About a year ago Barry Loveday (Reader in Criminal Justice at the University of Portsmouth) wrote an interesting article, in the Police Professional magazine I think, outlining his views that the performance target culture had created a generation of middle managers at the expense of leaders. His contention was that the obsession with delivering central government performance targets required little more than compliance and developed managerial skills at the expense of what the police, really needed, leadership and innovation.
Interesting than to see Peter Fahy, GMP's Chief Constable, arguing in the Daily Telegraph a couple of weeks ago that the government's culture of central control has produced a generation of middle and senior managers who are expert administrators with no instinct on how to how best to catch criminals. He went on to explain that, in his view, the police service is now hampered by an 'addiction' to targets and that forces' ability to catch criminals is being undermined by perfomance targets and form-filling.
So, with that as the background context, now seemed a particularly good time to take a look at HMIC's new police performance inspection regime 'Rounded Assessment'.
The document which sets out the new regime: 'Assessing Police Performance: giving the public a voice' is currently out for consultation, with responses required by Friday, 26 June. Available here and in the sidebar under HMIC.
Make no mistake, this one really is required reading, as it will define the performance inspection agenda for some years to come. It will most certainly occupy a place high in the thoughts of police authority and chief officer colleagues and, by extension, BCU command teams
Whilst the full document needs to be read and understood in detail, a couple of things worth highlighting:
As with the existing APACS, which it will replace, there will be five domains. These are:
Confidence and Satisfaction
Local Crime and Policing
Protection from Serious Harm
Value for Money and Productivity
Managing the Organisation
As far as is practicable, these five areas are mutually exclusive – ie, a particular activity or performance measure will feature in only one domain. The grading system applied to each domain will be excellent, good, fair or poor. Poor will be a very uncomfortable and very visible place to be.
One of the key criticisms of previous performance inspection regimes has been the lack of context and professional judgement. Rounded assessment seeks to address this, and in each domain a professional judgement will be applied by HMIC to the range of quantitative and qualitative information available to arrive at a domain grade or score.
As always, one of the most difficult areas to assess is Confidence and Satisfaction. The Confidence and Satisfaction domain will reflect the Home Secretary’s single target focus on confidence, measured by a BCS question (are the police and local councils dealing with anti-social behaviour and crime issues that matter in their area.)
HMIC's view is that in order to see the bigger picture and provide the best diagnosis of police performance, it may be helpful to set results from this measure alongside another BCS measure – the % of respondents saying they are confident/very confident in the local police. So far so good.
They then go on to suggest that 'Further understanding could be gleaned from robust local surveys on confidence and satisfaction'. The problem with this is that currently only roughly a quarter of forces meet the Home Office criteria for robustness in respect of their surveying.
The paper says that 'Statistics will be used sparingly, as research shows that the public is neither interested in, nor trusting of, statistics. We will focus on where the public is put at risk through poor performance, using easily understood graphics to convey key messages and explain relative performance to the public'
The critical thing to note about rounded assessment is that it is not designed as 'a practitioner dialogue'. It will be much more public-facing. Supporting this approach HMIC have already designed a public facing website to display the results of the inspections. It's striking how similar this website is in feel and approach to the Audit Commission's website which details the results of Comprehensive Area Assessment.
There is no doubt that, driven by the old 'what gets measured gets done' adage, Rounded Assessment will significantly impact everyone's performance agenda. It will be interesting to see how the focus on these broad range of de facto targets affects future managerial behaviour. Peter Fahy has a clear view:
"Capturing the most prolific, the most dangerous, the most harmful is the best way to reduce crime, increase public confidence, and lift the souls of our staff. In my experience if you get this right there is a clear sense of purpose and, yes, a buzz in a team or division/department then the key figures will look after themselves."
I have read this document as I had to forumlate a force responce to it. I felt that it very much klacked any detail. All very broad brush which leaves a great deal of scope for the HMIC to change their focus and frequency of data collection.
Posted by: catherine | 23 June 2009 at 10:24 AM