IOPC Review

The IOPC should continue to prioritise tackling its backlog of reviews and give due consideration to keeping in place the additional, temporary casework managers it has recruited, so it can far more quickly address its backlog and the long delays facing complainants.

The IOPC should review how it manages and mitigates risks in high-profile and large-scale investigations and ensure arrangements are in place to mitigate 'single points of failure' risks in its delegation framework.

The IOPC should review and clarify its procedures (and compliance with them) on end of review 'debriefs' to ensure potential learning is identified from every investigation.

The IOPC should consult with groups representing police officers and staff associations on whether, and how, it could improve how it engages with – and considers the wellbeing of – individuals under investigation. It is important adequate attention is given to the welfare of individuals under investigation as well as to the welfare of complainants and bereaved families.

The IOPC should review its communications and engagement strategy during investigations – with the public, complainants, police and stakeholders – to be as transparent and consistent as possible about the progress of its investigations and communicate with the public earlier (without prejudicing investigation outcomes and potential misconduct proceedings or criminal cases).

The IOPC should be more forthright in defending its role in ensuring police accountability, its work and processes, when it is justified in doing so. For example, it should not shy away from correcting public statements by police forces if they present misleading or inaccurate information to the media about ongoing or concluded IOPC investigations. Equally, it should publicly defend its work, decisions and staff where courts have found in the IOPC's favour in Judicial Review challenges brought against it.

IOPC investigators and any new Proceedings Support Units should prioritise: early engagement with CPS, police forces and coroners during investigations; maintaining high file quality; and prompt and thorough 'revelation' of materials to these parties as needed.

IOPC senior operational leaders should review IOPC investigator training in light of the findings of this Review, in particular to ensure familiarity with trauma-informed practice; stronger appreciation of policing environments (including through training alongside police forces, where appropriate); improved understanding of police powers, procedures and protections to individuals who may be subject to a criminal investigation (including through the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984).

The IOPC should formalise the use of subject matter networks ensuring adequate resources and governance.

The IOPC should develop a centralised strategic operational planning function with responsibility for horizon-scanning and projecting future demand for IOPC work.

The IOPC should review and update its Quality Assurance Framework and processes and benchmark its quality assurance activities against similar organisations.

The IOPC should discontinue the use of themes as a criterion in its decisions about which cases it will investigate independently. It does not have the requisite buy-in to justify their continued use in this way. It might be able to address this in part by more clearly explaining how it decides which cases should be independently investigated over others. But this would not address an inherent risk in using themes, that emerging issues are potentially overlooked at the expense of whatever attracts greatest public attention today.

The IOPC should review the consistency of the quality of its decision-making, evidence and investigation report clarity, through frequent dip-sampling of cases, and publish a summary of the findings of these assessments.

The IOPC should produce an annual quality report to be published at the same time as or alongside its Annual Report and Accounts, to report on its lessons learned and provide transparency on how it is measuring and improving quality within its processes.

The Home Office, Ministry of Justice and IOPC should consider and consult on options to make challenges to IOPC decisions more accessible, in particular whether the financial liability to cover the IOPC's legal costs should be capped if an application for Judicial Review of the lawfulness of an IOPC decision is rejected. If such a cap were rejected, an equally effective alternative must be introduced.

The IOPC should review the resilience and adequacy of its on-call arrangements, including whether further bespoke training should be offered to those who are on-call and whether it may be preferable to have a dedicated team or unit providing this service, in common with how many government departments and operational ALBs manage out of hours incidents.

The Home Office should carefully consider the merits and drawbacks involved before extending the IOPC's remit to cover an ever-wider range of organisations, in particular if its remit is extended without additional resource.

The IOPC's Board, together with the Home Office, should clarify its core purpose and how to further communicate and build understanding of this internally, among key stakeholders and the public. It should clarify, in particular, the extent of its role in focusing on individual complaints versus delivering improvements in general police practice and complaint handling, and the degree to which it holds the police accountable and the complex landscape around this.

The IOPC should consider, with its stakeholders, whether there is any direct measure of public confidence in the police complaints system as a whole, that it could seek the public's views on. This would more directly link to the IOPC's overall mission and statutory mandate.

The IOPC should use future iterations of its Public Perceptions Tracker to test public attitudes around the IOPC conducting significantly fewer independent investigations, and public support for the IOPC's increased focus on learning, even if this means conducting fewer independent investigations into serious police complaints and potential misconduct as a result.

