WOULD you like to see 200 extra officers on the beat in Dorset? Not backroom civilians but real coppers who visit your street and who don’t cost an extra penny in tax?

In Essex it’s already happening. One year ago the force launched Operation Apex following a police authority decision to find the money to recruit an additional 600 officers. They concentrated on income generation, recruiting partnership sponsors and good, old-fashioned cost-cutting.

Director of finance Rick Tazzini said the force had saved money on fuel, stationery and refreshments. Instead of allowing officers to fill up force cars where they fancied: “We asked officers to fill our cars at supermarkets wherever possible,” he said. This lead to a £50,000 saving in fuel costs alone, which funded an extra police officer.

They also looked into the cost of entertaining; slashing the price they were prepared to pay for tea, coffee and biscuits. “We have also recently introduced a very strict policy on where and when we offer hospitality,” said Mr Tazzini. “Over-generous hospitality was costing us £120,000 per year.”

Apex was the brainchild of former Chief Constable of Essex Roger Baker. At the time he pointed out that rolling out the scheme across the UK could see an extra 20,000 officers recruited, if more “barmy projects” were scrapped.

All over the country local authorities of all political hues are showing they can make cuts which are almost invisible.

In Portsmouth the city council has saved money simply by banning staff access to Facebook, Bebo, Twitter and eBay after discovering that 400 hours of working time each month – the equivalent of two full-time jobs – was squandered by staff trawling these sites.

Back up in Essex again, in January last year, the county council raised £375,000 by selling off the personalised number plate F1, registered to the leader of the council’s car since 1904. The proceeds were spent on road safety schemes for young people.

In Leeds the city council saved £30,000 a year by scrapping its bottled water dispensers and encouraging workers to use tap water, instead.

Scores of councils across the country are now contemplating switching off street lights for part of the night.

Considering that Poole’s annual bill is around £800,000 and Bath and North East Somerset reckons it could save nearly half of its £790,000 annual bill by a switch-off, you can immediately grasp the savings that could be made.

The London borough of Barnet has a different approach still. Officials are hoping to trial the same business model as budget airlines like easyJet, in a move dubbed “easyCouncil”, to charge the public for extras on top of a free, no-frills service.

Barnet wants householders to pay extra to jump the queue for planning consents, in the way budget airlines charge extra for priority boarding. “Some things will be cheap and cheerful and in other areas we will provide complete services,” said council leader, Mike Freer.

“This is not about rolling back the frontiers of the state, but about targeting our interventions.”

Two-thirds of the public services delivered by local authorities have been slashed by a rough average of 10 per cent a year over the last three years. In a recent opinion poll conducted by Populus for The Times, no less than 84 per cent of those asked expected “significant cuts” no matter who won the next election.

However, it is the nature of those cuts that will become the focus for debate and that goes for every local authority in Dorset, too.

In the next few weeks we’ll be looking in detail at every local council in this area, we’ll tell you what cuts they need to make and where they’re thinking of making them.

However, we want you to come up with your own ideas. Have you spotted a way your council could save money?

Or do you work for a local authority and know a way to cut costs? We want our readers to email or write to us with sensible and imaginative ways they think our councils could save money.