We have previously acknowledged at the sub-committee that, historically, we had not made the necessary transformation before making staff redundant. If you are going to make staff redundant or give them the opportunity of redundancy in a situation in which the work still needs to be done, you need to improve the work process and, ideally, put technology into that space.
We found ourselves in the position of making staff redundant but not putting in the technology or making the transformation. The work still needed to be done so we moved officers in to backfill. The intention was to do that on a temporary basis, but they were there for much longer because we did not deliver on the technology. The effect was to bring officers out of operational policing into what could be described as back-office roles.
The need to rekey data means that it takes two, three or four times longer to enter data overall. Someone gets information and enters it into one data system, then somebody else has to key it into another data system, then they photocopy it and it goes elsewhere. It wastes a huge amount of time.
All those issues added together make us really inefficient and we have to reverse that, which we are doing. We have laid out a clear strategy and a plan for moving police officers out of back-office support roles. We are looking strategically at our workforce balance, as we should have the right people with the right skills doing the right jobs. Where police officers have warrant cards or the specialist skills that we need, they should only be in the places where we need them. They are our operational assets so they should be in operational roles.
The technology should be an enabler; it should enable police officers to be more efficient in their operational roles and staff to be more efficient in the delivery of support. From a workforce mix perspective, there will be opportunities for civilian staff to support operational policing in operational roles but, for the most part, we have to get the technology right to enable that. At the moment, we are dealing with the legacy of manual processes and people not being in the right place to do the right job, but the workforce strategy that is part of policing 2026 will allow us to be integrated, with the right financial planning and the right technology enablement.
We want to get to a situation in which operational police officers are deployed with better capacity to do their jobs on the front line and staff in the back office focus on the jobs that they need to do with the right technology. That way, we can be more efficient and allow police officers to use their time better. We can save money and operate within our budgets and, ideally, get investment through for the specialist technology that Gerry McLean and his colleagues need so that we can keep up with and, ideally, ahead of the opposition in that space.