MPS Citizen Focus Diversity update

Report: 09
Date: 8 March 2007
By: DAC Diversity and Citizen Focus on behalf of the Commissioner

Summary

This report provides an update regarding the role of the MPS Citizen Focus Policing Programme in designing and delivering high quality policing services, according to individual need, through engagement with service users.

The report will also outline the work that has been undertaken to integrate data regarding Citizen Focus and Diversity into the service performance management frameworks.

A. Recommendations

That members note the report.

B. Supporting information

Background

1. The Citizen Focus Policing Programme is one of seven strategic priorities and a key programme in the MPS Modernisation Programme (MMP). In 2007/08 the Citizen Focus Policing Programme will become one of two ‘Priority 1’ programmes in the MMP. This will result in it being subject to even more rigorous scrutiny as well as receiving significant support, in terms of the expertise and resource that is available through the MMP infrastructure. An extract of a presentation given to the MMP Delivery Board given by DAC Rose Fitzpatrick is attached at Appendix 1. The presentation provides details of the key programme milestones and proposals for the future focus of the programme.

2. Work is currently underway to develop corporate and business group performance frameworks that both reflect the significance of the programme, in terms of successful organisational outcomes, and guide the business planning process at all levels.

3. Effective decision-making, communication and the timely resolution of issues are critical to the success of the programme and a governance structure has been created that integrates the programme with the MPS Modernisation Programme, Management Board and the MPA.

4. MPA engagement has been through membership of the Programme Board at both Member and Officer level. Additionally, the Coordination of Policing Committee and Full Authority have received progress reports and a recently established Community Engagement and Citizen Focus Oversight Group now undertakes regular scrutiny of work in this area.

Citizen Focus Principles

5. Citizen-focused policing requires a commitment to the continuous and systematic application of three key principles at every level of the organisation:

• Developing an understanding of citizens and communities, and their needs, expectations and concerns, through engagement appropriate to that community.
• Acting on this to improve continuously the quality, accessibility and responsiveness of service delivery taking clear account of an understanding of the citizen perspective in decision-making, operational practice and the way in which services are designed and delivered.
• Continuous engagement with individuals and communities over time, to build confidence and trust.

Examples of Citizen Focus activity

6. To ensure it is able to understand the people it serves and improve communication and engagement with them, the MPS and the MPA have produced a joint Community Engagement Strategy. To support the delivery of the strategy in the MPS a range of supporting products are being delivered including: community engagement training, written guidelines and a checklist to ensure staff are getting it right. A key component of all engagement activity is the requirement to provide comprehensive feedback to all those who have taken part.

7. To ensure we are able effectively to manage and monitor the results and outcomes of community engagement the MPS Diversity and Citizen Focus Directorate is developing a central community engagement infrastructure. This infrastructure will be in place by April 2007 and will provide the hub for the flow of engagement information, guidance and support, throughout the MPS and beyond.

8. Examples of how citizens are driving MPS activity through engagement include:

• The establishment of neighbourhood panels on every ward in London. These panels decide the policing priorities for the area by examining the results of community consultation and research by police and partners. In addition to priority setting the neighbourhood panel is fully involved in deciding what type of action should be taken on their local policing concerns and has an input to the problem solving approach taken on the ward.
• The use of a development panel comprising members of the public, external advisors and practitioners to develop a ‘customer call-back’ process through which supervisors can gain first hand information about the quality of service provided by their staff to improve individual and corporate performance.
• The establishment jointly by the MPA and MPS of community monitoring network groups through which local communities scrutinise the use of stop and search powers in their area. This gives people direct access to local police commanders and the opportunity to shape police tactics.
• The MPS also undertakes regular survey activity to determine the citizen perspective on the service the MPS provides and gain evidence of the quality of service actually given. The results of these surveys are analysed and interventions designed to improve services and increase satisfaction.

9. The service provided to victims of crime is a key priority as is providing appropriate levels of support to witnesses, especially vulnerable and intimidated witnesses. In this context witness care units conduct needs assessments to ensure that each victim and witness is treated individually, according to their needs.

10. Witness and victim experience survey data and British Crime Survey results have led the MPS to develop and refine processes for dealing with victims; multi agency links are stronger then ever, for example Victim Support workers are based in some witness care units and the letters sent victims of crime have been reviewed by a consultation group headed by Victim Support. This approach has led to the development of MPS Victim focus desks to provide support to victims of crime throughout the criminal justice process.

