Force Funding

Our Force intranet has lots of bleak content about the troubles we face in the coming years due to lack of Government funding and council tax precept caps of 5%. But why is our force one of the lowest centrally-funded entities out of all of them? I am all for efficiency gains and reducing carbon footprints, but I'm troubled by the prediction we will by 2011 be almost £20,000,000 short of funding. We're not talking sofa-change here. That's an incredible amount of money.

When it's not busy at night, I'll wander around our station turning off tens, or even hundreds of computers that are not being used. I'll turn off lights, close fire doors that have been wedged open, shut windows and turn down or off air conditioning and heating systems. When I think of the amount of waste just in electricity of our force, when you multiply the number of actions I take, over our entire county with the probably, 40 or 50 buildings we own, it makes me wonder if the funding gap isn't of our own doing. Yet, the likes of the 'big forces' (MPD, GMP etc) get what seems like an unlimited pit of money just thrown at them. Why should they be special when ultimately we all do the same thing, but we have to do it on a shoestring with no guarantees of no redundancies?

Speaking of reducing carbon footprints, I think I'll walk to the next job.