Metropolitan PEEL 2016

The Metropolitan Police Service works hard to ensure it treats all of the people it serves with fairness and respect. It understands the importance of doing so and how fairness and respect links to increased public confidence in the force. The results of the joint force and Mayor’s Office for Police and Crime youth survey indicate there is more to do as only 58 percent of 17 to 18-year-olds agree that they would be treated fairly and with respect.

The force’s organisational values of integrity, professionalism, courage and compassion support its vision to make London the safest global city. The professionalism board ensures workforce awareness of the Code of Ethics and the force’s values; officers and staff we spoke to had a good understanding of the Code. New recruits are given training based on the force’s values, ethics and professionalism.

The force has an engagement strategy and uses various ways to seek feedback from the public on matters such as fair treatment. The results and trends from the public attitude survey are reviewed quarterly. As part of the force’s listening campaign, each borough has a confidence plan that helps to guide local community engagement activity, although not all officers we spoke to were aware of their local plan. The listening campaign helped the force identify communities of which it had been unaware, and can now work with.

The Metropolitan Police Service requires improvement in ensuring that its workforce behaves ethically and lawfully. The force notes any deviations from the national police vetting policy and the reasons for them. The force takes a risk-based approach to reviewing failed vetting applications to assist in its objective to recruit staff that better reflect the diversity of the communities it serves. However, it carries out the re-vetting of officers and staff on a business-need basis, which means it does not comply with the national policy.

The force clarifies and continues to reinforce acceptable behaviours in a variety of ways. Officers and staff can use the confidential reporting service or Crimestoppers to report matters of concern, and are confident about reporting concerns to their supervisor or manager. The force has made good progress on the recommendations made in HMIC’s 2014 police integrity and corruption report. However, the directorate of professional standards does not have a counter-corruption strategic risk assessment or a control strategy and, because of a lack of investigative capacity, it does not actively seek intelligence on corrupt activities by the workforce.

The force recognises the abuse of authority for sexual gain as serious misconduct, as opposed to serious corruption. The force provides awareness training about inappropriate relationships, although some officers and staff said that they had not received the awareness training.

In our 2016 national overview of police legitimacy, we recommended that all forces should have started to implement a plan to achieve the capability and capacity required to seek intelligence on potential abuse of position for sexual gain. In 2017, we reviewed of the plans put in place by all forces to in response to this recommendation.

Abuse of position assessment – Metropolitan Police Service

The Metropolitan Police Service is good at treating its workforce with fairness and respect. It uses a range of methods to identify and understand the areas that have the greatest impact on workforce perceptions and takes action to address these. The force’s review of its performance appraisal process reflected the workforce’s dissatisfaction with it.

The force is intent on improving the performance appraisal process for the workforce. The pilot in May 2016 was still to be evaluated at the time of our inspection but, if positive, a new process will be implemented across the force to improve performance and fairness.

The force uses operational health risk assessments to help develop wellbeing controls in certain roles. We found that provision of psychological support in high-risk roles was very good.
Comprehensive guidance on wellbeing is available on the force intranet and the force runs campaigns covering different wellbeing issues. Supervisors receive training and told us that they understand clearly their wellbeing responsibilities. However, inconsistency among supervisors in providing support to those who need it remains a problem for the force. The force is intent on improving wellbeing provision so it is more consistently applied and the new performance appraisal process is a significant step forward in improving performance and fairness.