Flanagan Review of Policing

The Home Office, HMIC, ACPO, APA and the NPIA should clarify and re-design their roles and responsibilities to remove duplication and sharpen incentives and accountability for performance and productivity. They should set out their proposals to the National Policing Board in July 2008.

Building on recommendation 5 of the interim report, the NPIA should also begin building standard processes for use across forces. They should address the issue of double entry of information and be used as a precursor to the use of standard IT systems and mobile devices across all forces. This work should include the creation of minimum standards for forces in areas such as GIS mapping and AVLS corporate performance information. Forces should explore the benefits of software systems and using partners’ data to identify priority areas.

The Home Office should include in its forthcoming Green Paper consultation on the establishment of service-wide consistency of the implementation of standard systems and processes. The Green Paper should also specifically consult on the issue of whether the Home Office should mandate regional collaboration on issues such as procuring IT systems, Air Support, Fleet, Uniform etc.

The NPIA should produce an interim evaluation report from the workforce modernisation pilot sites by autumn 2008 so that the service is not denied valuable learning pending the final report.

The Home Office should set out its strategy for workforce reform in the forthcoming Green Paper, and the NPIA should facilitate the development of a ten-year workforce plan for the service. Both of these pieces of work should emphasise the importance of matching skills and aptitudes to roles and tasks.

The NPIA should conduct a review of the Integrated Competency Framework on behalf of the tripartite partners to ensure that it is a useful and accessible tool for police managers and staff.

The NPIA should provide guidance and assistance to police staff and officers to allow them to progress their careers within the police service through better management of their professional development.

Chief Constables should conduct a review of their forces’ working practices within Neighbourhood Policing to ensure flexible working options exist. HMIC will, as part of its inspection process, consider what progress has been made in this area from 2009/10.

Detailed modelling of the impact of workforce reform on local, regional and national resilience should be incorporated into the ten-year workforce plan to be coordinated by the NPIA.

The NPIA should work with forces on a post implementation review of the SOLAP workplace assessment and accreditation process, which the Greater Manchester Constabulary has offered to lead.

All existing doctrine, which includes regulations, codes of practice, operational policing manuals and practical advice on best practice in the police service, should be reviewed and consolidated so the total impact can be assessed and overlaps in individual documents removed by the end of 2008. This process should be led by ACPO, with support from the NPIA, on behalf of the service. The NPIA should play an ongoing role in considering all proposals to enhance doctrine. Their focus should be on the combined impact of changes to the service and the development of a protocol of ‘review and replace’ rather than continually adding to existing doctrine.

APACS should centre on the Government’s high-level priorities, drawing its indicators directly from the PSAs, supported by a small number of high level indicators on areas not covered in the PSA suite such as productivity and some suitably defined performance indicators on serious crime and counter terrorism. HMIC should collaborate with the Home Office to develop high level productivity measures for use in the 2010 APACS assessments. In conjunction with these measures, by 2010 forces should develop data useful for them to understand their performance and productivity.

The government’s recently established Risk and Regulation Advisory Council should examine the role of risk within the police service, and begin a national debate on risk aversion and culture change at a central government level. Ministers, senior police leaders and stakeholders from the wider judicial system all need to engage in and take forward this debate. ACPO and the other tripartite members should facilitate regional events on risk in the police service to engage staff and officers from all ranks in the debate on managing risk, and enhancing professional discretion and accountability. These events should include a practical discussion on existing processes in the police where little or no discretion exists. The NPIA should take forward and ‘mainstream’ the outcome of these events as a ‘golden thread’ in the way it designs training, education and doctrine for the police service.

To achieve the dual goal of public trust and confidence in crime statistics by ensuring all incidents and crimes are recorded and proportionately responded to, I recommend that: (a) A new streamlined recording process is trialled from the beginning of 2008, for a four month period. This new process will ensure that crimes are subject to proportionate recording, with a suitable minimum standard for all crimes and more comprehensive recording for serious crimes; (b) A structured project is undertaken to address the lack of proportionate response in the service and to create a community focused performance regime for local crime; (c) These proposals are implemented initially by Staffordshire, Leicestershire, West Midlands and Surrey forces who have volunteered in this regard; and (d) The NPIA undertake a focused evaluation of these pilot sites. Over this trial period, service wide data collected centrally may not be comparable. Any NCRS/NSIR audit and inspection regime must acknowledge the nature of the pilots and the potential wider benefits of more proportionate crime recording. The Home Office should use its forthcoming Green Paper as an opportunity for public debate and consultation on proposals to amend the Notifiable Offences List, and complete a comprehensive review of it by the end of 2008.

I support the roll out of the Simple Speedy Summary Justice Initiative, and recommend that the Streamlined Process, Virtual Courts and Integrated Prosecution teams, be implemented nationally by 2012, taking into account lessons learned from each pilot and the local business case for implementation. (a) The Crown Prosecution Service and ACPO should jointly work towards a single case file system within the framework of the Integrated Prosecution Teams. (b) The Home Office, OCJR and Attorney General should work together to ensure that targets and performance indicators for the Police and Crown Prosecution Service are brought into alignment and set against the core objective of convicting the guilty. This should be achieved through the next spending review process. (c) I welcome the news that the NPIA is putting better working between the police and the criminal justice system at the centre of its plans and that OCJR will continue with their comprehensive and radical review of the criminal justice processes. Further opportunities to achieve the government’s new PSA target to “increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the criminal justice system” should include consideration by these bodies of: (1) the proportionality of current disclosure rules; (2) simplifying current guidance on charging powers for the police; and (3) the extension of police charging powers to all cases heard at the magistrates’ court, and to additional offences subject to trial, either at the magistrates’ or the crown court.

