Proposed Home Office confidence target

Report: 11
Date: 5 February 2009
By: Chief Executive

Summary

The purpose of this report is to provide the committee with a summary of the risks and implications of the proposed Home Office confidence target.

A. Recommendation

That the MPA note the issues raised in this report and consider any additional work that may need to be commissioned from the MPS.

B. Supporting information

1. The Policing Green Paper "From the neighbourhood to the national: policing our communities together", published in July 2008, gave notice of the Home Office intention to implement a measure of public confidence in whether people think that the police and their partners are dealing with the crime and anti-social behaviour issues that matter locally.

2. The Home Office is proposing a target for the MPS of a 12% improvement in confidence in policing over a two year period.

Background

3. The MPA is committed to improving the level of confidence in policing for London and endorse the need to concentrate on more than just crime and detection statistics. The MPA has been monitoring the responses to the MPS Public Attitude Survey, a well-researched survey of 20,000 people from across London each year for some time. As such, we welcome the move by the Home Office to focus on more than just crime and detection data to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of policing. There are, however, a number of issues that MPA members should consider. The key issues are described in this report.

What drives confidence in policing?

4. The MPS has carried out considerable research and analysis into what drives confidence and satisfaction, utilising the results of the MPS Public Attitude Survey. This work has focussed on the responses to questions asked in the specific area of policing. Although in-depth research has been conducted, the understanding of what drives public confidence in policing is not yet at a level of sophistication to facilitate accurate tasking and policy change to ensure a direct correlation between policing activity and confidence. There is sometimes an assumption that members of the public not working in the sector have a sufficient depth of knowledge to differentiate between the responsibilities of the police service, general criminal justice system and local authorities when assessing their level of confidence. Certain high profile or signal crimes can have a disproportional, and sometimes unexpected, effect on both satisfaction and confidence. This could be magnified by any change in crime patterns or expectation levels resulting from the downturn in the economy, recent increases in unemployment and other social factors. There is also a possibility that as the majority of the public do not have first-hand contact with the police their confidence could be influenced by external factors such as the media rather than specific police actions.

The Home Office target

5. The recent Home Office Green Paper proposed a single, overarching, national performance measure based on the percentage of respondents answering 'strongly agree' or 'tend to agree' when asked: "... how much would you agree or disagree that the police and local council are dealing with the anti-social behaviour and crime issues that matter in this area?"

6. A two year 12% improvement target is being proposed by the Home Office.

Risks and implications

7. Members of the public do not necessarily differentiate either between the responsibilities of the police and local authorities or between the responsibilities and actions of other agencies involved in criminal justice. It is therefore difficult to see how the police could easily be held to account.

8. When considering the responses to the survey question it should be remembered that though policing is the core business of the MPS it is not necessarily such a high priority for local authorities. Many local authorities are likely to be under financial pressure in the current economic situation and so will need to focus on their core business. This is exacerbated by the fact that the question measures a response that is based on the shared crime and antisocial behaviour service provision of policing and local authorities.

9. For the MPS this issue will be further complicated by the reliance on partners from 32 separate boroughs. That said, work has already begun on the development of Joint Engagement Meetings, designed to enable a collaborative approach to problem solving across several partner agencies, particularly the police and local authorities. The confidence measure is expected to be a key focus area of these meetings.

10. Though the MPS and the National Policing Improvement Agency have carried out research into the drivers of confidence from a policing point of view, the MPA has seen no evidence of comparable research or analysis having been carried out from a local authority perspective. Police resources could be misdirected should the MPS rely solely on police-identified drivers to improve confidence without the equivalent local authority drivers or relevant changes to service provision being identified. There is also a possibility that poor performance by either the police or the local authority could be masked by the other’s excellent performance within individual boroughs.

11 There is concern that the target is unachievable and there is as yet insufficient evidence, both in terms of how the target has been devised and whether the improvement required is achievable either within the MPS or nationally. Experience of improvement in confidence tends towards a demonstration of a much slower rate of improvement, even when considerable effort is put into customer focussed work. The MPA also needs to consider that an unachievable target could provide a considerable disincentive to the MPS.

12. These issues do not detract from our ongoing attention to improvement from the MPS of their citizen focus and customer care but we must consider whether the proposed targets could set up the MPS, and other police forces, to fail and in doing so have a detrimental effect on the ongoing work of improving satisfaction.

C. Race and equality impact

1. MPS research and analysis has identified four broad groups that they have classified as ‘Contents’, ‘Demanding’, ‘Supporters’ and ‘Needy’ when assessing satisfaction and confidence. The four groups could not be distinctly divided into any demographic types, with an even distribution of gender, age and ethnicity across the four groups.

2. The MPA will continue to monitor any identified satisfaction gap between different demographic groups.

D. Financial implications

At present, it is not possible to identify the likely costs of the MPS achieving a 12% improvement in a two year period.

E. Background papers

None

F. Contact details

Report author: Jane Owen, MPA

For information contact:

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

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