Safer Communities in Scotland

Action plan template

5.25 Partnerships may find the template helpful during the action planning process [see Box 5.8]. It makes sure that decisions in terms of the range of interventions, lead officers, resources and target outputs and outcomes for each objective are clearly defined and recorded.

5.26 This template can also be used to produce monitoring reports and provide management information for the corporate partnership group. Performance against output targets can be recorded on a quarterly basis, allowing rapid assessment of whether the initiative is on course.

Performance against outcome targets is more likely to be measured on an annual basis, with the template allowing the partnership to review performance against targets for its annual report. It also allows the contribution of individual agencies to be identified.

5.27 The problem of housebreaking on Tighmore housing scheme to provide an illustration of how the template should be completed [see Box 5.8].

Implementing the action plan

5.28 In general, actions that are the responsibility of individual agencies will be easier to implement than those requiring joint action. Individual agencies should take ownership of those parts of the action plan that most naturally relate to their core activities. Successful implementation of the plan will require the partnership to:

• agree roles and responsibilities between different agencies
• make sure that people involved have the skills, training and support to carry out the tasks
• set up systems for collecting and evaluating all monitoring and evaluation data
• set in place clear lines of accountability, with dates for reporting back on progress

5.29 Lead officers responsible for interventions will have to make sure that they have:

• adequate resources, at the right time, to achieve outputs and outcomes
• assigned responsibility for collating all monitoring and evaluation data

5.30 Lead officers responsible for implementing initiatives have a key role in the early identification of problems, eg if a particular initiative is not going to meet milestones because expected resources have not materialised, they need to raise this with the community safety manager/officer so that remedial action can be taken.

5.31 The corporate partnership group will need to consider whether training is needed for the lead officers who will be responsible for providing monitoring information. Increasing officers' understanding of why monitoring data is needed, and ensuring that recording systems are simple and easy to follow, have been shown to improve the quality of information provided.

Monitoring, evaluation and feedback

5.32 Monitoring allows the partnership to check that it is doing what it intended. It also allows individual agencies to monitor their own performance. It involves measuring processes and outputs against pre-set milestones and targets. It is essential management information for the partnership since it allows members to pick up problems at an early stage and re-design interventions that may be failing.

5.33 Evaluation is the process of checking whether the strategies have achieved their intended outcomes. It should attempt to identify what factors contributed to, or inhibited, the success of an intervention (or programme of interventions), under what conditions and in what type of setting. It should be undertaken independent of officers responsible for implementing the programme of work.

5.34 Monitoring data should be relatively easy to collate but evaluating the outcomes of community safety activity can be more difficult due to:

• measurement problems
• difficulty of attributing cause and effect

5.35 Wrong conclusions about the impact of an initiative can be arrived at by:

• use of simple 'before-and-after' crime, disorder or accident statistics
• comparison of short time periods which ignore longer term trends
• ignoring the context in which an intervention is carried out
• not measuring displacement
• not having established baseline data

5.36 As well as defining performance indicators closely linked to the partnership's objectives, it may also be useful to establish contextual indicators that provide a benchmark to compare key performance indicators, eg recording numbers of household fires across the whole local authority area, or nationally, so that the success of a neighbourhood-based fire safety scheme can be placed in context. Benchmarking is one of the principles of the 'best value' approach.

5.37 Supporting indicators can also be used to provide indirect corroboration of success, eg housing repair costs can be measured in an area where interventions have been put in place to reduce the incidence of housebreaking and compared to similar areas that have not benefited from such an approach.

5.38 Key performance indicators, contextual indicators and supporting indicators should be included in the monitoring and evaluation plan created for each objective.

5.39 Partnerships should make sure that all input and output data is monitored and regularly checked by the co-ordinating team against the milestones and targets, but it must choose which interventions will be evaluated. The partnership should focus limited evaluation resources on those interventions where evaluation is most needed. The partnership may choose to evaluate those interventions:

• that are particularly innovative
• where the findings will be robust
• where they will contribute to the knowledge of good practice, both locally and nationally

5.40 Partnerships should also take account of the cost of the evaluation and consider whether similar initiatives have been evaluated elsewhere. A tiered approach to the evaluation strategy makes sense: some interventions would simply be monitored, some would be subject to basic evaluation, and a chosen few would be more rigorously evaluated.

5.41 Monitoring and evaluation fit into the audit-to-action process, give feedback to the 'learning partnership' and allow changes to be made to the strategy and the implementation of the work programme [see Box 5.9].

Monitoring and evaluation strategies should be put in place once the action plan has been agreed. Agreement on performance indicators, data collation systems and monitoring responsibilities is necessary, as is a decision on the level of evaluation and who will carry this out. The action planning template can be used for quarterly monitoring reports to the corporate partnership group and for collating information for the annual report [see Box 5.8]. This will also allow individual agencies to monitor their own performance and to provide feedback within their own agency.

5.42 The pattern and nature of community safety problems is expected to change over time. Partnerships should set up a joint database with regular quarterly updates on recorded crime, fire and accident figures and other key pieces of data in order to monitor changes. This may include updating the community safety profile at the end of each year to take into account new recorded crime, road and fire accident figures, etc.