As a service—this is probably about policing, as opposed to the Police Service of Scotland—our capital allocation and capital investment have, for a number of years, been consistently less than an organisation of our size requires. In general terms—I am speaking in the generality here, rather than using specific figures—the Police Service of Scotland accounts for 3 per cent of Scottish Government spend. Members can correct me, but we spend about £1.2 billion in revenue, and I think that Scottish Government revenue spend is about £33 billion. However, during the past few years, our capital allocation has consistently been less than 1 per cent of the Government’s capital spend.
As a citizen in Scotland and as a public leader, I am aware that there are financial pressures on all Governments and that there are significant investments to be made in schools, hospitals and transport infrastructure, but it is a statement of fact that the Police Service’s capital allowance and allocation has not kept pace with our revenue allocation. As a result, the service spends less. I think that I included that in our written submission. Compared with others, we spend less on capital per officer and staff member. If £20,000 per officer is spent in England and Wales on capital—that is, fleet, equipment, property and so on—we spend about £6,500 per officer. It is a significant challenge to make sure that the service is properly equipped.
This year, our capital allowance, collectively, is about 40 to 45 per cent of what we identified we would need. There are different elements to that. There is the need to maintain business as usual, as you have alluded to, and we need to make some capital investment each year in fleet, estate and so on. At the same time, we are trying to make capital investment to allow us to properly transform the organisation into one. The clunky, misaligned, contradictory information technology infrastructure that we inherited from the legacy arrangements is well documented. To be frank, it is remarkable what officers, staff and the leadership of Police Scotland have been able to do to make sense of the system and allow us to police operationally, but I think there is recognition that we cannot go on like that.
My challenge is to balance the investment that is needed in fleet, equipment and estate and in making sure that officers and staff can work properly and are equipped to do the work while, at the same time, making sure that we are also investing in some of the transformational projects and pieces of work that are vital to modernise the service.
There are challenges at present. I have been very clear and public about those challenges with ministers, and I am grateful for the opportunity to talk them through further with the sub-committee this morning. Part of my duties as chief constable is to meet those challenges and balance competing demands, but our capital allocation falls short of what I assess that we need to move the service forward.