The Scottish Government

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INTRODUCTION

In Autumn 2005 HM Inspectorate of Constabulary for Scotland ( HMICS) published a report on performance management in the Scottish police service, titled Managing Improvement¹. In it, we called for a multi-agency strategic steering group to be established that would co-ordinate performance measurement and reporting across the service. We further recommended that an early priority of the group be to conduct a fundamental review of existing performance information and targets.

The Senior Strategic Steering Group ( SSSG), on whose behalf we have produced this report, and the Scottish Policing Performance Framework ( SPPF) are the respective outcomes of these recommendations. Both have been made possible only through close collaborative working between Scottish Government, the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland ( ACPOS), police forces, the Scottish Police Authorities' Conveners' Forum, Convention of Scottish Local Authorities ( COSLA), Audit Scotland and HMICS. It is because of our unique operational independence from both forces and government that we have been asked to produce this first annual report on behalf of the SSSG.

The Framework

Launched on 1 April 2007, the SPPF presents a new way of reporting performance information that will help to advance our understanding of how best to manage and continually improve policing across Scotland. This applies not just to forces themselves, but to their police authorities, central government and the general public too. It will also help scrutiny bodies like ourselves and Audit Scotland whose responsibility it is to hold the service to account on behalf of the people of Scotland.

The framework itself is constructed around four areas of policing designed to cover the breadth of policing activity:

Service response - relates to the quality of service provided by forces. It covers all aspects of force engagement with the public including making initial contact, responding to incidents and giving feedback. It is also concerned with public confidence in policing.

Public reassurance & community safety - relates to how forces respond to the concerns of local communities. It includes forces' and their partners' contributions to preventing, investigating and detecting crime, as well as community engagement and public perceptions and experiences of crime and disorder in their local area.

Criminal justice & tackling crime - addresses how forces and their partners contribute to the effective and efficient operation of the criminal justice system, as well as how they tackle matters of national security and serious organised crime.

Sound governance & efficiency - covers how forces manage their resources and finances.

For each of the four areas of policing, key strategic objectives have been agreed to reflect areas of national priority. These high level objectives, as they are known, have in turn been translated into one or more of the following types of performance measure:

Outcomes - the final results of policing;

Activities - the activities and processes that contribute towards the outcomes; and

Inputs - the resources required to carry out the activities.

There are also a number of context indicators, which are not in themselves measures of performance but instead provide contextual information to describe the environment in which the police operate.

The first annual report of the SPPF

This first annual report presents all of the performance measures in the SPPF, explaining each in turn and where possible providing force- and national-level performance data over time ². For a number of reasons we have, however, been limited in the analyses we have been able to carry out:

• data recording practices for much of the information in the framework are relatively new to some forces and in many cases are still being developed or implemented;
• all available data for the two consecutive years 2006-07 and 2007-08 are presented in a series of 52 tables. Where there is only one year of data we have been unable to establish the year-on-year change in performance. A further five multigraphs provide a visual summary of indicators comparing performance over the two years. These too will therefore only include those forces that were able to supply data for both years;
• it is widely accepted that trends over a longer period of time make more robust indicators of performance. Readers must therefore be circumspect when attempting to draw conclusions from the data presented; and
• interpreting variances in data can be difficult. Though we may think we know and understand the reasons behind fluctuations in performance, we cannot always be sure from the available evidence that our assumptions are correct. For this reason we have kept such assumptions to a minimum and have concentrated instead on describing what the indicators can tell us.

Points of note for 2007-08

HMICS is encouraged to see:

• that overall recorded crimes and offences are down across Scotland as a whole, notably Group 1 (crimes of violence) which show a reduction of nearly nine per cent on last year;
• that the number of people killed or injured in road accidents across Scotland has decreased by 7.7% compared with last year; and
• that the number of reports submitted to the procurator fiscal within set timescales has increased by over ten per cent.
• Where we would like to see more focus directed in the future is in:
• significant improvements in the availability of data;
• common recording practices being adopted by all forces;
• forces' ability to challenge, understand and explain the variation in detection rates across forces; and
• the development of a consistent approach to incident recording.

We understand that forces are continuing to address matters of data availability and consistency. However, persistent inconsistencies need to be resolved as a matter of urgency. For example, the apparent variances in detected crime rates between forces may have more to do with differences in force policy or practice than actual variations in performance. In other words, it is not enough simply to report on these differences; forces must align their processes so that real differences in performance can be identified, understood and then reported to the public.

Future development of the SPPF

The framework has continued to develop since it was first implemented in April 2007, assisted more recently by the additional involvement of the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities ( COSLA) through the SSSG. As will become apparent in the following sections, measures for every high level objective have not yet been introduced. Nor do those that appear in this first iteration of the framework reflect all policing activities or priorities.

That said, work continues to identify, develop and incorporate new indicators as appropriate and, where necessary, to refine current ones. For the year 2008-09, further performance indicators have been added in order to broaden the coverage of the framework. Efforts are also being made to strengthen the link between these and the operational priorities of the Scottish police service identified through risk-assessment. It is further expected that forces will also supplement the national picture by including their own local priorities in their performance reports.

Implementing the SPPF has presented more challenges for some forces than others. The infrastructure for gathering the necessary data is not universally in place or necessarily well developed, although the service is working to address this aspect too. It is anticipated that over time, improvements and refinements in the capability and capacity of forces to gather and analyse performance information will allow more detailed analyses to take place. It is further hoped that the ongoing development of the framework, both in terms of its content and the way it is used to manage performance, will allow demands for forces' performance information from other bodies to be streamlined. For example, it might be possible for the SPPF to replace the existing Accounts Commission statutory performance indicators ( SPIs).

In the meantime, in our opinion the introduction of the performance framework, and the publication of this first report, are significant steps forward towards achieving the aim of providing consistent information to the public on the performance of the police service in Scotland.

Note: The framework for 2007-08 and 2008-09 can be viewed online at
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Justice/Police/Performance

Copies are also available by contacting the Police Performance Team at the Scottish Government:

Tel: 0131 244 2388
Email: police.performance.framework@scotland.gsi.gov.uk

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