Metropolitan PEEL 2017

The Metropolitan Police Service is good at treating all the people it serves with fairness and respect. Force leaders can demonstrate the value and benefits of procedural justice, and arrangements exist to ensure the workforce has the knowledge it requires. The importance of treating people with fairness and respect is widely understood, although it does not always extend to less obvious situations, such as providing a poor level of service to the public. While the force provides training so that the workforce can recognise and overcome unconscious bias, the level of understanding of unconscious bias varies throughout the organisation. The force provides good communications training, which is reinforced within some teams by remote electronic learning or by email briefings. Both training in, and scrutiny of, use of force are good, and the force is compliant with the national recording standard. HMICFRS is impressed by all aspects of the force’s arrangements for training in, and understanding, the use and scrutiny of stop and search.

The Metropolitan Police Service is good at ensuring that its workforce behaves ethically and lawfully. It is co-founder of the tri-force London police challenge forum, which considers and advises on ethical dilemmas. Leaders regularly clarify and reinforce what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. The force has an achievable plan to ensure all re-vetting is up to date within the next two years. Members of the public can make complaints in different ways, although written complaints information is not consistently available in police and other public buildings, and is not targeted at those who are reluctant to complain. The complaints we reviewed were dealt with effectively and consistently, so it is disappointing that we were not told of any formal process for offering additional assistance to complainants who need help when going through the complaints process, and records relating to keeping complainants appropriately updated are poor. The workforce has a good understanding of what discrimination involves, but, although it is generally well identified, we encountered some evidence and some workforce perceptions that the force is not responding to discrimination appropriately in all cases. The force is taking concerted action to address these issues, including a recent review of its grievance procedure and work to increase the workforce’s trust and confidence in the process. We found a high standard of investigation into allegations of discrimination, while complainants generally received a high standard of service.

The Metropolitan Police Service requires improvement in some elements of treating its workforce with fairness and respect. Since our 2016 legitimacy inspection, the force has made progress in many areas. It continues to offer many ways in which the workforce can provide feedback to leaders. It has reviewed its grievance process, and has carried out work to identify any disproportionality in recruitment, retention, progression and in allegations of wrongdoing; it is taking action to address this. There are many processes in place to identify and select officers with high potential. The force continues to make good wellbeing provision and is piloting a new appraisal process. In general, these changes have been received well. However, low trust and confidence in leaders is a recurring theme among the workforce, and morale appears to be the lowest it has been in three years of inspection. Most members of the workforce still use the unpopular performance development review process, and wellbeing is still not perceived as a priority. Technical issues mean that the new appraisal process is unlikely to be put into operation until late in 2018, so improvements will not be introduced quickly.