Monitoring News
Every month our Managing Director, Steve Kimber, fills us in on the latest monitoring news.
 |
This Connections feature has an accompanying RSS Feed. To subscribe to this RSS Feed...click here. |
Below is an archive of the previous year's monthly columns or click here for earlier news columns.
| March 12 | February 12 | January 12 |
| December 11 | November 11 | October 11 |
| September 11 | August 11 | July 11 |
| June 11 | May 11 | April 11 |
Connections
July 2010
Well we’ve had the emergency budget against the backdrop of the worst financial deficit in living history and Government appears to be throwing open the doors of Whitehall for a complete transformation of how Government is funded and works.
It necessarily follows that savage cuts will follow in Government spending in the public sector and it will inevitably focus on spending cuts in police force areas. It would not be unreasonable to question the current structure and how policing is delivered in the UK with view to moving to a similar platform as the Fire & Rescue Services.
In our own County, Hampshire Constabulary had already found £6M in savings when it was asked to find another £3.2M and the same is being asked across the UK of other forces. With an undertaking not to deplete front line officers it will probably result in many civilian support and back office staff becoming casualties in due course.
One aspect of police services that surely must be crying out for a national solution is that of issuing URN’s. When many bodies in the UK already provide for online purchase of Standards or Certificates of compliance covering the whole of the UK, it is not inconceivable that a national URN online application process could be adopted prefixing the URN with a County reference.
The online system could easily integrate with existing command and control systems without the need for human intervention, so with a little investment significant ongoing costs could be saved as has been demonstrated by other organisations such as NSI, SSAIB and BSI.
However it’s very easy to identify savings elsewhere, but we all owe it to ourselves to use this time to seriously review the needs of our own businesses and to cut out wastage and streamline, not only for the current economic climate, but also for that which is yet to come.
In the words of author and entrepreneur Alex Pratt "Never buy what you can lease, lease what you can rent, rent what you can borrow and borrow what you can find in a skip" (read more).
Times are hard, certificate returns for both NSI and SSAIB are down, and installers are feeling the pinch. But providing the recession doesn’t become a depression, our industry should survive as it has done in the past.
Bye for now,
Steve