Planning Performance Assessment Framework and Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabularies baseline assessments 2004/2005

Report: 8
Date: 27 October 2005
By: Commissioner

Summary

Today the Home Office has released a series of assessments of the relative performance of all police forces in the year ended 2004/5. This is under the Police Performance Assessment Framework (PPAF) and takes into account the Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabularies (HMIC) baseline assessment. The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) has been given a number of gradings for performance (excellent, good, fair, or poor). Any progress that a force has made is also assessed and given a direction of travel. The results are shown at Appendix 1 and Appendix 2.

1. The MPS thinks that both the Police Performance Assessment Framework and the HMIC Baseline Assessment are a welcome challenge to our performance and that they will become more valuable as they develop to fully reflect counter-terrorism, serious, organised and Level 2 crime and our capital city functions.
2. Many of the assessments are positive and more recent data shows that improvement has already been made in areas that were assessed as poor.
3. However, there is clearly scope to improve in several areas and the MPS is fully committed to improving the service that we deliver.

A. Recommendation

That

1. Members note the contents of this report.

B. Supporting information

The PPAF and HMIC assessments are welcome but need developing

1. The assessment framework is a useful way of challenging performance, which we welcome. Together with the HMIC baseline assessment it is a valuable confirmation of what we do well and a challenge to what we need to improve.

2. We believe that PPAF needs to develop further in order to properly reflect what the MPS delivers for London. At the moment counter-terrorist work is not taken into account and only limited weighting is given to serious and organised crime and to capital city functions. However these make up a significant proportion of our responsibilities, take up a large amount of resources and are of huge importance to London, the rest of the country and in some cases the rest of the world. These are also areas where we believe that the MPS would score well (see HMIC judgements below).

3. HMIC and the Home Office have acknowledged this and the possibility of exploring international comparisons and we will be looking to continue to work with them to ensure that this is properly reflected in the future.

Many of the assessments are positive and recent data shows improvement

4. The HMIC baseline assessment grades the MPS as ‘Improving’ in 20 of the 21 areas assessed and ‘Stable’ in the remaining area.

5. The HMIC baseline assessment also grades the MPS as ‘Excellent’ in investigating major and serious crime, tackling Level 2 criminality and roads policing. Although counter-terrorist functions are not formally recognised the report also states that these functions are discharged ‘to a standard that is the envy of the policing world’ and that the response to the events of July ‘highlighted excellent leadership and training and has done much to further enhance trust and confidence in the police’.

6. The recent ‘Closing the Gap’ report by Dennis O’Connor recognised that the MPS is one of only two forces nationally to have demonstrated both a reactive capability and a significant proactive capability to respond to serious and organised crime.

7. HMIC has also recognised that: ‘The deployment of Safer Neighbourhood Teams has produced a stunning step change in service delivery in the areas where it has been adopted. In a very short period of time the MPS has reached a point where it is now a model of good practice for other forces to follow.’

8. Re-running the PPAF tests with data for the last six months shows that improvement has been made particularly in the sanctioned detection rate, offences brought to justice and in the experience that people have of contact with the MPS.

9. The MPS has made and continues to make substantial progress in the delivery of offences brought to justice. This again is a key driver across the domains. The progress on citizen focus is particularly apparent with data from the Public Attitude Survey and Victim and Witness Surveys in the first quarter of the year 2005/2006 showing overall satisfaction, for example, improving from a year-end position of 68% to 78% and a consistent upward trend across all the other measures.

Satisfaction of victims with service of police: 2004/05 v Q1 2005/06

Improving the service we deliver

10. The MPS is fully committed to improving performance and in particular in relation to data quality and compliance with the National Crime Recording Standard (NCRS), further improving detection rates, reducing crime and improving the day-to-day service that we offer people.

11. The MPS will continue in its plan to deliver the roll out of Safer Neighbourhoods. This expansion will remain a critical element in our ability to deliver performance against PPAF criteria (crime reduction and visible reassurance are two key drivers across the PPAF domains). Early results show total notifiable offences falling by 7% in Safer Neighbourhoods areas compared to 4% in other areas (2004/5 compared to 2003/4) and that 74% of white respondents and 86% of non-white respondents have said that the increased police presence is making them feel safer.

12. Anti social behaviour is one of the major concerns that safer neighbourhoods will address. This will improve our performance against the specific item that has capped our performance in the ‘promoting safety’ domain.

13. The Service Review has looked in detail across the MPS to find ways that we can improve performance and make better use of resources, in particular by focusing on frontline and priority areas. Delivery of the Service Review recommendations as part of the MPS Modernisation Programme is therefore crucial to our ability to improve.

14. Improvement will continue but some of it will not be instant. We are looking at a 2 – 3 year programme to deliver lasting change rather than a quick fix.

15. The issues raised by the failure of the NCRS audit run in October 2004 continue to be worked on. Some of the tests have now been passed to an acceptable standard and work is in place to ensure that the next detailed scrutinies in December 2005 and the spring of 2006 will not have a red grading.