The Home Office should work with the IOPC to consider the merits and implications of providing the IOPC (or other organisation) with a mandate – with commensurate legislative powers and resources – to follow up on the degree to which police forces and other bodies act on IOPC recommendations.

The Home Office, working with the Ministry of Justice, IOPC, HMICFRS, the College of Policing, NPCC, Chief Coroner and other partners, should identify all organisations with recommendation-making powers within the emergency services and criminal justice systems in England and Wales, and consider options for a more cohesive system – including a database or other collation – of recommendations and learning.

The Home Office should work with the IOPC to consider the merits and implications of providing the IOPC with the mandate and appropriate legislative powers, to enable it to routinely understand the outcome of referred conduct cases the IOPC decides should be investigated locally and thereby evaluate its mode of investigation decisions.

The IOPC should reconsider its senior structure and corporate functions as soon as possible.

The IOPC should reduce the number of senior leadership positions filled on an acting basis as soon as possible.

The IOPC should rationalise the number of ad hoc groups it convenes and ensure its management structure and governance can accommodate issues as they arise.

The IOPC should strengthen its programme management approach and its governance of change.

The IOPC should consider what can only be done by the centre and what can be best delivered regionally. It should consider the feasibility of moving to a national operating model across its key operations, whilst preserving effective regional outreach. It should consider the place of the Metropolitan Police in this model.

The IOPC should publish on its website – and proactively share with the Home Office – all data on Key Performance Indicators it collects, to facilitate scrutiny of its performance and improve its public accountability. It should move to publish all anonymised performance data by default unless there are compelling reasons not to.

The IOPC should develop and publish on its website a monthly performance report that meaningfully facilitates transparency and external scrutiny. This should include descriptions of its performance metrics and targets in plain English, intelligible to general members of the public. It should also provide comparisons with how its performance has changed and include commentary on what the IOPC attributes these changes to and, where applicable, what steps it is taking to improve its performance.

The IOPC should consider, as part of its organisational redesign, where responsibility for improving performance should sit.

The IOPC should establish an integrated performance report (bringing together operational and financial performance) to be used by senior management and Board. The Board should also consider how to incorporate quality insights into the same report and how it will assure itself of quality and performance.

The IOPC should develop a workforce strategy in tandem with a revised estates strategy, future operating model and revised medium-term financial plan, to ensure human resources and financial planning are delivered effectively. The IOPC should review its fixed term contracts and temporary promotions within a revised workforce strategy.

The IOPC should review the extent of training and look at opportunities for accreditation for its Casework Managers (who consider reviews) and Assessment Analysts (who decide which referred cases require an investigation and decide which cases the IOPC should investigate independently and which can be investigated by police forces or PCCs). It should consider seeking external input to quality assure samples of referral decisions.

IOPC senior management should monitor staff wellbeing closely and consider how else it can enhance support given to staff working on emotionally difficult cases.

The IOPC should review the nature and extent of the employee assistance support available for staff working on its most serious and sensitive cases particularly over long periods of time and the training it provides in relation to safeguarding and trauma informed response.

The IOPC should develop an organisational learning strategy.

The Home Office should change the IOPC's overall governance arrangements – through changes to legislation where necessary – so that: all functions of the IOPC are vested in the body corporate (Unitary Board) not a single person; a Non-Executive should be appointed as a Crown Appointment to provide leadership and to Chair a Unitary Board; Non-Executive Directors, one of whom will be a senior independent director, are appointed by Ministers; the Senior Independent NED should have a defined role in line with best governance practice; the Non-Executives appoint a Director General/Chief Executive who, subject to the Principal Accounting Officer's decision will normally be the IOPC Accounting Officer; and the Non-Executives appoint directors on the Director General/Chief Executive's recommendation, provided there is a majority of Non-Executive members.

The Home Secretary and Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee (HASC) should agree that, before a recommendation is made to the Crown, the appointment of an IOPC Chair is subject to pre-appointment scrutiny by the Committee.

The Framework Document governing the relationship between the Home Office and IOPC should set out the broad principles of how the IOPC's independence in decision making is protected while ensuring the IOPC can be held to account by Home Office. The revised framework should: acknowledge explicitly the need for independence in IOPC decision making while being accountable to Parliament for the way it functions and should set out in high level terms how both those needs are being met; summarise the information that will be shared routinely and the mechanisms for sharing that information; acknowledge an expectation that the Chair will routinely meet with Ministers and the Permanent Secretary to keep them informed of performance and strategic direction; and establish a single meeting between DG / CEO, senior sponsor and relevant staff with the purpose of sharing and discussing shared risks, holding each other to account for respective responsibilities and discussing performance.