11. To understand the expectations of the diverse communities we serve the MPS will establish real-time satisfaction levels of service users using call back interviews to provide feedback to staff on the level of service they have provided. Staff associations and key stakeholders have been involved in this work and have been invited to submit their initial views prior to formal consultation early in 2007.

12. Through the Citizen Focus Policing Programme the MPS is working with staff throughout the organisation to highlight the importance of their roles in delivering quality services. Activity has taken place to ensure that the experience of service users, community needs and diversity issues are seen as a fundamental part of the roles of all MPS officers and staff. For example in April 2006 the ‘Community and Customer Focus behaviour’ is now a compulsory behaviour in all personal development reviews (PDR) and probationary reports. The behaviour complements the existing requirement to demonstrate competence in relation to respecting race and diversity and now forms part of all corporate selection, promotion and recruitments processes for all ranks and grades.

13. The inclusion of the Community and Customer Focus behaviour in the PDR of every member of staff presented particular challenges to members of staff and supervisors operating in support roles. This was because they had no direct external customers and did not deal directly with communities. To address these difficulties guidance has been issued that identifies the importance, in terms of overall service delivery, of meeting the needs of internal customers. A review of annual PDR’s will be undertaken post April 2007 to assess the impact of the addition of the new behaviour.

14. Steps have also taken place to ensure that training programmes are designed and delivered with the service user in mind and that the corporate induction programme reflects the need to provide quality policing, whatever one’s individual role in the MPS.

15. By focusing on the requirements of their internal customers the staff in the Directorate of Information have identified that colleagues at all levels are frustrated with the need to record and memorise a number of different passwords depending on which IT application they are using. In response the Directorate has established a ‘single sign-on’ programme so that all but the most sensitive applications can be accessed through one password. The effect on frontline staff will be to significantly reduce the time it takes to access the variety of systems they might require on a day to day basis. The overall aim is to allow these officers and staff to the live the MPS value of being ‘proud to deliver quality policing’ by assisting them to provide a better service to individuals and communities,

16. During 2006/07 the MPS Diversity and Citizen Focus Directorate (DFCD) developed a performance management framework for MPS Diversity Board. The framework is being used by the Board to manage organisational performance across a range of diversity, equality and fairness issues, including those concerning citizen focus. The framework comprises three dimensions:

• an externally focused dimension, ensuring that MPS services are delivered appropriately, fairly and equitably to all communities
• an internally focused dimension, relating to employment practices
• a dimension that allows a number of enabling objectives (required to support the achievement of the other dimensions) to be monitored.

17. Performance indicators have been developed for the service delivery and employment practices dimensions that are focused on addressing disproportionality or differential levels of satisfaction, confidence, treatment etc. The ‘service delivery’ outcome of the framework contains a number of performance indicators that are directly taken from the Home Office National Policing Performance Assessment Framework. It also examines differential outcomes or treatment in other citizen focus areas, for example comparative levels of public confidence of minority groups.

18. The performance framework will support a number of MPS initiatives including the Leadership Academy Local support process and the activities of Diversity and Citizen Focus Advisors (formerly Impact Consultants). The job title, job description and specific Integrated Competency Framework has been created for the role of Diversity and Citizen Focus Advisor. An external advertisement is expected to be placed by the beginning February resulting in employment of six advisors in late April or early May 2007.

19. MPS Diversity Board has examined diversity performance in relation to ethnicity, disability and will consider gender in January. The Board has wide representation including MPA, GLA, other external stakeholders and MPS staff associations as well as MPS business groups. The Board oversees diversity performance across a broad range of service delivery and employment practices. As part of the reporting process DCFD works with colleagues from across the organisation to understand current performance issues, address information gaps or data quality issues and develop approaches to improve performance.

Examples of achievements

20. Programme outcomes to date include:

• The publication of the MPS Quality of Service Commitment
• Full Council membership of the Institute of Customer Service (the first police service to become so)
• The development of a segmentation tool that categorises every role in the MPS according to the level of public contact it has. The tool will be used to target the delivery of citizen focus objectives and key messages to staff across the MPS, including the sharing of good practice. The tool will also enable the identification of those priority roles and functions requiring training and development in service delivery
• Training for trainers at the Leadership Academy to enable them to include citizen focus in all of their training activities
• Working with Together to ensure the new MPS Values incorporate citizen focus principles
• In association with the Home Office Police Standards Unit, the production of a Citizen Focus National Good Practice Guide
• The production of a borough based self-assessment workbook to improve borough performance in citizen focus policing
• Revision of the corporate policy development framework to ensure that citizen focus principles are embedded
• Revision of borough websites to ensure that access information is easily available to the public, for example providing ward level detail of crime levels and contact numbers for dedicated teams
• Undertaking surveys of users of front counters to inform the development of services and staff training.

