Introduction
1. The police service in Scotland has always considered itself to be accountable to the public as well as to local and national government. In recent years there has been mounting pressure, not just within policing but in the public sector as a whole, for such accountability to be visible and transparent. This has exposed policing to an ever greater range and extent of scrutiny. In response, forces have begun to rely increasingly on more visible performance management processes.
2. But most public service organisations, including police forces, have also recognised themselves the need to engage in performance management for the improvement of the service they provide to the public.
3. In 2005 we published our report Managing Improvement. In it, we described in detail how performance management was then developing and expanding across the Service. Though we noted areas for improvement, the report painted a positive picture of a burgeoning culture of performance management in forces. It was not intended that this inspection specifically address the previous report's recommendations - though we were pleased to observe how senior managers felt performance management to be integral to the operation of force and territorial commands. Nevertheless, some of the themes touched on will be familiar.
4. Credit must be given here to the Association of Chief Police Officers ( ACPOS) and in particular to the Performance Management Business Area ( PMBA) which the Association set up in response to Managing Improvement. Much has been achieved by the direction and coordination provided by this group. However, it will be seen that our inspection found that the influence of ACPOS does not appear to be as strong as it occasionally needs to be in terms of promoting a consistent approach to service improvement and public reporting. We suspect that this is not necessarily due to any lack of commitment from the members of the PMBA, rather to the lack of formal systems for translating agreed ACPOS policy into reality. This is one of the reasons that HMICS is encouraging ACPOS to review how its policies, strategies and standards are recorded, made accessible, and implemented across Scotland.
5. Regional and local variations will always be necessary in policing, but not in those areas where the public and their elected representatives reasonably expect consistency and adherence to minimum standards. As far as this thematic inspection report is concerned, we anticipate that both ACPOS and the Police Conveners' Forum will take particular and active interest in progression of the recommendations.
6. The decision to conduct a thematic inspection on officer productivity arose from our consultation and risk process for identifying and prioritising topics for scrutiny. Initially our focus was on how performance management was dealt with at team and individual levels, and how forces were preparing for the implementation of the Platform Project. But following an approach from ACPOS Performance Management Business Area, we extended our terms of reference to look at how forces were using the Scottish Policing Performance Framework. We also agreed to examine how forces had integrated performance management, from the strategic down to the operational level, and how this linked to the National Intelligence Model.
7. Management theorists and organisational consultants may debate long and hard on whether the performance of an organisation is most influenced by its leaders and managers, its individual members, or its operating environment and culture. Most commentators today would agree that the truth lies somewhere in a combination of all of these factors.
8. It is certainly true that the quickest and perhaps least resource-intensive improvements can be made when managers recognise how procedures, processes, systems, etc, can be altered to allow the organisation to achieve its purposes more efficiently and effectively than before. Learning organisations - which are not afraid to accept that weakness or error is most often organisational and least often individual - do this successfully all the time.
9. The police services of the world have not been famed in the past as learning organisations, preferring the blame culture which focuses on personal failure. However, this is changing in the UK and evidence for this can be found, for instance, in the way in which some police forces in Scotland are beginning to use complaints about the police as learning opportunities, encouraged by the approach of the new Police Complaints Commissioner for Scotland.
10. Improvements brought about by changing the performance outputs of individuals or the culture of an organisation are likely to take longer and require more effort. However, it is sometimes the case that they may provide the most sustainable improvements and will certainly increase the quality as well as the quantity of service.
11. Our new thematic inspections are intended to be of shorter duration, tighter focus and less burden on forces. Consequently we request less written information from forces and try to seek more innovative ways of exploring subjects. In this inspection, only performance issues relating to police officers were fully explored. However, as part of a wider evidence-gathering exercise we conducted an internet survey of all staff working in Scottish forces and policing agencies. Despite the potential constraint of requiring internet access to take part, 2,440 members of staff responded (around 10% of all police personnel).
12. The results of this survey have been used to augment the findings of this inspection. A copy of the questions can be found at Annex A and more analysis of the results is presented in Annex B. Because of the volume and quality of responses, we will be publishing an additional and separate report giving more detailed analysis and comment on the findings.
13. During the inspection we visited all eight forces. Interviews were held with members of force executives and divisional/area command teams, as well as with inspectors, sergeants and constables in response and community policing roles. We were pleased to note that the results of the survey validate the findings of the fieldwork.