The IOPC should conduct a formal Board skills assessment – and reflect on the current Board's experience, diversity of backgrounds and perspectives – to inform future Crown and Ministerial appointments to the IOPC (including DG/CEO, NEDs and potential Chair roles).

The IOPC should strengthen its governance by appointing a suitably qualified Board Secretary with responsibilities to lead, advise on and support the functioning of corporate governance.

The IOPC's Board should review its committee structure to consider: creating a remuneration committee to focus only on senior staff (staff reporting directly to the DG/CEO or who would be considered equivalent to a Senior Civil Service grade) remuneration and appraisal; creating a nominations committee to lead the process for appointments, ensure plans are in place for orderly succession to both the Board and senior management positions and oversee the development of a diverse pipeline of succession. The Board may consider the remuneration and nomination functions may be combined in a single committee; whether the Board would benefit from additional committees in assuring and scrutinising: performance; strategic planning; budget setting, investment decisions and financial investment; and change.

The Home Office and IOPC should review how it sets objectives and conducts appraisals for all Board members.

The Government should convene a senior working group – including the Home Office, Ministry of Justice, IOPC, police, CPS, Office of the Chief Coroner and HSE – to map key processes and identify common pinch points in police, IOPC, CPS and coronial activities. This group could consider: how to ensure or encourage proportionality at each stage (in particular in IOPC investigations and whether appropriate use is being made of existing accelerated procedures); options to hasten the conclusion of all such proceedings, including, where appropriate, legislative reform and time periods set out in law; whether a new MOU agreed between all parties could helpfully govern how they work together and what they expect from one another; and suitable performance metrics.

The IOPC should ensure an induction is in place for all new NEDs.

The IOPC should develop a Board Development Plan.

The IOPC Board should conduct an annual review of its effectiveness ensuring that, at least once every three years, this is conducted externally.

The Home Office and IOPC should prioritise a prompt review of the Framework document between them, to ensure that it empowers the IOPC to act within its legislative framework in respect to the publishing of strategies, business plans, annual reports and accounts. This should set clear expectations for how quickly the Home Office will review key IOPC documents to ensure it prioritises their far more timely publication, to facilitate scrutiny of its activities.

The IOPC Board should decide which areas it would be helpful to have a clearer articulation of strategy to shape its direction. We suggest that obvious candidates are: people, estate, finance, IT and stakeholder management.

The IOPC Board should adopt an emergent strategic planning approach, agreeing a refreshed and costed strategic and business plan on an annual basis.

The Home Office should consider its assurance needs in respect of the IOPC, how they are met and how they are reported to the Senior Sponsor and Principal Accounting Officer.

The IOPC Board should strengthen its engagement with critical stakeholder groups and consider how NEDs may contribute to that engagement.

The IOPC should more clearly articulate, in its Annual Report and Accounts, the main challenges or risks the IOPC faces and the actions it is taking to address them.

The IOPC should invite the Home Office to observe its Board and committee meetings – including the Audit and Risk Assurance Committee and new Quality Committee – at appropriate seniority, recognising that there will be some matters which should be considered in a closed session. The Home Office should make full use of insights gained through these observations.

The IOPC should consider internally, as part of a review of its operating model, whether and how the investigations' timeliness and quality might improve from introducing: specialised investigation teams. Examples might include: adverse incident or deaths in custody team; fatal uses of force team (firearms, taser, physical restraint); or a vulnerability unit to lead all mental health, child abuse, domestic abuse, sexual offences cases. Dedicated functional teams. Examples might include teams dedicated to: writing or quality assuring investigating reports; making investigation decisions; and engaging with external stakeholders on criminal, misconduct or coronial proceedings.

The IOPC should introduce a media dashboard, presented to the Board on a regular basis, to help Board members understand and monitor communications and engagement.

The IOPC should work with statutory stakeholders and complainants to improve its website to make it easier to navigate and find relevant information; improve engagement; make it more dynamic and intuitive; and provide clear explanations for how it decides which cases to investigate and the extent of its role in the police complaints and disciplinary system.

The IOPC should broaden and strengthen its communication with the public, beyond provision of text or spreadsheets of statistics on its website.

The IOPC should ensure all IOPC publications and statistical bulletins are easily understood by the public and facilitate greater scrutiny of local forces' data. For example, this could include executive summaries (and press releases) published online in plain English, with clear analytical insight into statistically relevant differences in forces' handling of police complaints.

