Public: Criminal justice + Comment | Public

Policing in the 21st century

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 09:44:00 GMT

Robert McFarland takes a look at, and comments on, the proposals in the government consultation document ahead of the the first annual Police Foundation conference on 7 September

Press comment on the government's recent consultation document Policing in the 21st Century, centred on the Tory's manifesto commitment to introduce directly elected police commissioners. Much more though is afoot; the Home Secretary is making proposals that fully justify her claim to be introducing "the most radical change to policing in 50 years".

What are these changes, and what chance is there that the government will succeed in overcoming the entrenched attitudes and special interests that for far too long have frustrated efforts to drag the 'last great unreformed public service' into the 21st century?

Policing for the people The origins of the government's proposals are to be found in a Conservative party policy review pamphlet written in 2007 by the current police minister, Nick Herbert. Policing for the People attacked the centrally imposed rules and targets that compromise police professionalism, result in unproductive bureaucracy and disempower local communities. The proposal to replace police authorities by directly elected police commissioners reflects the perceived need to return powers over local policing to local communities and, specifically, to ensure that the police become more locally accountable.

At a national level the pamphlet highlighted the necessity for the police to be much more effective in fighting serious and organised crime and dealing with cross-border and international criminality. In this context Herbert accepted that the current structure of 43 forces was no longer viable, while rejecting the mainstream reformist view that the answer lay in merging the 43 forces into a number of regional police forces under direction from a central leadership. He argued that big was not necessarily beautiful and that having fewer, larger forces was irreconcilable with 'the new localism'.

Herbert suggested two models, both based on the current 43 forces, were viable; 'locally accountable forces matched with effective leadership from the centre to ensure collaboration, or locally accountable forces operating alongside a national Serious Crime Force.'

The pamphlet didn't choose between the two, though there is an inference that if the first model didn't deliver, the second, two-force solution would.

Imperatives of office

On taking office coalition Home Office police ministers were confronted by two imperatives: the need for financial savings and the vulnerable state of the protective services. The Chancellor's decision to reverse the Labour government's exemption of the police from the effects of the financial crisis left the service reeling.

Finding savings of at least 25% of the police budget (around £3bln in total) makes significant reform of police structures and ways of working essential. Home Office ministers have already indicated that radical cuts are on the way and that the days of the 43 fiefdoms doing their own thing are over. Announcements include removing the shibboleth around maintaining police officer numbers; a review of police pay and conditions; and the intention to mandate centralised procurement and shared services.

Public safety is the first responsibility of government and the state of the nation's protective services; that part of policing dealing with serious and organised crime; from drugs, fraud, and cybercrime through to protection rackets and people trafficking, has become an ever more urgent issue. Since Denis O'Connor's 2005 HMIC report on the protective services in which the existing 43 force structure was deemed to be 'unfit for purpose', senior police officers have been pressing the government to act. There has been some progress; the setting up of the Serious & Organised Crime Agency in 2006, the introduction of the lead-force concept for counter-terrorism, fraud intelligence etc, as well as a number of collaborative initiatives co-ordinated through ACPO.

It has not been enough. Recently the Met Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, said that police resources devoted to addressing the threat of organised crime were 'uncoordinated and, in effect, inadequate and have been for many years … which is unsurprising given the continuing absence of a coherent delivery structure'.

It is the need for near certainty in the delivery of these twin imperatives; major savings and more effective protective services, that has pushed the government towards the second of Herbert's 'viable structures', the one introducing a two–tier force structure.

Any doubts among ministers that this may be going too far too fast must have been assuaged by the fact that a two-tier police structure makes it easier to realise the government's manifesto commitment to localise decisions on local policing and to make the police more locally accountable.

The separation of national and local

Prepared in obvious haste, the consultation document is hardly a model of clarity, too many different audiences to woo and different interest groups to mollify for that. Afraid of frightening the horses, the tone of the consultation document is meant to be reassuring; it waxes lyrical about not breaking 'the golden thread that runs from local policing across force boundaries and internationally; insists that the government wants merely to re-balance the tripartite relationship; and stresses collaboration as the instrument that will 'save money … and tackle serious and cross-boundary criminality more effectively'.

