Written evidence submitted by the College of Policing
Introduction
The College of Policing’s role
The purpose of the College of Policing is to provide those working in policing with the skills and knowledge necessary to prevent crime, protect the public, and secure public trust.
The College of Policing has three complementary functions:
The College of Policing is the professional body for all those who work in policing. We are not a statutory body but we have a number of statutory functions, particularly in connection with the making of regulations and Codes of Practice relating to certain aspects of policing.
Our response
Our response reflects the Committee’s focus on what is required for policing to continue to provide the best service to the public in the future. It focuses on the changing nature of the demand placed on policing and the need to ensure the service is supported to meet that demand in the future.
The delivery of policing in the future is dependent on the skills, knowledge and professionalism of the policing workforce. The resources allocated to the police workforce account for approximately 80% of all police spending, which indicates the critical importance of the professionals who deliver policing. Advances in technology will bring both opportunities and challenges for policing in the future, but the development of the professionalism and expertise of those who work in policing will remain a priority in order for the police to best protect the public for years to come.
An annex which captures the thoughts of the Strategic Command Course (SCC) Graduates 2017 is included as part of the College’s submission. The SCC is a senior level training course facilitated by the College of Policing and this year’s graduates are operationally credible, professionally competent potential Assistant Chief Constables (or equivalent police staff grades) from across the UK and beyond. The views represented in this annex are those of SCC Graduates and do not reflect the College’s position.
Consideration of the Terms of Reference
Each of the inquiry’s Terms of Reference (marked in blue) are considered below and, where possible, they have been grouped together to provide a more coherent response. Many of the College’s strands of work overlap to achieve our key aim of equipping the workforce with the skills and knowledge they need to meet the future challenges to policing.
‘Reforms which may be necessary to ensure the police service has the ongoing capacity and capability to fulfil its primary task of ensuring public safety, in the face of new and evolving threats and challenges.’
‘The relationship between public expectations of the police, including desired visibility and perceived priorities, and the operational realities of policing within the current financial context.’
‘The extent to which the police are sufficiently equipped to deal with these changing patterns of crime and other operational demands, such as mental health crisis work, and where gaps in capacity and capability are likely to lie.’
The College undertook a wide ranging review of Police Leadership, to help ensure that the service was fit to face the challenges of the future. In its development the review considered many aspects of the Committee’s inquiry, including reform, the expectations of the public and the extent to which policing is equipped to deal with the changing patterns of crime. The final report captured views from staff at all ranks and grades, a cross-section of roles, and from organisations across policing. It also included input from successful leaders from academia, health, political, religious and commercial environments.
The Review suggested a need to focus on six broad areas of reform:
The report also made 10 recommendations which are being implemented across policing. All of these reforms are aimed at developing the policing profession in order for it to best meet the demands and changing patterns of crime. The key theme for all of the review’s findings is the value of increased professionalism.
The people who serve the public in high-risk environments, such as policing, have to exercise judgement to make difficult decisions about public safety every day. Prescriptive guidance and supervision cannot be provided for every eventuality in dynamic situations, so other means of assurance are needed. Established professions in the UK support their members and help assure the public that discretion is exercised appropriately by setting clear conditions of membership. These commonly include the use of a published specialist knowledge base, commitment to an ethical code, keeping up to date with professional development, and meeting an educational standard verified by nationally recognised qualifications.
While policing has taken steps in recent years to adopt these elements of a profession, there is still considerable work to be done to ensure it is prepared to meet the changes and challenges of the future. In order to meet the expectation of the public and ensure officers and staff are equipped to deal with changing patterns of crime, it is important for the policing profession to prioritise the following aspects of professionalism:
1) Work to establish, disseminate and implement the evidence base of ‘what works’ in policing and crime reduction, and the closer alignment of the inspection regime with this evidence base.
It is important for policing to work from a robust evidence base and to know what works. This should include providing policing with the support to allow innovation and to question practice. The College is undertaking work to support the capability of forces and members of the profession to test innovative approaches to policing and crime prevention. By testing the response to the changes in the nature of demand and sharing these across the profession, policing can ensure it is meeting the expectations of the public and deliver the best service. The Police Knowledge Fund has encouraged partnerships between police forces and academic institutions and much of the current learning is included on our What Works Toolkit, which is considered in more detail below.
2) Recognition of the complexity of policing and the skills that exist in, and are required for, the profession.
For most professions, a nationally recognised system of accreditation demonstrates that individuals have the required knowledge and skills to carry out their roles, offering assurance to the individuals themselves, their employers and colleagues and the public.
