Criminal Justice update

Report: 11
Date: 15 March 2007
By: Assistant Commissioner Territorial Policing on behalf of the Commissioner

Summary

This report provides an update on the work being carried out by the Department of Criminal Justice with the ultimate aim of bringing more offences to justice.

A. Recommendation

That members note the report.

B. Supporting information

National Strategy for Police Information Services Custody and Case Preparation (NSPIS CuCP).

1. Greenwich borough went live with NSPIS CuCP on 6 February 2007 bringing the total NSPIS ‘live’ boroughs across the MPS to five. The Case Preparation element of the NSPIS CuCP application has not been activated at Kingston at this time as Kingston Magistrates’ Court is a pilot site for the Libra court computer system and the electronic link required to connect NSPIS CuCP and Libra is not yet available (see also paragraph 3 below). The next borough to go live is Redbridge on 13 February 2007 and thereafter boroughs will be taken live on a regular basis throughout the year except during main holiday periods.

2. Processes are well advanced with boroughs scheduled to go live up until September 2007 in order to prepare them for roll out. Engagement is planned with all remaining boroughs commencing 8 months prior to each go live date.

3. In order to provide an electronic link between NSPIS Case Preparation and magistrates courts (other than those served by the Thames Gateway server) there is a reliance on the introduction of the new Libra magistrates court system across London together with the roll out of an interface between NSPIS CuCP and Libra. In order to facilitate the introduction of the necessary interface at the earliest opportunity, the MPS has volunteered to be the police service to test this interface as soon as it is available. This will provide the MPS with the ability to then undertake a live pilot of this link at the earliest opportunity.

4. The roll out of Libra is significantly delayed and current indications are that 10 court areas will be live by December 2007. A roll out schedule in 2008 for the remaining 13 London court areas is not yet available from HMCS. The impact in respect of the MPS NSPIS CuCP roll out is that whilst NSPIS Custody is still on track to be deployed across London by 31 March 2008, the NSPIS Case Preparation application deployment will extend beyond that date until the Libra system is fully deployed and links established between NSPIS and the outstanding Libra courts. An NSPIS CuCP deployment approach based on the above has been developed by the NSPIS project team and the detail is currently subject of consultation with relevant criminal justice partners.

Performance

OBTJ Target Setting 2007/08

5. The London Criminal Justice Board (CJB) has now agreed the Criminal Justice targets for London for 2007/08, which are the subject of a separate report at Appendix 1.

6. The MPS is now in the process of agreeing Sanction Detection rates and, with the LCJB Performance Team, bespoke borough OBTJ performance targets.

Sanction detections

7. The overall Sanction Detection (SD) rate for the performance year to date (April -Dec 2006) is 20.8% against the target of 20%. The MPS has consistently met this target since June, with 21.8% being achieved in December.

8. All of the priority offences for which the MPS has set SD targets are being met except Rape. The details of these offences are as follows:

• Domestic Burglary at 20.5% against a target of 18%;
• Personal Robbery at 13.4% against a target of 12%
• Domestic Violence at 36.6% against a target of 31%
• Racist Crime at 30.3% against a target of 26%
• Homophobic Crime at 27.3% against a target of 23%
• Rape at 29.7% against a target of 32%.

Offences Brought to Justice (OBTJ)

9. The OBTJ target for London, which includes the British Transport Police and City of London Police, for the rolling 12-month measurement period during 2006/7, is 185,000. The MPS contribution to this target is 181,212. As at December 06, the MPS was meeting this target and achieving 194,451 OBTJ for the rolling 12 month period.

10. The break down of OBTJ disposal types, for the rolling 12-month measurement period to December 06, is as follows:

Persistent Young Offenders (PYO)

11. The MPS continues to work with all criminal justice agencies to meet the overall 71 days Arrest to Sentence target. As part of this, the MPS has an individual target to deal with PYOs from Arrest to Charge within five days. The complexity of how a PYO is measured does mean that early identification of current and potential PYOs is critical to successful action.

12. The MPS has implemented a corporate tracking system and indications from December and January are that the weekly throughput has resulted in PYOs being dealt with in an Arrest to Charge average of five days. Clearly, there are some PYOs who are currently wanted or are on police bail for further enquiries that may affect these figures when they are ultimately arrested or charged. Activity is being undertaken to progress early arrest enquiries and deal with corporate issues that are delaying charging decisions.

13. London’s Arrest to Sentence rolling 3-month average performance from August to October 2006 was 84 days.

Current Trial management performance

14. The current trial performance data is as follows:

Graphs are shown in Appendix 2

Emerald Warrants management system (EWMS)

15. The MPS currently holds 7,408 fail to appear warrants exceeding this year’s target of 8,500 by 12.9%. The rate of reduction for ‘fail to appear’ warrants execution, plateaued during December 06 but resumed in January 07.

16. The timeliness of executions has not been fully met during this year and therefore will be a testing target for 2007/8.

Table 1: Fail to appear warrants (see supporting material)

Asset recovery

17. The volume of confiscation orders made remain off target but the value of £14.6m is currently exceeding trajectory and is on target for achieving £17m by the end of March 2007. The challenge for the MPS is to increase our officer’s knowledge and thereafter to increase volume. The Economic and Specialist Crime Unit are currently running Financial Investigators Managers Courses. On Tuesday 6 February, there was a multi-agency conference on confiscation and Asset recovery.