16. Improvement does have to be seen in the context of the continued terrorism threat. The MPS simply cannot afford to relax its vigilance in this regard in any way. Progress on the expanded Counter Terrorism command is essential to this.

17. Improved gradings within this system are good indicators of progress. Although it is a technical point – the unique volume in terms of number of crimes makes it difficult for the MPS to move grading quickly. The need to continue with forward momentum will therefore be easily seen – whereas the delivery grading may be slower to change. This reinforces the need for improvement to be seen in the context of a two to three year timescale.

C. Race and equality impact

The PPAF domain that deals with promoting public safety, providing assistance and citizen focus are directly about contact perception and fear of crime. All of these have obvious and clear implications for race/equality issues.

D. Financial implications

There are also some real challenges ahead in terms of the choices that may be presented by any future budget settlement. PPAF will provide useful context in deciding where the MPS should invest in order to improve performance.

E. Background papers

None

F. Contact details

Report author: Commander Simon Foy, DCC2 (4) Performance

For more information contact:

MPA general: 020 7202 0202
Media enquiries: 020 7202 0217/18

Appendix 1

Overview of the Police Performance Assessment Framework

On 27 October 2005 the Home Office released a series of assessments about all forces in England and Wales under the Police Performance Assessment Framework (PPAF). This will produce a range of gradings across a number of areas or ‘domains’ against which a judgement is made against overall performance, and the direction that various Forces are heading. This grading has also taken onto account the various related component parts of the HMIC Baseline assessment document.

PPAF measures seven separate areas, each of which is populated by a collection of performance indicators. These are:

• Reducing Crime - measured by comparative risk of personal and household crime and various rates of crime including domestic burglary, violent crime, robbery, vehicle crime and life threatening/gun crime
• Investigating Crime - measured by detection rates for various offences, offences brought to justice and domestic violence arrest rates
• Promoting Safety – measured by the fear of residents of particular categories of crime
• Providing Assistance - measured by a front line policing measure
• Citizen focus - measured by the satisfaction of victims with the service provided by police, as well fairness of stop and search
• Resource Use - measured by indicators relating to sickness, resignations and recruitment
• Local Policing - measured by resident’s perception of police performance

(Each of these indicators in turn is measured with the various related component baseline data from the HMIC baseline document.)

The performance assessments relate to the end of year figures for 2004/5 i.e. in effect the data relates to performance six months ago.

This is also the first occasion that the HMIC baseline assessment (which is meant to be a more qualitative and subjective judgement of a force) has been lined up with the PPAF measures (which are designed to be more objective) in order to produce a single judgement about a broad area of policing. It is also the first time that this assessment has been put into the public arena in this way. The actual data that is being used to construct these judgements will also be available.

The PPAF assessment has been developed over a number of years. A number of broad issues have emerged during the course of this development that has been discussed at length with the Home Office, ACPO and the MPA. The MPS has been involved in this debate.

A considerable amount of effort has been put into making sure that the data that is used by the Home Office is accurate and in a consistent format – particularly as it is extracted from different forces. This has taken some time to get right – and whilst not absolutely perfect – has now reached the stage where it is appropriate to put this data out to public scrutiny.

Forces are compared to each other on the basis of the ‘most similar family’ of forces. This is to ensure that instead of a simple comparative league table between all forces - which would have obvious implications in terms of relative size and complexity – forces are compared to each other within specific similar groups. (This remains a unique difficulty for the MPS – because of its unique size, breadth of mission and the sheer scale of the challenge.) For this purpose we are compared to West Midlands, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire and Merseyside. This comparative dilemma remains an issue for the MPS.

The PPAF system measures seven domains only. There has been considerable debate/discussion about whether this is an adequate representation of the spread and complexity of policing – and whether judgements in these areas allow proper consideration of everything that a police force does. The inclusion of the HMIC baseline assessment element is designed to address this issue.

There is a ‘local policing domain’ in the PPAF system itself. The Home Office are keen to ensure that this domain is populated and measured by data that supports the nature of local policing. Active discussions are still taking place between the Home Office, ACPO and the APA to decide how this may best be done. For the purposes of this judgement therefore the local policing domain is constructed with limited data – but it is anticipated that this will become more detailed over time.

NCRS ‘capping’

A number of special rules have been applied to several forces including the MPS:

• To the MPS direction grade for the ‘reducing crime’ domain – which has been capped as ‘stable’ due to a red grading given by an NCRS audit. This would have been an ‘improved’ performance had this rule not been applied
• To the MPS direction grade for the ‘investigating crime’ domain – again capped to ‘stable’ (rather than improved) due to the red NCRS audit
• To the MPS aggregate domain score for direction for promoting safety. This is capped as ‘stable’ (rather than improved) as the indicator relating to perceptions of anti social behaviour has received a deteriorated grading

The dampening of three ‘improved’ areas to ‘stable’ is due to ‘audit compliance’ (in the case of investigating and reducing crime) or because of performance on ‘specific priory components within some domains’ (in the case of promoting safety). The NCRS audit has therefore in effect ‘masked’ improvement that had taken place during 2004/5 and has continued since.

Appendix 2

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