Policing does not currently set consistent, national education levels for its roles or ranks that reflect the current and future challenges facing the service. There is also wide-ranging variable and inconsistent practice in terms of the implementation, assessment and accreditation of initial police education across the 43 forces.
Our proposals, announced in December 2016, to introduce an educational qualifications framework and update the professional profiles in policing, will go some way towards addressing this issue and ensuring policing best meets the expectations of the public, while balancing the operational realities and changing crime types.
3) Measures to understand and reduce the significant welfare impacts of police work, particularly around assaults on police officers and staff.
The extent to which the police are sufficiently equipped to deal with these changing patterns of crime and other operational demands is impaired by the impact of policing work on the officers’ and staff wellbeing. Policing professionals face real threats to their health and wellbeing on a daily basis. The impact on the police’s ability to deliver for the public is stark and studies suggest that a significant number of officers are unable to perform their duties due to wellbeing issues. Ensuring officer and staff wellbeing is key, therefore, to ensure policing has the ongoing capacity and capability to fulfil its primary task of ensuring public safety.
The College is undertaking work with partners to address this, including producing a blue light workplace wellbeing framework, psychological risk management guidance for forces, a wellbeing standard and funding research into the extent of assaults on officers. This work will inform how we can best support officers and staff for the future.
4) Work to embed the Code of Ethics to strengthen the service and deepen public trust and confidence.
If policing is to continue to meet the expectations of the public it must maintain their trust and confidence. We believe that further embedding the Code of Ethics for policing can play an important role in deepening this trust and confidence. The Code gives everyone in the service and the public a clear, shared understanding of the standards which should guide the decisions of everyone in policing.
Combined with the standards of professional behaviour, the code gives officers and staff the confidence and a clear basis on which to challenge those who fall short of the standards expected, no matter what their rank, role or position is, and let the public know what standards are expected of officers and staff, no matter which force area they are in.
As the code becomes a reflective part of decision making for everyone in policing, but especially for new members of the service, and it is understood by the public, it will help maintain the essential relationship between public trust and confidence.
5) Development of a Licence to Practise scheme to recognise, raise and make more consistent the skills of professional practitioners dedicated to helping some of the most vulnerable victims of crime.
A scheme of licensing and registration could both ensure support for officers and staff undertaking difficult roles in areas of new or evolving crime, and deepen the public’s confidence in the ability of those in the service to keep them safe.
The benefits of such a reform are considerable and could include:
‘Current and future crime trends and their implications for policing in England and Wales, including emerging or growing categories of crime (such as online crime and child sexual abuse) and under-reported types of crime.’
The changing nature of demand in policing has been highlighted by a number of other submissions to the inquiry, with many of them noting the College’s work to analyse the activities undertaken by policing.
The College’s analysis suggests an increasing amount of police time is directed towards public protection work such as managing high-risk offenders and protecting victims who are at risk and often vulnerable. Specifically, the work identified that:
The scale of these emerging threats represent a significant challenge for UK policing. In order to continue to learn from this analysis and ensure police forces are supported to better understand the type of demands they face, the College developed a Demand Toolkit. The toolkit supports forces in their analysis of demand and looks to address a number of gaps in the information. The toolkit has been utilised by a number of forces to populate their own demand profile and helped policing better understand the scale of emerging crime problems and the activities associated with specific policing demands.
To ensure the police are sufficiently equipped to deal with operational demands the education and standards in policing need to be up to date and clear. In order to help support policing in this, the College has focused on priority areas including: Child Sexual Abuse, Domestic Abuse, Mental Health, Stop and Search and Cyber Crime. In these areas we have established the evidence base, updating training and developed new guidance and standards.
Further work is required in this area in order to ensure the standards used in policing are robustly evidence based and easily understood by those who work in policing and the public. Work is being undertaken by the College to move towards establishing practice standards, similar to those produced in the health sector.
‘International best practice examples of innovation in policing, and the extent to which they could be replicated in England and Wales.’
To ensure that the service faces the future equipped with the evidence of what has worked in the past, the College continues to gather a body knowledge and make it readily available to policing professionals through our What Works Centre online toolkit, Police Online Knowledge Area (POLKA), membership platform and other mechanisms. Over time, this will ensure policing practice and standards are based on evidence and what works.
