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Performance and Measurement

APACS - Background and Consultation

The Analysis of Policing and Community Safety (APACS) framework was introduced in April 2008 to replace the Policing Performance Assessment Framework (PPAF). In this page we provide background information on APACS and the consultation process for its introduction.

The introduction of PPAF in 2004/05 helped to produce better policing performance across England and Wales between 2004/05 and 2007/08. It fostered a strong performance management culture that has now become firmly embedded in the way the police and its partners plan and deliver services to reduce crime and ensure safer communities.

Building on the experiences of PPAF, the Home Office and its partners committed to refining the approach to managing the performance of the police, working alone or in partnership with others, on crime and community safety to ensure continued improvements. We therefore agreed to develop and introduce a new performance framework which:

  • simplified national and local performance arrangements;
  • aligned the performance management of crime, drugs and policing by combining existing performance assessment arrangements for these areas in the Home Office;
  • joined up with the wider performance management frameworks of community safety partners; and
  • broadened the scope of performance management to take account of important community safety work which has not been included in previous performance frameworks.

The Analysis of Policing and Community Safety (APACS) framework was introduced in April 2008. The new simplified framework reduces the number of measures by which the police and others are judged in terms of their success on crime and community safety and reduces the data demands of central government.  The framework covers policing and community safety issues in a balanced way which focuses better on the most serious crimes and criminals.  It harmonises with other related frameworks and contains indicators and targets which are shared between partners.

APACS Consultation

A consultation on APACS was held in early 2008 and is now closed. Documents relating to the consultation are provided for reference below. Note – these documents are available for information only. They are not the technical guidance (which can be found on the main APACS page).

APACS Strategic consultation documents (Welsh language version ).

APACS technical consultation documents.

Technical Consultation Annex – these five technical sections support the technical consultation document above. They contain the technical definitions of the proposed measures and are grouped under each of the five APACS domain headings:

 Technical Consultation Response report. Provides feedback on the issued raised in the Technical Consultation on the indicators and structure of APACS (held between 7 December 2007 and 18 January 2008).

APACS Communications

This section contains products that were used to introduce stakeholders to the APACS framework. These were provided while APACS was still under development and may not reflect the present status (particularly after the publication of the Policing Green Paper).

APACS narrative. This details the development of APACS.

APACS and local area agreements presentation. This was used to explain the link between APACS and Local Area Agreements (LAAs) and the 'national suite' of performance indicators for local authorities.

Home Office websites