Police Reform
Protective Services
A key priority for the police service is to ensure that it deals effectively with terrorism, serious crime and other major challenges to public safety. These services are often described as "Protective Services" and were highlighted in the report "Closing the Gap" by HMIC in 2005 as needing to be strengthened in capability and capacity by the majority of police forces.
Defining Protective Services
Protective services include counter-terrorism and extremism, serious organised and cross-border crime, civil contingencies and emergency planning, critical incident management, major crime (requiring the appointment of a senior investigating officer), public order, strategic roads policing and protecting vulnerable people.
Improving collaboration between forces
Following the decision in June 2006 not to pursue plans for creating strategic forces by merging police forces together, a new programme of work is now underway in the Home Office which focuses on the police services' need to collaborate to ensure barriers are overcome and to achieve greater efficiency in delivery of protective services. This programme is being developed by the Home Office in partnership with the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), the Association of Police Authorities (APA), HM Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) and the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA). By working together we aim to increase collaboration between police forces in order to improve protective service delivery and develop a needs-based business model to be used to identify gaps in provision and monitor progress at a national level.
The programme will involve:
- Developing a National Protective Services Analysis Tool (NPSAT) that will assist in assessing priorities for dealing with threats both by type of threat and by area. Forces will be expected to undertake their own work to apply the analysis tool to their area, including using additional data sets and intelligence. NPSAT will help to highlight those areas where improvement is needed most urgently across the country and at force level;
- Producing protective service minimum standards. All forces will be expected to reach the minimum standard that is set out for each protective service as a minimum. Areas of greatest risk of harm need to have higher levels of capability;
- Police forces and authorities producing adequate plans for their area to demonstrate how they are working together to meet the protective service needs identified by NPSAT and meet the standards set out by ACPO. There will be initial concentration on ensuring that the areas and services with the highest needs (as identified by NPSAT and forces) are addressed first; and
- Developing monitoring and inspection regimes to assess forces against the ACPO standards and protective service need.
Alongside HMIC the Home Office will be working with forces and authorities to help them develop plans for improvement and to identify what can effectively be achieved on a joint force basis.
Tony McNulty, the Minister of State for Policing, Security and Community Safety wrote to chief constables and chairs of Police Authorities on 14 February 2007 detailing this programme of work and setting out the timetable. The key target is to bring the protective services capability and capacity up to ACPO's new standards in all higher need areas by 2009 and across all forces by 2011. The Home Office will be examining what forces and authorities say they need in terms of levers and incentives in order to collaborate effectively and it will also endeavour to remove the barriers to joint working.
Collaboration Demonstration Sites
To aid and promote joint working for the delivery of protective services the Home Office is supporting ten "demonstrator sites" to explore a number of different approaches to collaboration. These were announced in a written ministerial statement on 17 July 2007. They will be fully evaluated to ensure that lessons learnt and best practice are fully disseminated and inform future policy development.
The demonstrator sites are as follows:
- Avon and Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, Dorset, Wiltshire and Gloucestershire (the South West region) are developing the delivery of shared services through collaboration through the South West Region;
- Cheshire, Cumbria, Lancashire, Merseyside and North Wales are establishing a joint team tackling serious and organised crime;
- Cleveland and Durham are developing a joint firearms unit;
- Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire (the East Midlands region) are establishing a dedicated joint witness protection team which will review many practices including the refinement of policies, procedures and best practice;
- Dyfed-Powys, Gwent, North Wales and South Wales (the 4 Welsh forces) are improving the delivery across all of Wales of public protection (child protection, sex offender management, domestic violence, vulnerable adult abuse and missing persons);
- Dyfed-Powys, Gwent, North Wales and South Wales are also exploring collaborative approaches to delivering major crime, serious organised crime and cross border crime service across the 4 Welsh forces;
- Essex and Kent are developing and implementing a coordinated and integrated strategic command unit in order to improve operational delivery of policing services in the Thames estuary, sea ports, air ports and the strategic roads network;
- Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire are establishing a co-located major crime unit;
- Humberside, North Yorkshire, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire (Yorkshire and Humber region) are creating a unit that will provide a policy lead, training and support infrastructure to undercover officers and are exploring the potential for an integration employment frameworks, terms and conditions and HR policies; and
- Surrey and Sussex are drawing together protective services into an integrated specialist operation command covering both force areas.