However the bottom line is that the proposed consultation is largely a PR exercise, seeking advice on the hows not the whats. The key decisions have already been taken.

The government has seen the need to establish a clear distinction between national and local policing. Reformers have long been arguing the necessity for such a separation, but what is fresh is that the government's proposals eschew the standard solution, force mergers, instead proposing what is in effect a two-tier policing structure similar to that present in many, if not most, western democratic jurisdictions.

The proposed top-tier is a new National Crime Agency (Herbert's national Serious Crime Force) 'to lead the fight against organised crime, protect our borders and provide services best delivered at a national level'. The NCA will absorb the existing intelligence–led Serious and Organised Crime Agency but, unlike SOCA, will be operationally focussed under the leadership of a senior Chief Constable who will oversee a number of operational commands 'for example, an organised crime command, a border policing command , and (potentially) an operational support command'. In other words it will be a police force like any other.

The NCA's operational support command would take over many of the force support functions of the disbanded National Policing Improvement Agency; as well as the national support services currently under the aegis of ACPO. Ultimately the NCA will have the resources, the professional expertise, and the authority to enable it to be held directly accountable for delivering more effective protective services, developing police professionalism and improving efficiency throughout the service.

For the existing 43 forces separation means that their main responsibility becomes the provision of local policing services to the 370 odd local authorities and their neighbourhoods. They will also have an important role both in providing key logistical support, mainly manpower, to the NCA, and in collaborating with the NCA's operational support unit and others to streamline processes, improve efficiency, share services etc.

Separating the local policing function allows the government to cede control over local policing policy and priorities to local communities without compromising the national service. The centre can now disengage from the minutiae of local policing priorities and plans and give up on unwarranted and unnecessary interference in the way local communities are policed. In the process, or rather in the absence of it, bureaucracy is reduced and money saved. This represents a genuine devolution of power.

How is the new structure to be made accountable? The consultation document explicitly leaves open the NCA's governance structure, though ultimately it can only be to the national government. Originally the Tories wanted accountability for the 43 forces to be to the local electorate through directly elected police commissioners, replacing the existing police authorities. This idea was emasculated in the coalition agreement when it added the rider that the commissioners would 'be subject to strict checks and balances by locally elected representatives'. This has led to the proposal to set up 43 local authority-led Police & Crime Panels, a move which raises more questions than it answers.

Consequences It needs to be admitted that the consultation paper never specifically refers to the separation of the national from the local. But proposals, like actions, have foreseeable consequences, some of them doubtless unintended.

Collaboration – the fatal flaws

The consultation document's rhetoric assumes that results will be delivered by collaboration; between forces, between forces and the NCA, and between police commissioners, the NCA and other forces; in fact between Uncle Tom Cobley and all. The snag is that no one; neither government, chief constables, nor local councillors believe collaboration works. In an effort to combat this widespread scepticism the consultation document talks of strengthening 'the current duty to collaborate ... so that the Home Secretary … can direct forces' and of introducing a 'transparent operational protocol between chief constables and the NCA'. But this mixture of threats and more bureaucracy is no answer.

Collaboration may deliver some benefits eg through shared back-office services and some procurement decisions, but at an operational level it is a fatally flawed concept. The flaws are around fairness and accountability. Any operational command will, by definition, be constantly making decisions about priorities. The criteria will be the seriousness of the incident and the human costs involved. Being 'fair' to ensure a proportionately equal deployment of resources across the collaborative's constituent areas won't come into it. Accountability is an even more serious problem. Under existing structures a commander of a collaborative venture is either not accountable to anyone or is accountable to each and every one of the chief constables who are party to the collaboration. If the latter, chaos ensues. If the former not only is it patently unacceptable but it begs the question of how chief constables can continue to be held responsible for their geographical area if they don't control the decisions about priorities or the deployment of resources.

