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Sara Mendes Da Costa, voice for the speaking clock
Police spent £35,000 calling the speaking clock, voiced by Sara Mendes Da Costa (above). Photograph: Rex Features
Police spent £35,000 calling the speaking clock, voiced by Sara Mendes Da Costa (above). Photograph: Rex Features

£35,000 on the speaking clock? Spend the time reporting real data

This article is more than 12 years old
The Met Police's bill for the speaking clock is in the news. But should it be?

We now know, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, that the Metropolitan Police has spent more than £35,000 on calls to the speaking clock in the last two years.

What wasters of our public money these profligate policemen are, eh? But that FOI request just scratches the surface – and isn't even needed to suggest other areas where significant amounts of our cash are being blown.

Some examples: assuming everyone in the Met drinks two cups of tea per shift, the force's annual bill on teabags alone will top £65,000. Allowing a modest four toilet rolls per year per officer gives a yearly bill of £34,000+. I'd keep going, but we may need to save some of these for a boost on a slow news day.

If you detected a (substantial) dollop of sarcasm above, congratulations. There's no doubt spending £35,000 on calls to the speaking clock, in an age where every mobile phone and PC constantly displays the time, seems ridiculous. But the number perhaps warrants closer examination.

The key issue, as hinted at in the (somewhat facetious) examples above, is that the Metropolitan Police is a huge organisation: it has more than 35,000 officers and PSCOs, plus more than 13,000 civilian staff. Even trivial amounts of spending per officer quickly adds up.

So what does the spend on the speaking clock represent? The force spent £16,879 on calls to the service in 2010/11. At 31p per call, that's just under 54,500 calls over the year.

That works out as 1.5 calls to the speaking clock for each officer, or in other words represents each officer in the force using the service just once or twice each year.

Is that unreasonable? Accurate time is occasionally important to police, when noting chronologies in reports or ahead of operations.

It's not hard to imagine police officers needing to sync their watches (or phones) on particular operations on occasion, or perhaps occasionally mistrusting their computer's clock when trying to timestamp a report.

Given the wages of a typical police officer (national average £38,918 for sergeant or below), if such a phonecall saves even a minute of an officer's time, it's an overall cost saving to the public.

Buying even a cheap watch for each officer would cost considerably more: a £10 watch per officer would likely keep bad time and cost in excess of £340,000 – and so have to last 18 years to make any cost saving whatsoever, even assuming zero staff turnover.

The example might be trivial, but highlights the dangers of grabbing eye-catching numbers out of context. The Metropolitan Police is a huge organisation with a budget in excess of £4 billion each year. Given its scale, there is huge scope for aspects of its spending, outside of context, to look ridiculous.

No doubt there are areas of waste within the organisation, and elsewhere in the public sector. But grabbing numbers without putting them in context fires heat but not light, at a time when the public sector faces significant cuts in budgets and staff.

In such a climate, journalists and experts are best placed demystifying public spending and budgets.

Picking on flashy-but-meaningless numbers for an admittedly fun news story has, if anything, the opposite effect.

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