The online Crime Reduction Toolkit summarises the best available research evidence on what works to cut crime. It currently provides readily accessible, and evidentially robust reviews of 43 possible interventions ranging from CCTV, drug courts, juvenile curfews, and mentoring to street lighting. The toolkit uses the EMMIE framework developed by the University College London Jill Dando Institute, which broadly identifies whether or not the evidence suggests an intervention had any impact on crime, how it works, where it is likely to work, how to do it and what the costs of implementation are. This clear presentation of the facts about crime fighting can help users, from the police service to PCCs and academics, to access and understand research quickly, to the benefit of the public. For example, our findings have recommended the use of alley gating and restorative justice conferencing, and cautioned against “scared straight” programmes which seek to deter young people from crime by prison visits. The College is working to update the toolkit with new interventions and evidence.
The development and application of this approach to high priority areas of policing is crucial in ensuring policing applies techniques and interventions that work in preventing and combatting crime.
‘Police funding levels, efficiency and cost-effectiveness, including the role of Police & Crime Commissioners (PCCs) in driving innovation and reform.’
‘The role of digital technology in policing, including take-up, risks and barriers to use.’
In order to support the work to establish where policing needs to focus for the future, the College has recently collaborated with other key partners to develop the Policing Vision 2025. The vision looks to set out a plan for policing over the next ten years. It will shape decisions around transformation and how policing uses its resources to help keep people safe and provide an effective, accessible and value for money service that can be trusted.
The Home Office have provided funding under the Police Transformation Fund (PTF) to encourage the development of transformation of policing until the end of this spending review term. The spending of the fund has been allocated against the five strands included in the Vision 2025: Local Policing, Specialist Capabilities, Workforce, Digital Policing, and Business Enablers. The Home Secretary ultimately decides on how the funding is allocated, however, recommendations and the process are owned by the Police Reform and Transformation Board (PRTB), chaired by the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners (APCC) and the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC). The process of deciding on recommendations is ongoing and spending on workforce development is expected to total around 10% of the total fund.
Submission from the UK Police Strategic Command Course
Policing for the future – changing demands and new challenges
Introduction
The Strategic Command Course and its response
This submission is submitted on behalf of the UK Police Strategic Command Course (SCC) 2017; it has been facilitated by the College of Policing. The College runs the SCC and provided time for the participants to consider the Committee’s questions as part of this year’s curriculum.
The SCC graduates are a pool of operationally credible, professionally competent potential Assistant Chief Constables (or equivalent police staff grades) ready for appointment from April 2017. This year’s students are police officers and police staff from a range of forces in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. They are complemented by police officers from Anguilla and France, and by members of the Home Office, National Crime Agency, and Border Force.
The members of SCC discussed all the questions posed in the consultation, but focused particularly on three of them. Their thinking is recorded below.
1. Reforms which may be necessary to ensure the police service has the ongoing capacity and capability to fulfil its primary task of ensuring public safety, in the face of new and evolving threats and challenges.
The Police Service employment model can constrain the ability of the Service to adapt its response to address new forms of criminality. Statutory Police Regulations can be restrictive and reform in this area would help the Service to respond in a more agile manner to contemporary, and future, threats. The following measures could be considered:
(1) The establishment of a common ‘public sector worker’ model to allow movement between different public sector organisations
(2) Portability of pension arrangements to allow officers and staff the opportunity to exit and re-enter policing at different levels
(3) The introduction of a formalised ‘reservist’ model to access key skills and capacity at short notice (similar to the military model)
(4) Extension of accreditation models (such as PCSO, Financial Investigator) to roles within digital, protection and other developing areas in order to bring in people with specific qualifications.
(5) Rapid development of the apprenticeship schemes
(6) Being more ambitious in our approach to ensure a representative workforce; taking account of evidence base, for example the recent PSNI initiatives
The Strategic Policing Requirement (SPR) has not provided a sufficiently strong mechanism to ensure truly effective cross-force collaboration and capability development. The work of the Specialist Capabilities Programme could provide a coherent approach, and supporting this with a stronger SPR or mandation might increase the speed of progress and encourage consistency across forces. A greater level of consensus between Police and Crime Commissioners is a fundamental pre-condition of progress in this area. Other possible improvements might include;
Going further, a regular Strategic Policing Review similar to the Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) could be considered. Led by the Cabinet Office and working across Government departments, this could provide greater understanding of emerging threats, crimes and harms, and a stronger cross-system approach.
Noting that there is an ongoing review of the police funding formula, we note that charging for some services (such as football policing, night time economy policing), might be pursued more strongly. This charging might include instances where policing absorbs demands placed upon other agencies (such as care of the mentally-ill, or initial services for those missing from care).
