FOR the third successive year Scotland’s spending watchdog has had to admonish Police Scotland and the Scottish Police Authority (SPA).

The Auditor General for Scotland, Caroline Gardner, was clearly frustrated with the nation’s policing bodies as she outlined both financial failings and concerns about transparency. Such were the problems with the state of the SPA and Police Scotland’s finances that the Audit Scotland team had to put in significant extra work – essentially helping the agencies do their books. The SPA is £20.5million over budget for 2015-16 and has only reduced that to a less alarming £1.2m overspend through use of an accounting trick which the Scottish Government permitted exceptionally, offsetting a capital underspend against the huge revenue overspend.

Meanwhile Ms Gardner is demanding the authority provides much more clarity about the way Police Scotland’s £1.1bn budget is being spent. It is not good enough that such an important public body is effectively concealing this information from effective scrutiny.

A hugely worrying example is the £50m additional money awarded to the force, intended to enable one-off reforms, but a considerable amount of which – according to Ms Gardner – was simply “absorbed” into day-to-day spending.

The announcement by Ms Gardiner that the SPA can expect to have a cumulative deficit of more than £188m by the end of the current parliament is symptomatic of her dismay. She had no need to publish this figure, and it can be read as a deliberate wake-up call.

In fairness, it is three years since the national force was created and some problems may have been inherited from previous police services. There is also an element of constraint from central government. Police Scotland is victim of a populist policy which guaranteed an arbitrary 1000 police officers more than the figure inherited by the SNP Government, and compulsory redundancies are blocked. Such political demands – which have no direct link with the outcomes Police Scotland delivers – make its job harder, when staffing costs are a major part of the challenge. But financial leadership and management have been weak from the outset at the single force. Enough time has passed for the SPA to get to grips with such issues. Yet still, records of property, buildings and other assets appear to have been poor and Audit Scotland had to correct “numerous” errors, Ms Gardner says.

Police Scotland has been through significant change this year. There is a new Chief Constable. There is a new SPA chair, Andrew Flanagan, who thankfully is an accountant by trade. Mr Flanagan says there is more work to be done, but he is confident new arrangements will work. They need to.

This cannot go on. Three years is long enough to bed in new systems and structures. Accounting tricks are not sustainable and promises of reform are becoming tired. The morale of frontline officers is already being undermined by the ongoing financial uncertainty, and the confidence of the public is being affected too.

It may be the season of goodwill, but goodwill is rapidly running out for Police Scotland and the SPA.