ABSTRACT
Public sector organisations in all modern economies have found their budgets squeezed in the last few years following the Gershon report (Gershon, 2004) and the financial crisis from 2007.This has led to fewer resources available for the delivery of core and support services,with the Gershon report requiring approximately £2bn to be cut from Home Office budgets.The 2010 UK Government Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) announced a real terms cut in central Government funding grants for the 43 police forces in England andWales (HMIC, 2011; HM Treasury, 2010).The financial cuts mean that budgets in individual forces will have to be cut by between 9 and 14 per cent in real terms, but these cuts vary in magnitude across different forces.The HMIC estimated that between March 2010 and March 2015 the police workforce would be reduced by about 34,100 posts, half of which would be police officers.Other methods of achieving efficiency gains that are being tried include shared service centres, collaboration across forces, shift pattern reviews, neighbourhood remodelling and outsourcing.All services were reportedly looking at demand analysis as a means of becoming more efficient. This chapter studies the management of demand and capacity in public services,
looking initially at the relevant service management literature and its application to public sector operations. Following this review, we study demand and capacity management practices in the police services with a focused case study of the management of work flow in police custody suites in one region of England.We present data on demand patterns for these services and look at how this demand is met through the provision of both human and physical capacity in these custody suites.The workflow through the system has some similarity with the work flow through other complex service processes, such as emergency flows in healthcare.We will make these comparisons based on the data we have collected and determine whether or not there are lessons for the police in the ways that other sectors have tackled these issues.The main focus of attention concerns medium-term capacity planning,where resource profiles are normally developed to match seasonal changes in demand and make allowances for sudden spikes in demand.The case highlights
the similarities between this application of theory and those previously studied in healthcare. In this case study there are issues of flow management of offenders through the system and gains in resource utilisation through the pooling of demand into more centralised facilities are partly countered by a loss of control of whole system flow through the compartmentalisation of responsibilities and oversight.
