hub, where we have police officers co-located and jointly managed with social workers and with health professionals dealing with the early intervention of our most vulnerable people in our communities, vulnerable adults and children at risk.
Two things have happened as a result of that. The first thing is that the operation is far cheaper than it was, because we're able to co-locate and jointly manage. Crucially, though, it is more effective because we're able to share information and design interventions far more effectively than was previously the case.
Finally, I will offer a reflection on how this has been in terms of leadership. Leading through austerity is a significant challenge. The real learning, for me, is that we have to maintain confidence and optimism with the people we are leading if we are to continue to deliver effective public services at a significantly reduced cost. That in itself has been a leadership challenge. I am not saying I have always got it right, but we've given it a very good go.
Thank you.