Next Steps

21. By the end of 2007 a further year will have been spent embedding a citizen focused policing style across the organisation. This will provide a better understanding of the communities served the priorities of those communities and what are successful tactics in improving service delivery. The headline results are expected to be:

• Improved satisfaction rates particularly at the ‘very’ or ‘completely’ satisfied grades
• Greater community confidence in the performance of local policing teams
• More equity in service provision as any differentials in satisfaction levels are reduced
• Greater involvement of Londoners active in engagement
• Increased levels of intelligence from our communities
• Staff development, performance and remuneration are more closely aligned to citizen focus activity
• Key service delivery systems better defined
• National best practice identified and adopted across the MPS.

List of abbreviations

MMP

Met Modernisation Programme

IT

Information Technology

DFCD 

Diversity and Citizen Focus Directorate

PDR 

Personal Development Review

C. Race and equality impact

1. The Citizen Focus approach provides the mechanisms through which we are able to identify the bespoke needs of individuals and communities and provide responsive services that meet those needs.

2. In the time that the programme has been running the satisfaction levels of black and minority ethnic victims of crime rose by 10%. In the same period the satisfaction of all victims of racist incidents has improved by 13.8% to the extent that by the end of 2005/06 the MPS was top of its most similar family of forces [1] in this performance area. This provides a strong indication that the focus brought to the issues through the programme has the potential to make a positive impact on the services we provide to all of our communities.

D. Financial implications

The approach of the programme is to embed the citizen focus principles in the usual business development processes of the MPS. It is not intended that the programme will be the catalyst for new major change programmes but will add to those already in being, (e.g. criminal justice and the new MPS call centres) for which provision has been made in the Medium Term Financial Plan. The direct costs for the programme are for eight members of staff.

E. Background papers

1. Corporate Strategy 2006 – 2009
2. National Policing Plan 2005 - 2008
3. White paper ‘Building Communities, Beating crime: A better police service for the 21st century.
4. MPA / MPS Community Engagement Strategy
5. Medium Term Financial Plan
6. Existing Programme material

F. Contact details

Report author: Chief Superintendent Ian Harrison

For more information contact:

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

Appendix 1: The Citizen Focus Policing Programme 2007 – 2008

An extract from a Presentation to the MPS Modernisation Programme Delivery Board held on 28 November 2006 by DAC Rose Fitzpatrick

Citizen Focus Policing Programme Milestones

April 2005

• MPS bottom ranked force in 3 out of 5 SPI’s (action, follow up and overall experience), 40 out of 43 in SPI 1a (contact) and 33 out of 43 in SPI 1d (treatment).
• Work begins on the Quality of Service Commitment – good practice disseminated to Boroughs

July 2005

• Programme Manager appointed

October 2005

• Programme moved into newly formed Diversity and Citizen Focus Directorate under DAC Fitzpatrick

February 2006

• Programme Board established

April 2006

• MPS ranked 38th in SPI 1a (contact), 25th in SPI 1b (action), 31st in SPI 1c (follow up), 12th in SPI 1d (treatment) and 29th in SPI 1e (overall experience).
• MPS is the most improved force in England and Wales.

September 2006

• Joint MPS/MPA Community Engagement strategy published

October 2006

• MPS joins the Institute of Customer Service

November 2006

• MPS Quality of Service Commitment published

The Drivers for Change

“The Citizen experience at the heart of everything we do … It’s about personalising our service, more obviously wrapping our services around the law-abiding citizen”.
Commissioner – February 2005

“Clear recognition that citizen experiences must be improved”
Service Conference key message 2006

“We have to do a lot more about understanding what the customer experience is”
Commissioner - Service Conference 2006

Future Focus

To improve the user experience we must:

• Drive through changes in structure and leadership to avoid silo working
• Ensure that the ‘user experience’ is reflected more broadly in the corporate performance framework
• Ensure that the corporate measures are reflected in Business Group performance frameworks
• Ensure that identified good practice is mandated and not optional

Why now

• We are now into the corporate planning cycle
• We are developing a new corporate performance framework
• We have the levers – we know what the problems are and we have identified some of the solutions.

The approach identified by DAC Fitzpatrick was endorsed by members of the Delivery Board.

Send an e-mail linking to this page

Feedback