Wiltshire Police closing in on target as £5m saved so far
The Force has to save £6.8m this financial year
Wiltshire Police is making progress towards fixing its difficult financial situation.
The Force announced earlier this year that it would have to save a total of £6.8m in 2025/26 due to a funding shortfall.
While Wiltshire’s Chief of Police revealed in June that just over half the money (£3.6m) had been found so far, that figure has now gone up to almost three quarters.
Chief Constable Katherine Roper said: “We have now identified and/or found 73 percent of our savings need for this year.
“We have done that through our financial review programme which is tackling our estates, looking at our fleets and the last pillar of it is our people.”
This includes measures such as moving out of certain Police buildings and reducing the fleet to bring in a pool car system.
The biggest change, which has brought the Force “really strongly forward” in terms of the necessary savings, however, involves reducing the numbers of staff.
“I have tried to keep the impact on our people as small as possible. We have seen some redundancies. However, we have recognised that we do have some vacancies within the organisation and what we can do is not fill those vacancies”, explained the Chief Constable.
“So, we made a decision a couple of weeks ago to either freeze or remove a number of non-operational vacancies that are happening within the organisation.”
Chief Constable Roper stressed that all of those positions had been vacant for more than six months.
She also added that the changes will help the Force with upcoming budgets.
“By removing roles or freezing roles from the organisation, of course, we’re then beginning to look ahead into the following year because that will have an impact year on year and as we make the savings in the estates that will have an impact year on year.
“So, we’re actually laying the foundations now, not only to achieve our savings for this year but also for the next two years where we know we’re going to have to make more.”
In terms of officers, the Chief Constable remained adamant that she will not be reducing numbers.