Police productivity

The Home Office should build on its recent analysis of police forces? financial resilience to improve its understanding of the scale and causes of financial stress and risks faced by forces. To achieve this, it should: agree a standardised template with policing to collect consistent and timely financial and performance data, focusing on key risk indicators.

The Home Office should support police forces to accelerate the benefits from adopting innovative practices and technology by: working with the College of Policing and other stakeholders to: roll out the new diagnostic tool in 2026-27 to all 43 police forces to test the potential to streamline police processes and make better use of data and analytics to manage demand.

The Home Office should support police forces to accelerate the benefits from adopting innovative practices and technology by: working with police forces to conduct an audit of the skills required to enable faster implementation of new technologies and use of AI.

The Home Office should support police forces to accelerate the benefits from adopting innovative practices and technology by: consolidating existing funding streams and reviewing mechanisms to support longer-term funding commitments.

The Home Office should support police forces to accelerate the benefits from adopting innovative practices and technology by: reviewing the feasibility of greater mandation to increase standardisation across police forces in order to create the conditions for more efficient procurement and adoption of new working practices

The Home Office should build on its recent analysis of police forces? financial resilience to improve its understanding of the scale and causes of financial stress and risks faced by forces. To achieve this, it should: repeat its financial resilience work and compare forces with similar characteristics to help identify the root causes of financial stress, including developing a view on variations in financial management capability across forces.

The Home Office should work with the NPCC and other key policing partners to conduct horizon scanning to identify potential changes that might affect policing, including changes at the local government level. Where potential new demands are identified, it should ensure that the potential impact is quantified and based on reliable data.

In taking forward its plans for police reform, the Home Office should review its approach to funding forces. It should use this review to set out a trajectory for moving to a funding approach that takes account of forces? current operational context and their capacity to meet the full range of government priorities. It could consider, for example, the proportion of funding that commissioners receive from local taxation, levels of demand, the relative efficiency of forces and levels of financial resilience

To achieve more ambitious savings and embed new working practices to improve police productivity, the Home Office should develop and embed an evaluation strategy in the Police Efficiency and Collaboration Programme. It should establish a programme of portfolio, thematic and longer-term evaluations to identify areas with the greatest potential to harness opportunities to improve police efficiency and productivity, and identify the conditions needed to achieve lasting changes in working practices across the 43 police forces.

The Home Office should build on its work to better understand the factors influencing police performance and productivity, by: establishing what aspects of police productivity are most relevant to the overall objectives it has set for policing.

The Home Office should build on its work to better understand the factors influencing police performance and productivity, by: bringing relevant data together to provide consistent, up-to-date data to better measure productivity within forces, including re-running the police activity survey.

The Home Office should build on its work to better understand the factors influencing police performance and productivity, by: incorporating productivity measures into its framework for measuring police performance.

The Home Office should support police forces to accelerate the benefits from adopting innovative practices and technology by: working with the College of Policing and other stakeholders to: strengthen its evaluation of potential new working practices and technologies to provide better information to police forces on the benefits, risks and practical steps needed to support adoption.