Speaking to the HR Forum on the Arcadia last month, Martin Tiplady, HR director of the Metropolitan Police Service, warned the audience that today’s HR professionals had been trained for “yesterday’s model” and that practitioners were often seen as “peripheral, rule-based and not getting it”. The latter criticisms make them vulnerable to accusations of being too expensive for the actual value they provide to organisations, he said.

One measure by which the expense of HR is considered is the staffing ratio of HR professionals to employees, which widely varies within UK organisations, from extremes of 1 to 35 to “world-class HR” at 1 to 130. He said HR “will not survive” unless departments can achieve a ratio of 1 to 100. In his own organisation, HR staffing will go to 1 to 100 this year, increasing to 1 to 110 next year as the Met undergoes an HR transformation.

Changes underway in the London police authority have seen HR staffing fall by 330 jobs over the last 12 months to around 580. However, HR services will become more accessible to weekend and shift Met employees via a 24-hour HR service, which will be implemented in the second half of the year. “Criminals don’t work 9 to 5 Monday to Friday,” Tiplady said wryly.

Tiplady told Recruiter that the 24-hour HR operation will be call centre-based, staffed by a total of 60 people. “At the peak, we will have 24

in there,” he said. The call centre staff’s primary function will be to guide callers to self-service HR tools but a skeleton staff of HR specialists will also be on hand around the clock to deal with emergency situations.