Police Should Come Clean On Overtime

The cancellation of this year’s Glade Festival has led to many UK event organisers appealing to the police to come clean about how they calculate the overtime for covering them.

The 11,000-capacity event at Matterly Bowl, Winchester, which was scheduled for July 15-18, was scrapped after the local constabulary upped its policing charges more than six-fold from £29,000 to £175,000.

Nick Ladd, who co-founded Glade in 2004, says what irked the organisers most was the delays involved when dealing with Hampshire police.

“We’d ask for a meeting and it would take three weeks for them to come back to us. Then the meeting would be set for two weeks’ time. But the police we needed to meet wouldn’t be available and another officer would arrive, but not one with the authority to act on anything,” he told Pollstar, pointing out the organisers felt the police were almost stifling the process.

This year’s Glade festival was to feature dance acts including Tricky, Orbital, Delphic and Simian Mobile Disco.

Jim King from the Association Of Independent Festivals says there’s a need to lobby the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), which recommends guidelines on how local constabularies calculate the costs of policing.

He says a risk assessment based solely on the capacity – which appears to be the main yardstick – is flawed because it doesn’t appear to take the nature of the event into account.

King gives the example of a crowd of 10,000 people turning up with deckchairs and boxes of wine to see someone like Simply Red at a country house-style event being easier to police than a younger booze-fueled crowd of half that size at a heavy rock gig.

He believes the police need to explain how they’re scoring outdoor shows according to ACPO guidelines in order to calculate the costs. He says it would help create a better dialogue with the festival organisers.

“We’re not saying what they’re doing is wrong, but it’s far from clear that it’s right,” he said. He says Glade has shown there’s no consistency in the way the charges are calculated.

“If it’s gone from £29,000 in 2009 to £175,000 in 2010, then – whichever way it is – one of those figures has to be hopelessly wrong,” he said. “Surely they can’t be that far apart and both be right.”

Glade spent £20,000 on legal fees during the licensing process and more negotiating the police costs down to a little more than £90,000.

Ladd calculated that fulfilling the rest of the police demands – including having CCTV coverage of all areas, extra stewards, and the provision of a police base and a holding cell – would have put the total cost of security at around £330,000, or about £30 of every £135 ticket based on a sellout. The overtime cost for a single policeman worked out to £55 per hour.

The organisers pulled the plug in the middle of May because they still didn’t have confirmation that the police had agreed to reduce the charge to £90,000. Ladd says budgeting for the event had become impossible.

The decision came after the organisers and a very supportive local council spent an eight-hour meeting failing to reach any workable compromises with the police.

The festival has a good record on law and order, Ladd says, with only two public order offenses in its six-year history, although Ladd and his colleagues welcomed CCTV in the car park because last year it was the scene of 67 criminal offenses.

Sixty of them were for thefts from Vauxhall Nova cars, which had apparently been targeted by a gang that had the knack of getting into them without smashing any windows.

ACPO says it’s not in a position to comment on specific festivals, although it did release a statement on its guidelines that said: “Forces are encouraged to engage with event organisers at an early stage to give an indication of the likely police costs involved, and work to find ways of minimising the number of police required and charges made.”

It also says “the new guidance aims to provide a degree of uniformity and consistency for all types of events when it comes to assessing when charges should be made.”

“Each event is unique, and the decision to charge or not will depend on its specific characteristics. This includes the size of the event, its location, and a structured view of the risks to the community.”

It says the charges are based on the total cost of providing the policing service. This involves not just the basic salary costs of the officers involved, but other elements such as pension contributions, National Insurance costs and overheads such as transport and other insurance.

Spending on the police in England and Wales increased by 48 percent in real terms from £9.83 billion to £14.55 billion between 1999 and 2009, according to research that the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy carried out for the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies.

Just more than three quarters of the increased spending has been devoted to staffing expenditure, with rising numbers across the different staff sectors.

Overtime payments for police officers alone, excluding ancillary staff, rose by 90 percent from £209 million to £398 million in the same period.

The overall bill for police overtime increased from £247.5 million in 1998-99 to £466.5 million in 2008/09, according to the CCJS.