Police Scotland

I alerted my faithful readers to the Scottish Tories' use of Freedom of Information requests only yesterday when they were doing a bit of NHS-bashing that didn't stand up to serious scrutiny. Today it's the turn of Police Scotland to get the Tory treatment, as reported here on the BBC Scotland website:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-38491433

The big headline is: Compensation paid out by Police Scotland has hit record levels, according to new figures. No figures are given, of course, to show how the figures have increased on last year or previous years.

Now you must know from press and TV comments in the past couple of weeks that Police Scotland is in trouble financially - it is £17.5 million overspent this year. Police Scotland is a massive organisation with 23,000 staff. It is still 'rationalising' its staff and its spending after putting all of Scotland's police forces under one banner. Savings were bound to take a while to kick in. For example, you can't decide on Monday that you're going to cut the number of police call centres and have the cuts and the staff savings in place by Friday. When there are to be cuts, there are workplace consultations to go through. The Police Federation has to be consulted so that police officers are sure their interests are safeguarded. Officers have to be given the chance to move to other posts if their current post is abolished. Funding has to be found if they are to be allowed to retire. All this is perfectly normal in any industry.

Yesterday, Police Scotland was getting a bashing for wasting money on Gaelic. The Gaelic Act was introduced in 2005 (I'm sure you'll remember Labour were in charge at Holyrood then). The aim of the Act - an aim I totally agree with - is to 'normalise' Gaelic as part of life in Scotland. One aim of the Act is for all public authorities to have a Gaelic Plan. Eleven years - that's eleven years - after the Act became law, the police are doing their plan. (I'm not being nasty here: the Gaelic Act was intended to be phased in and it just happens to be Police Scotland's turn now). Here are their aims: Police Scotland want police officers in areas where Gaelic is spoken to learn the language and will help them with that. No one will be forced to learn the language. Police Scotland will have dual-language signage on notepaper and forms and on police cars and other vehicles. End of. To listen to the press, every officer in Police Scotland is to be bilingual within five years (if they manage to do that, as a one-time language teacher I'd like to know how) and dual-language signs are going to be everywhere - and expensive. Newspaper reporters and people who write furious letters to newspapers have failed to notice that costs have already been assessed and changes are designed to be 'cost neutral.'

So what is today's headline telling us? In 2015/6, 'the force paid out £1.27million in damages as a result of 516 claims.' That's £1.27m out of a budget of £1.1billion.  I did it for the NHS allegations yesterday but I can't even be bothered to get the calculator out to work out what that comes to as a percentage. Not very much. Even the Tory spokesperson admitted the amount of money and the numbers of claims involved are very low but:

" (Police Scotland pay out) compensation payments on hundreds of occasions each year." And that means: "every day there is at least one incident which results in taxpayers' money being used to compensate for an error or incident." As we saw yesterday, big numbers are used to give us a shock but it all boils down to very little on analysis.

So the Tories' assertions are not true and Police Scotland is not as spineless as the NHS when it comes to standing up for itself - see the article on the BBC news website - even pointing how much money it claims back from car insurance companies whose insured drivers hit police vehicles.

But I would like a couple of minutes to consider these Freedom of Information requests. The Tories (and the LibDems) have become quite adept at making these requests and then using them to try to fool the public into thinking Scotland's public services are going to hell in a handcart. Who pays for these FOI requests? The Tories are great at telling us it's all about safeguarding the taxpayers's money. Are they doing that? Every FOI request has to be written by a member of an MSP's office staff (paid for by the taxpayer), filed with the public body it's aimed at and dealt with by a member of staff (paid for by the taxpayer). If all the Tories can come up with is the stuff here and in my previous post, I'm not sure we're getting value for money.

Not from the public bodies. From the Tories.