The IOPC should make the statistics it publishes (including those on police complaints) dynamic and far more accessible to the public, to facilitate greater transparency and public scrutiny of police forces and IOPC performance in the police complaints system, for example, through a software Dashboard with data updated frequently, refining it iteratively, based on proactively sought feedback.

The IOPC and Home Office should make their statistics about police misconduct proceedings and related criminal proceedings more easily accessible, irrespective of which organisation is publishing the information.

The IOPC should consult the public and stakeholders as part of a review of its publication policy. It should publish full investigation reports by default (rather than investigation report summaries) and extend how long reports are available on its website to facilitate transparency and appropriate public scrutiny.

The IOPC should review how it communicates its role publicly and how it conducts its work including: its website, press releases, IOPC comments provided to media reports on its work, written materials provided to victims and those under investigation, and in person briefing to communities and stakeholder groups. It might consider consulting its users or convening a focus group or other forms of testing to establish which of multiple different potential descriptions of its role and processes are most easily understood.

The IOPC should track the proportion of reviews or investigations that are not completed because complainants pull out of the process, as well as the reasons given for this.

The IOPC should step up its efforts to counter a widespread perception that a majority of its staff are former police officers, by more prominently enhancing on its webpage its description of 'what we do'. Equally, it should explain the insight and value of employing some former police officers and staff.

The IOPC should consider embedding the following as core investigation principles: investigators should speak – or, even better, meet – with any complainant or bereaved family members at the outset of an investigation to understand what they want from the investigation; investigation terms of reference should not be drawn so wide that quality suffers as a result; investigation terms of reference (and investigation reports) should have a clear mission statement requiring investigators to establish preliminary findings of fact as quickly as possible (and before entertaining detailed representations from the parties and their lawyers, other than establishing what any complainants want) which can quickly obfuscate the matter at hand); investigators should draw from any findings of fact already made by a reputable source (e.g. court, inquiry or coroner) as their starting point; IOPC lawyers should be engaged early on (and advice sought from them where relevant) in cases that require specialist understanding of legislation, to establish and set out the relevant law in the investigation report; investigators should concentrate on the best method of establishing the facts or consolidating all of the evidence, rather than following a process that overly goes through the motions, where these are not relevant; all relevant parties – and not just the complainants, bereaved family and investigation subject – should have reasonable opportunity to participate in the investigation; all potential interviewees should be contacted at the earliest opportunity with an investigation and where appropriate given an opportunity to review excerpts of the draft investigation report; and the IOPC should ensure it always draws any relevant inference from a failure on the part of police officers or staff to cooperate fully with the investigation.

The IOPC should ensure all bereaved families are provided with its guide for families on how the IOPC investigates and supports them following a death and the deaths in or following police custody leaflet developed following the Independent Review of Deaths and Serious Incidents in Police Custody. It should routinely signpost support groups through its customer contact centre.

The IOPC should review its performance measures and what data it could collect from complainants on their satisfaction with the outcome and handling of IOPC reviews and investigations.

The IOPC needs to review all MOUs it has with key partners and stakeholders, starting with those organisations it works with most closely.

The Home Office – as the ultimate signatory to the Memoranda of Terms of Occupation with the Government Property Agency, and the IOPC's sponsor department – should support the IOPC by escalating unacceptably long delays the IOPC has faced in obtaining accurate invoices from the GPA for its Canary Wharf and Warrington offices.

The IOPC should develop a robust estates strategy, with clear plans for its accommodation needs, aligned to its future operating model, its Medium-Term Financial Plan and to a workforce strategy it should develop in tandem. At a minimum, its new estates strategy must: account for the degree to which staff need to be based in the operational region they support; forecast expected utilisation and attendance in light of future expectations for office, remote or hybrid working; reduce its geographical footprint; and include any investments required to deliver it.

The IOPC should refresh its Places for Growth strategy and explore options to move more of its staff out of London and the South-East, whilst also preserving dedicated engagement leads for MPS and other south-east police forces, complaints about which comprise over a third of IOPC independent investigations.

As part of its future operating model and new estates strategy, the IOPC should explore whether further savings can be made to its estates costs across its Sale, Birmingham, Cardiff and Wakefield offices.

