Police Scotland support staff are facing further redundancies next year as the force attempts to balance its books in 2015/16, Chief Constable Sir Stephen House has told MSPs.

The organisation has an overall strategic target of saving £1.1 billion by 2026, Holyrood's Justice Committee heard.

"We are internally very confident that we will meet that strategic target," Sir Stephen said.

He warned that the path ahead is "not smooth" and there is no area - except police officers numbers, which are protected - which will not be considered in order to make savings.

Police Scotland is already on course to balance its budget for 2014/15, with savings in the region of £60 million. A similar level of savings is also required for 2015/16.

"We have said we are anticipating some real challenges next year in the budget to balance it," Sir Stephen said.

"We have identified what we saved last year, what we are on course to save this year and what we expect the gap to be next year, and it is all around the mid-60s basically."

About 2,000 civilian staff have been cut through voluntary redundancies and early retirement schemes since 2009.

Sir Stephen said further cuts in this area were likely but there was "no specific target" on numbers.

There are already plans to reduce the number of police control rooms.

"Inevitably there will be more voluntary redundancies, early retirements in that area, because the staff know what our plans are going forward with control rooms," Sir Stephen said.

There are also plans to review custody centres.

"That may result in the reduction of some civilian staff and we will continue to look at all the other functions we carry out such as finance, HR and ICT to see if we can be more efficient with our budget," he added.

"That might mean offering more redundancies to more civilian staff, so, yes, I anticipate there will be more reductions in civilian staff."

Savings could also be made by reducing the force's property portfolio, improving the energy efficiency of buildings and the vehicle fleet, Sir Stephen told MSPs.

Reviews of IT and communications systems, the procurement of contracts, overtime for police officers and the number of senior ranked officers would also be looked at.

"There is no area that we won't consider looking at to balance the budget," Sir Stephen added.