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Chapter 5 Standards

Summary

• Standards are important as a mechanism to promote consistent service delivery across Scotland and to support effective scrutiny and governance of police services.
• The lack of agreed standards has had a detrimental impact on the ability of police services to demonstrate that they are delivering good quality services across Scotland.
• The work that ACPOS is already undertaking to develop standards is key to the broader understanding and management of risk, and needs to progress more quickly.
• The absence of standards across the range of policing services means that decision-making on resources is not properly informed.

The importance of standards

5.1 In the context of this review, standards are considered to refer to universal processes and desired outcomes rather than performance indicators or statistical measures (although these are also important). So, for example, the Scottish Policing Performance Framework is not, in itself, a standard, although it may report on the performance of individual forces in meeting agreed standards.

5.2 In our view, standards for police services are important for a number of reasons:

• increasingly there is a recognition that geography should not determine the availability and quality of public services that individuals and communities receive (see Appendix C - stakeholder questionnaire response analysis);
• as policing becomes increasingly locally focused through SOAs, common standards allow forces to act jointly in an effective way, where this is required ( e.g. as when responding to public order challenges across Scotland during the G8 Summit in 2005). At one force workshop we heard that standards can act as 'the glue' through which the service as a whole retains its unity of purpose;
• the cohesion that standards bring is also fundamental to the service's ability to improve and professionalise, continuously and consistently, the way in which it carries out its core functions;
• it is only when a clear statement of what the police will deliver for certain policing functions is made and implemented consistently that the service, and crucially police authorities and boards, can gauge what are the real resourcing implications;
• as locally focused governance and accountability bodies, police authorities and boards have little information about what they should expect of their forces and whether their services are as good as those elsewhere in the country; and
• there is evidence to suggest that the public do not always understand what they can expect from the police. This has a number of implications for a public service which seeks to be user-focused:
• first, people have a right to know what they can expect when coming into contact with the police;
• second, in the absence of published standards, unchecked public expectations of what the police can and should do, can at times be unrealistic; and
• third, without standards to refer to the public may not value the service they receive where it exceeds the norm.

5.3 A number of stakeholders in our consultation process strongly advocated the introduction of service standards: "setting standards is essential so service planning and delivery can be measured against a robust definition of service expectations…" (City of Edinburgh Council); "an approach based on robust self-evaluation and performance monitoring, complemented by a degree of external inspection, should underpin service standards for all public services" (Solace) (Appendix C).

5.4 In addition, the majority of those who responded to our in-service survey also supported the idea of common service standards across all forces.

Graph 3. [Q12 In-service survey]

There is no need for shared common standards of service delivery across forces

5.5 Furthermore, and as supported by the most recent Justice Committee report into community policing, ¹¹ we do believe that there is a real desire from the public to have a clearer understanding of how the police operate in their area and what they will do when contacted about a crime or other police matter.

5.6 Standards already exist for some policing services, so in that regard they are not a new concept. Moreover, since ACPOS is already working to produce further standards we feel that it is a case of working with the existing momentum rather than creating a new one.

Concerns raised in relation to standards

5.7 Some participants in our interviews and workshops expressed concerns about the introduction of common standards. These fell broadly into three areas:

• that common standards might not allow the different needs of different communities to be met;
• that too much consistency discourages innovation for improvement; and
• that applying a 'minimum' standard might lead to a drop in the quality of services provided in areas where this was currently exceeded.

5.8 These are all legitimate concerns that should be taken into account when developing and implementing standards. However, standards that concentrate primarily on service delivery outcomes, rather than the processes in place to achieve these, could undoubtedly offer scope for greater local flexibility and innovation.

The current position on the development of service standards

5.9HMICS acknowledges the work to develop service standards that ACPOS has undertaken since 2007. During our workshops with forces, it was apparent that many chief officers considered this work to be vital to the advancement of policing in Scotland.

5.10 We also share another opinion commonly expressed during these workshops, that the development of standards is the primary step to defining how, and from where, specialist policing services might most effectively be delivered. Standards should also help the service to calculate the cost of its various functions and make it easier to assess its capacity and capability. We note that some forces are taking steps to develop this understanding.

5.11 We are concerned, however, that the pace of this work appears not to match the priority it merits. We understand that an early project document is due to be produced by February 2009. However, this will only identify a development process, rather than the production of any standards. This latter task, we understand, will thereafter be assigned across the ACPOS business areas.

5.12 This timetable means that information on the cost and ease of implementing the standards is unlikely to be available until late 2009 at the earliest.

5.13 We cannot make judgements or recommendations about the provision of specialist policing services across Scotland without an understanding of the impact, including the costs, that standards will have individually and collectively on forces.

5.14 We are equally concerned that forces are continuing to enter into local agreements on specialist service delivery in the absence of both of the standards themselves and any appreciation of what their impact will be nationally.

Lack of standards - impact on resources

5.15 A common feature of specialisms such as firearms and public protection is that they are designed with clear structures, standards and very often their own audit regimes. These better defined and more developed mechanisms enable forces to identify the resources required to deliver these specialisms against the agreed standards. In a world where resources are limited, it can therefore be easier for these specialised services to attract the appropriate level of funding or investment, compared with other less defined services.

5.16 Conversely, the absence of standards for mainstream policing functions leaves it susceptible to resources being diverted away from these functions to meet the demands in more defined areas. If realised, this tendency, when applied to response and community policing (functions that the public and many in the service see as absolutely fundamental) would be a matter of significant concern.

5.17 The importance of locally connected mainstream policing was supported by respondents to the in-service survey.

Graph 4. [Q15 In-service survey]

I believe that members of the public in my force area like the fact that, on the whole, policing is carried out by local officers

5.18 Service standards which cover the broad range of policing activity should help to redress this potential imbalance by creating a level playing field where local policing services are just as well defined as specialist policing services. This does not mean that decisions on allocating resources between the two will be made easier - these will always be difficult - but it does at least mean that they will be better informed and so more easily defended or reviewed where necessary.

Monitoring standards

5.19 We also recognise the potential for service standards to help forces carrying out their
self-assessments, as introduced by HMICS in 2008. This should directly reduce the impact or
'burden' of inspection because:

• the monitoring of publicly available standards should encourage and influence a visible reduction in any unjustified variation in policing and so also reduce the changes arising out of inspection; and
• the use of common standards in self assessment will provide a stronger and more readily available evidence base for bench-marking so as to contribute to forces' own continuous improvement programmes.

Conclusion

5.20 Arguably, the lack of standards has led to the service absorbing new areas of demand, so giving an impression of greater capacity than it actually has. Introducing standards would provide a more holistic, longer term, and consistent focus and should promote a better balance of resources for and between the various major strategic change programmes.

5.21 In our view, there is a need to expedite the work currently underway by ACPOS to develop standards and to establish how future areas for improvement in professional practice should be dealt with. This would include promoting good practice, developing training and skills, improving processes and increasing technical capability.

5.22 Elsewhere in the UK, much of this developmental work is carried out by the National Police Improvement Agency ( NPIA). As part of the work to produce standards in Scotland, a decision needs to be made on who or what should take on a similar role here.

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