The Home Office should urgently initiate a review of the RIPA Codes of Practice. Once initiated I see no reason why with determination and commitment from the interested parties involved such a review could not be conducted over a 3 month period.

The current comprehensive form for Stop and Account should be removed and replaced with the following measures: (a) Any officer who asks an individual to account for themselves should provide that individual with a ‘receipt’ of the encounter in the form of a business card or similar, and use Airwave to record the encounter, including the ethnicity of the person subject to the encounter to enable disproportionality monitoring; and (b) Supervisory officers should ‘dip sample’ these recordings. These proposals should be piloted in the West Midlands and evaluated by the end of summer 2008.

The Home Office and CLG should consider how best to support improved community safety partnership working in two-tier areas, in particular encouraging greater collaboration between local partnerships to enhance their capacity to deliver key community safety services. As the new Local Area Agreements are rolled out, the Home Office and CLG should also consider how best to support the delivery of tailored neighbourhood community safety outcomes.

The Home Office, CLG and WAG should put in place proper governance and programme support arrangements to deliver the Action Plan which will promote the closer integration of Neighbourhood Policing with a neighbourhood management approach. These arrangements should be in place by autumn 2008.

To promote improved partnership working and the closer integration of Neighbourhood Policing within a neighbourhood management approach, the relevant local government and policing agencies (NPIA, IDeA, LGA, Welsh LGA and Regional Improvement and Efficiency Partnerships (RIEP)) should develop a national leadership and training resource through a joint excellence programme. These bodies should explore whether the REIPs can provide funding for the programme. This national resource will build local partners’ capacity to deliver shared community safety outcomes through joint training and development for both leaders and practitioners.

Recognising that the Single Non-Emergency Number programme has acted as a catalyst for improved partnership working, the Home Office and CLG should ensure that learning from the programme is shared with all community safety partners and identify how to encourage and incentivise the mainstreaming of this approach into local operations. This process should be completed by August 2008.

Chief constables and senior community safety partners should ensure that effective leadership, tasking and direction of neighbourhood resources are vested in the most appropriate individual, irrespective of the organisation for which the individual works.

The Home Office should urgently examine its requirement for each force to undertake Activity Based Costing with a view to this requirement being replaced with an alternative which costs less, is easier to use and has greater impact on productivity. It should also assess alternative ways of meeting its information requirements regarding the allocation of police funding.

The NPIA should, by April 2008, have agreed a funded programme for the next three years to continue to support forces to embed Neighbourhood Policing.

ACPO, the APA and the NPIA should develop a broad set of principles for minimising abstraction from neighbourhood policing teams by April 2008. These should be adopted by all forces no later than June 2008. Progress will be reviewed in.

The APA, with the support of the NPIA, should develop guidance for police authorities on how they can promote and sustain Neighbourhood Policing. This guidance should be be completed by July 2008. HMIC, the Audit Commission and the Wales Audit Office should assess, as part of police authority inspection, how well police authorities contribute to embedding and sustaining Neighbourhood Policing and its outcomes.

CLG’s Cohesion Delivery Framework (to be published in Summer 2008) should provide support and guidance to local partners on the key role Neighbourhood Policing teams play in improving cohesion, and on how that role can be developed further locally.

The Home Office should support HMIC, the Audit Commission, forces and police authorities in developing a statistical profile for each force, similar to those used successfully in local government and the health service, which would include comparable high level data on staff numbers, objective costs and key management ratios. Prototypes of these profiles should be prepared by autumn this year, with final versions available by autumn 2009.

The allocation of grant funding to police authorities should be based transparently on objective need in order to better match resources to threat and demand. To achieve this, the Home Office should move towards a fuller application of the funding formula in future Spending Reviews, phasing out the existing damping mechanism of floors and ceilings. To better address the demands of protective services, the protective services steering group should consider top-slicing funding. In the longer term, the Home Office should seek agreement with ACPO and APA on a revision to the funding formula that better deals with the shifting demands of protective services.

Where police authorities determine that a sound business case exists for voluntary merger, every effort should be made by Government to facilitate this process.

Forces should review their demand profiles, taking account of more detailed information now available, to ensure that resources are deployed to areas of greatest risk and priority. HMIC should use this information in inspections from 2009-10.

Forces should focus effort on ‘high potential’ areas for improved productivity, such as demand management (where QUEST has highlighted areas for improvement), procurement and flexible working. HMIC will be looking for evidence of using best practice in inspections from 2009-10

Chief constables should ensure that they are taking an entrepreneurial approach to policing, not just in ethical income generation through private sector sponsorship and business enterprise, but also through encouraging finance directors to create and exploit ‘business opportunities’.