The Home Office and IOPC should explore options to reduce IOPC exposure to its expensive Canary Wharf lease. In particular, the Home Office should consider: whether it could use any of IOPC's Canary Wharf desks for Home Office staff, at good value for money compared to its existing estate; and the potential merits – or not – of the Home Office absorbing some of IOPC's exposure, even if it increases the Home Office's own costs, in favour of putting the IOPC onto sustainable finances sooner than 2032.

The IOPC should defer purchase of any new vehicles until all GIAA recommendations on Fleet have been acted on, given underuse of existing fleet and inadequate oversight of fleet usage.

The IOPC should align its revised fleet strategy with a new estates strategy and its future operating model and consider using other modes of transport and car hire.

The Home Office should ensure the 'organisational police duty of candour' is designed in such a way to strengthen the IOPC's ability to infer from lack of candour on the part of police officers and staff during IOPC investigations.

The IOPC should review how it manages its commercial contracts, developing and implementing strong central identification and tracking of when contracts are coming to an end or might need to be re-tendered or renegotiated. Such tracking should assess risks from inflationary pressures and potential opportunities to potentially reduce costs during contract renegotiations.

The IOPC should develop a more robust tool for monthly tracking of efficiencies. This should be used to update annual and medium-term financial plans and the Board kept informed on whether efficiencies are being achieved. To inform its effective decision-taking, regular financial reporting to the Board could helpfully include a clear RAG status on risks to delivery against each planned efficiency and mitigations in place where delivery of efficiencies is off track, aligned to the MTFP and Risk Register.

In the revisions the IOPC is making to its Medium-Term Financial Plan, the IOPC should bring together more clearly pressures alongside its efficiency plans to understand overall impact, allowing for any risks or opportunities to be flagged and managed effectively.

The IOPC's revised Medium-Term Financial Plan should consider the risk and higher costs associated with any delay to the completion of the IOPC's Hillsborough investigations.

The IOPC Director General should review planned savings to staffing costs, in light of the Review's observations. They should consider whether, as IOPC Hillsborough investigations conclude, its skilled investigators could be redeployed to wider operational work to backfill investigators lost through turnover, or arrest, or indeed reverse, the steep decline in the number of other independent investigations the IOPC conducts annually.

The IOPC should urgently review and revise its medium-term financial plan (MTFP), with much more extensive input and challenge from across the organisation, including from the Board. This revised MTFP should make assumptions on pay increases, other inflationary pressures and demand more explicit, having tested and agreed these assumptions with the Home Office. Unless or until the Home Office advises otherwise, it should take as its premise that the IOPC's annual budget will be 5% lower in cash terms from the 2022/23 budget, to be achieved by the start of 2026/27 (with assumed funding of £65.1m in 2025/26). Best-case, base-case and worst-case scenarios and sensitivities that model different factors should be applied.

IOPC Finance should review how it delegates budgets to budget-holders, to avoid or significantly reduce the risk of 'baking-in' financial pressures by delegating more than the HO funding it receives.

The IOPC and Home Office should work together more closely to inform and constructively challenge and support IOPC's financial plans, consider what steps are necessary and in both parties' interest to put the IOPC onto a more sustainable financial footing and what activity and service it can provide with the funding it is given.

The Home Office must move away from focusing purely on the IOPC's bottom line and improve its analysis of the extent to which IOPC's delivery represents good taxpayer value for money in order to provide adequate assurance to the Home Office's Permanent Secretary, as Principal Accounting Officer, that public money is being managed effectively.

The Home Office Sponsorship Unit and the IOPC Finance must embed processes, with better sharing of management information and look to widen the performance measures IOPC uses to ensure it adequately manages its finances.

The Home Office should consider, in consultation with the IOPC, the merits and implications of options to address an apparent gap in the police complaints and disciplinary systems, to ensure learning is made and individuals held accountable where a death or serious injury during or following police contact is only narrowed averted. These should include whether the IOPC's statutory functions and/or powers should be extended (with commensurate additional funding) to cover these instances.

The IOPC should appoint a Finance Director to the Board without undue delay to provide greater financial leadership and ensure singular accountability for the organisation's financial planning.

The IOPC should explore the merits of sourcing an integrated finance and HR management system.

Finance discussions should receive higher priority and more time at IOPC Board meetings, to allow strategic discussion and challenge for effective decisions to be taken. Board members should have greater opportunity to interrogate IOPC Finances, its efficiency performance, risks, opportunities and investment proposals for efficient and effective decision-making.

Once a permanent IOPC DG is appointed, they should grip implementation of these recommendations (where agreed). They should provide progress updates to HASC, from April 2024.