In 2008, we embarked on a process of supporting robust and consistent self-evaluation across all Scottish police forces. Our aim was to support forces in their continuous improvement of services. Self-evaluation can add value to forces, the SPSA and their respective police authorities or boards by: providing better information about their own performance and practice to feed into business planning cycles; helping to meet force and authority/board responsibilities under Best Value; and, facilitating the cross-fertilisation of ideas and encouraging simultaneous improvement in every force.
As well as supporting improvement in forces, our intention is that self-evaluation will also play an important role in helping us to identify national areas for inspection activity, as part of a risk-based and proportionate programme of work.
The Scottish Parliament's report Independent Review of Regulation, Audit, Inspection and Complaints Handling of Public Services in Scotland (Professor Lorne Crerar, September 2007) makes it clear that organisations need to take much greater responsibility for self-evaluation before external scrutiny can be minimised. We very much support the view that primary responsibility for improving services and demonstrating performance lies with the organisations that provide them.
Since 2008 we have supported Scottish Police forces to embed self-evaluation within their performance management arrangements. We have revised and developed our framework for national self-evaluation to be more flexible and responsive to the approaches within individual forces. We remain committed to improving the value that effective self-evaluation can add to policing in Scotland.