Whilst recognising the opportunities for reform, it must also be acknowledged the UK has effective practice that is established and internationally sought. This includes neighbourhood policing, policing of protest, relationships with security and intelligence services and the joint sharing of intelligence.
2. The extent to which the police are sufficiently equipped to deal with these changing patterns of crime and other operational demands, such as mental health crisis work, and where gaps in capacity and capability lie.
As regards vulnerability, while vulnerability factors are increasingly important to policing (for example, 40% of those with whom the Metropolitan Police Service officers interact have mental ill health issues), this question should not be asked of police in isolation – it is clear that changing patterns in both vulnerability and the Agencies which tackle it mean that whole-system approaches are required. We propose a review of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, perhaps to create a ‘Vulnerability Act’ in order to provide a statutory basis for cross-agency working; fit for the purpose of a joint approach to tackling vulnerability. Clarity of Governance accountability, for Local Safeguarding Boards and Community Safety Partnerships requires immediate review.
Police or PCCs should be statutory members of Health and Wellbeing Boards. The potential for Police and Crime Commissioners to drive reform and innovation through convening powers at the local level is significant. Greater PCC involvement in Health and Wellbeing Boards and the joint commissioning of services focused on early intervention, prevention and addressing vulnerability could deliver considerable benefits.
The following might also be considered:
Improved data sharing across organisations to protect vulnerable people is considered a critical success factor and features as recommendations in numerous Public Inquests and Serious Case Reviews. However, there is a perception that legislation currently impedes the effective sharing of digital information. Legislation, such as the Data Protection Act, is typically framed in a manner, which presumes information may not be shared unless exceptional circumstances apply. The reversal of this presumption, particularly in safeguarding cases, could offer profound efficiency, effectiveness and interoperability benefits.
We advocate a determined shift towards the prevention of crime and harm, as opposed to the reaction to it. New Zealand’s ‘Prevention First’ strategy which is being trialled in Scotland, may be worthy of additional study. There are successful parallels in the Counter Terrorism Prevent context, which should also be explored. Statutory duties through legislation should be considered for agencies, including the private and voluntary sector.
Consideration could be given to evolving the Police Transformation Fund into a cross sector fund to ensure an appropriate ‘cross-system’ approach to preventing crime and vulnerability. The recent publication of the National Crime Prevention Strategy highlights the causation of crime and, as such, offers an evidence base for initiatives with agencies to consider. The introduction of the joint Health and Social care Sustainable Transformation programme could be expanded into regional cross sector innovation funding and activities to deliver joint problem solving and improved outcomes.
3. The role of technology in policing, including take-up, risks and barriers to use.
Technology presents a range of transformational opportunities to the delivery of policing. However, technology is often talked about as ‘supporting’ policing as opposed to actively driving delivery. There is scope for policing to be more ambitious in its adoption of new technologies. For example, artificial intelligence could be used to offer a multi-lingual public interface to accelerate the police response to emergency calls for service and crime reporting, help map Road Traffic Collision scenes using drones and optimise the police use of ‘big data’[1]. Effective horizon scanning, nationally coordinated engagement with academia and an appetite to harness new technologies could significantly enhance the delivery of policing in the medium term.
Historically, the police adoption of technology has been localised, fragmented and characterised by a desire to either procure or design large complex systems. There is an acute need for the police service to develop a brigaded approach that prioritises the adoption of modular, compatible and mobile applications to deliver benefits relating to data sharing, technical agility and procurement.
Greater ambition and toleration of risk in public/private sector partnerships is also required. The pooling of digital data with other organisations presents both ‘pursue’ and ‘prevent’ opportunities. For example, Operation Amberhill (Metropolitan Police) shares data with partners in the private and public sector to combat identity fraud, joint initiatives such as the Financial Sector Forum and the Joint Money Laundering Intelligence Taskforce are also yielding increasing cross-organisational benefits. The extension of this approach to target other forms of criminality has the potential to offer a range of benefits.
A cross-Government Strategy that defines national standards for data, hardware and software and ensures interoperability across criminal justice agencies, including the third sector would be beneficial in improving consistency
The use of UAVs (drones) provides huge opportunities for policing. A risk-based approach is essential, however it is clear that the use of UAVs, which capitalises on rapid technological advances, has the potential to reduce demand and challenge conventional methods of deployment. More academic research and greater understanding of risk is required in this area.
[1] The use of electronic passport gates at Heathrow Airport demonstrates the extent to which artificial intelligence can be utilised to enhance both efficiency and effectiveness.