Table 2: Volume of Orders made (see supporting material)

Table 3: Value of Orders made (see supporting material)

18. The percentage of outstanding collectable balance has remained constant at 32% (table 4). The Central Accounting Unit at HMCS and the MPS has been examining ways of reducing this amount, which it is hoped will lead to improved enforcement for confiscation warrants. The MPS Confiscation Enforcement Team should be fully operational by March.

Table 4: Percentage of outstanding Collectable Balance (see supporting material)

Table 5: Reduce the number of collectable outstanding orders over 12 months old (see supporting material)

19. The higher than expected results towards the end of 2006 were largely as a result of changes in the counting during September (table 5). In particular, the status of a large number of live but unenforceable orders was changed and they no longer count towards the target. The sudden upturn is largely due to data cleansing.

The National Enforcement Service (NES)

20. The NES is a principal whereby the right enforcement agency executes warrants based on grading of the warrant and risk of violence posed. To support this principal a ‘National Warrants Handling IT System’ is being developed. A member of the MPS is on the Business Process development group. The principal is being tested in the North West of England with a national roll out due to start in April 2008. The LIBRA court IT system will need to be installed into London Courts before the NES IT (when developed) can be rolled out. This has the potential of delaying the project.

Victim & witness care

21. The internal recruitment programme for the VPCSO role commenced on 8 December 2006 with a closing date of the 5 January. A positive response was received, with a 120 application packs being sent out.

22. Due to strict eligibility criteria (Safer Neighbourhood Team PCSOs must have served at least two years) only 37 applications were received. After a paper sift of these 22 have been interviewed and 22 were successful.

23. The programme of recruitment is a continuous one, and re-advertisement of the role will commence mid February 2007. It is anticipated that those who were ineligible to apply in the first round may well be eligible in subsequent campaigns.

24. A training package has been devised and the first training course is due to be held at the end of February 2007.

25. The Emerald project team has been engaged with OCUs regarding the role and responsibilities of Victim Focus Units. Each OCU has a nominated Single Point of Contact and they are currently ensuring accommodation and equipment will be available once deployment of VPCSOs to OCUs commences.

26. Emerald is working closely with Safer Neighbourhoods to manage the impact of PCSO abstraction from Safer Neighbourhood Teams ensuring these teams are not depleted below the required model.

Integrated Prosecution Teams (IPTs)

27. The structure of Integrated Prosecution Teams has been agreed between the MPS and CPS, with CPS staff being located in police stations and taking on the role currently performed by MPS crime case clerks, enabling MPS case clerks to be redeployed as Case Builders in Case Progression Units (CPUs) or within a Post-Prosecution support function. Employment of Case Builders, together with enhanced quality assurance within CPUs, will lead to the improved quality of case papers and less remedial work being required, allowing for swift progression of the file through the criminal justice system.

28. Accommodation has now been identified at Hackney, Waltham Forest and Tower Hamlets. CPS floor space planners have attended the venues and appropriate accommodation has been identified. Property Services Directorate (PSD) continues to liaise with its CPS counterparts in agreeing this utilisation of MPS premises and arranging licensing agreements.

29. These three Boroughs will be pathfinder sites from April 2007, with a view to full rollout across the MPS by April 2008.

30. A job description has been completed and ratified for the Case Builder role within Case Progression Units.

31. A training course has been developed for the new Case Builder role.

32. IPTs will also enable the MPS to provide additional resilience in a Post-Prosecution function in relation to aspects such as timeliness relating to CICA claims, Impending Prosecutions on the PNC and compliance with Records Management Branch policy concerning the archiving of case papers. This will later serve to provide resilience in relation to issues arising from the Bichard Enquiry. Job descriptions for this Post Prosecution function have been completed and a training package is being developed.

33. Workload analysis has been undertaken to identify appropriate staffing levels in the Case Progression Units and the Post-Prosecution Teams in comparison to the demand on each Borough. This work will allow us to model and standardize borough processes and staffing thereby improving quality and generating efficiencies.

34. A comprehensive communication strategy is being developed and many key members of staff have been briefed in relation to the introduction of IPTs.

LCJB update

Virtual Courts

35. Extensive work has been conducted to identify potential police pathfinder sites. All 24/7 custody sites (53 in total) have been visited and comprehensive data obtained. This data has now been partially analysed.

36. The LCJB has sanctioned a ‘prototype’ exercise of the virtual court concept. The exercise will be conducted in the SE area of London, involving Lambeth and Southwark BOCUs’ and Camberwell Green Magistrates Court.

37. The exercise will last for four to six weeks. Its purpose is to identify and test different operating models so a firm and effective model can be confidently identified for roll out across London.

38. The VC team are currently working towards the target start date of April 2007 for the exercise.

C. Race and equality impact

There are no race and diversity implications.

D. Financial implications

There are implications in regard to NSPIS, Asset Recovery, NES, VFDs, IPTs and Virtual Courts. Each of these initiatives is to secure greater effectiveness and efficiency. Each has benefits to be realized, making them cost neutral or indeed capable of generating savings. Where this is not the case they are self-financing or funded otherwise than by the MPA.

E. Background papers

None

F. Contact details

Report author: Chief Superintendent George Clarke, Territorial Policing, MPS

For more information contact:

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

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