Staffordshire PEEL 2016

The force generally has a good understanding of its current and future demand, conducting routine monitoring and analysis of a broad range of information to improve understanding of its current demand. The force is also developing its understanding of the less obvious areas of demand, including hidden demand. However, under-recording of some offences may be undermining its efforts to develop a more detailed understanding of the full scale and extent of the totality of demand.

The force regularly challenges itself to understand how inefficient internal processes create additional demand on its resources. The force has conducted reviews in some local policing teams and uses software to analyse and remove inefficiencies from a variety of force processes. The force’s ability to identify wasteful use of resources would be enhanced if these processes were applied continually across all areas of the force. Its review of the demand expects to identify some emerging issues for prioritisation, giving it a developing appreciation of the impact, scale and likelihood of future risk.

The force is aware of shrinking partner resources and capacity and is actively engaged with partners to develop a shared understanding of the potential impact on joint working arrangements. The force and its partners have plans in place to meet this demand, including some co-location arrangements, changes of tactics and sharing of resources.

Staffordshire Constabulary uses its resources well to manage current demand. It has applied the MORILE risk assessment process (management of risk in law enforcement) to a wide range of themes and crime types to inform its overall assessment and understanding of its strategic risks. The force understands the importance of directing resources towards the highest areas of risk and reviews this systematically. The force has a well developed understanding of costs and how to improve the quality of service and outcomes. The force is very focused on benefits realisation and has effective systems and processes to conduct benefits realisation monitoring across a broad range of business areas to drive efficiency.

The force has developed a comprehensive skills matrix to map the skills of its workforce to understand workforce capabilities and gaps, enabling it to plan well for future training, and recruitment to support succession planning. The force has good plans in place to enhance its digital investigation capabilities through its integrated forensic partnership with Staffordshire University. It also shows a strong commitment to working collaboratively with partners with a broad range of public and private sector partnership arrangements in place. The force has less focus on considering potential collaborative arrangements with other police forces and can demonstrate only limited savings from such collaboration. It may wish to consider further opportunities in this regard.

The force demonstrates its intention to make best use of investment by taking a considered and measured approach to manage change, while having highly effective systems in place to allow it to model and track proposed changes allowing changes to be modelled and then trialled using a temporary workforce mix.

Although the force is planning well for demand in the future, its plans are not yet fully developed. The next phase of the force’s transformation programme is a force-wide approach to transform how it operates. The force has identified a number of key work streams for development and each work stream lead is preparing an individual mandate for approval to ensure the force’s planned use of assets matches demand, organisational priorities and financial requirements. Although the plans are ambitious they are not yet well-developed. The force has robust governance arrangements in place, but until all work stream mandates are analysed and collectively approved, the force cannot demonstrate that its plans are sufficiently robust to bring about transformation at the required pace and scale. These mandates will be necessary to enable the force to assess the extent to which the change programme can transform how it manages demand and secures efficiencies.

To ensure resources continue to meet financial requirements, the force has projected plans for recruitment and is extending its use of transferees and external promotions to maintain levels of experience and capability. The force has invested in mobile data for all frontline officers and has ambitious plans with its commercial ICT partner for significant investment in ICT to bring about immediate improvements to its ageing IT infrastructure. The force’s future financial plans are being drawn up in close collaboration with the office of the police and crime commissioner and in devising these plans, the force is making realistic and prudent assumptions about future income and costs.