Contemporary police leadership operates in a highly scrutinised and ever-changing environment. This is particularly so since 2010 and the advent of the Comprehensive Spending Review’s announcement of a 20 per cent reduction in central police funding, equating to a saving requirement of £2.4 billion for police constabularies in England and Wales. With an average of 70 per cent of police funding coming from central government, the scale and impact of the cuts to British policing are unprecedented. The increasing financial pressures have necessitated significant organisational and operational reform, and constabularies have had to make concerted moves to understand and reduce demand (Neyroud, 2011a; HMIC, 2014). Despite the political rhetoric of ‘protecting the front line’, from 2010 to 2018, police officer strength fell by over 21,330, reaching the lowest number of officers since comparable records began in 1996 (Hargreaves et al, 2018; Allen and Zayed, 2019). Police organisations have also had to make fundamental changes to how policing activity is organised and delivered. Police force amalgamation and regionalisation, privatisation, and partnership working are now normalised as ‘business as usual’ (Manning, 2014; O’Neill, 2014). Combined with other policy reforms, such as changes to police pay and pensions following the Winsor Review (Winsor, 2011), this means that increasing productivity within the context of diminishing resources and the management of low staff morale is an accepted feature of contemporary police leadership (Brogden and Ellison, 2013; De Maillard, 2015). These economic challenges are situated as the responsibility of police leadership, with HMIC (2013: 20) confirming that ‘leaders will need to demand more of fewer people, ensuring they can work in different ways, against a backdrop of fewer opportunities to advance, and less advantageous conditions’.
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