It's an excellent question. This was a real challenge.
First of all, police officers in the U.K. do not have a right to strike. It is something that they give up when they join the police force. They have a police federation—it's not a union—that represents front-line rank-and-file officers. Each police force has its own police federation representatives.
I found the most effective way was to get them very close to the change program, especially the official representatives of the police federation. They were sitting on boards. They were sitting in projects, doing governance, and working with us to see what worked.
I also tried on the basis of “no surprises”. I have attempted, not always successfully, to be as open as I possibly can around the challenges that we're facing and the changes that we're making. I have discovered that not many officers needed to be persuaded of the financial challenge. In other words, once that had been set nationally, the cops understood that we had to change dramatically. In that sense, we got their buy-in. I'm not saying all the changes were popular—and some of them had to be enforced—but I think overwhelmingly we had a huge amount of support from officers who could see what we were trying to do.