The NCA and the 43 forces

The NCA is to be operationally focussed, headed by a senior chief constable responsible for a number of operational commands. Co-ordinated nationally, each command is likely to be operationally based in strategic regions (the 2005 HMIC report described just such a model). The resources required can only come from the existing 43 forces, how else to reduce duplication (43 of everything) and deliver the savings required by the Treasury. It's at this point, however, that the consultation paper fails to confront directly the autonomy of the 43 chief constables.The proposals insist that even if chief constables don't have command over the resources (and even when those they do control are under a strong statutory duty to collaborate), they are to remain solely accountable for the protective services in their geographical area. This is not sustainable.

Local Control and Accountability

The government's realisation that it can only meet its commitment to decentralise control over local policing by strengthening central control over the protective services represents, in a British context, a significant breakthrough. Having proposed setting up the NCA, a national police force by another name, it has been able to go much further than anyone thought possible in ceding control over local policing policy and priorities to local communities. And the process could, eventually, go much further. The consultation document at one point proposes giving the Police & Crime Panels the power to call for a referendum on the police precept, in effect giving them a veto over the police commissioner's budget. If the government ever agreed to pass back to local authorities the police proportion of the business rate, the whole of the local policing budget could revert to local control.

The boldness of the decisions about local policing and the de facto emergence of a two-tier structure makes the manifesto commitment to introduce directly elected police commissioners problematic and, ironically, irrelevant. The general case against PCs has been well rehearsed both by chief constables and local councillors, but proposals in the consultation document also undermine the concept; The police commissioner's main role as the champion of the interests of local people is heavily compromised by placing on him/her a 'strong duty to collaborate', with the added threat of statutory enforcement.

PCs are to be monitored by local authority-led Police & Crime Panels, who would have a veto over certain decisions, including the police budget. It is unclear how the PC can be held accountable if in practice the funding comes from a parallel elected body. Not always even parallel as while some force areas are co-terminus with a precept raising authority, most are not. Even if party politics doesn't intrude, it is difficult to see how this arrangement can work.

Then there is the expense both of the elections in 42 unique constituencies (London is excluded) and of providing police commissioners with offices and support staff.
Overall the PCs' job looks an impossible one, with incumbents pulled in even more directions than the police authorities they are meant to supersede. The government, which is in favour of force mergers providing they are voluntary, will also surely want to avoid making 43 police commissioners constitutional fixtures.

Endgame

The government's proposals offer the dizzy prospect of a robust national police capability and, at the same time, a local policing settlement involving a transfer of power, free of diktats from London. This is real progress in an area of public policy for far too long seen as intractable.

Will the government be able to push the reforms through? There is something in it for almost everyone and the financial imperatives will concentrate minds. Some backwoodsmen among chief constables may be upset, but their more forward thinking colleagues should be able to swing the argument. The rank and file police constable also won't relish what will be seen as demotion to a second division and there will be mutterings about tradition and the sanctity of royal oaths.

The crucial test will be the reaction of MPs when the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill is introduced in the autumn. It would undoubtedly help bring local authorities and chief constables fully on board and influence MPs positively if the government quietly did a U-turn on police commissioners. Whatever merit the idea may have had has been lost in the greater debate.

Robert McFarland is was formerly a chief executive with the BOC Group. More recently he has been involved in government reviews, all associated with aspects of the criminal justice process

The first annual Police Foundation conference - Policing and the Recession, 7 September 2010

Law and disorder?

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 12:40:00 GMT

In the drive for greater efficiency, police forces will be expected to collaborate more and share services - while building strong local communities and giving residents more say

The new coalition government agreement said little about police reform but two months in, driven partly by the need to find substantial savings and partly by the commitments in the Conservative election manifesto, the likely shape of the immediate future is beginning to emerge.

The headlines include confirmation that the police will not be treated as a special case when it comes to budget cuts, and the abandonment of the previous government's commitment to maintain the number of police officers and of both the public confidence target and the policing pledge.

Changes to stop and search and charging procedures to reduce bureaucracy have also been trailed.

These measures will yield but a fraction of the Chancellor's looked for savings, and so far plans to find the balance are far from convincing.

43 police fiefdoms

Nick Herbert, the police minister says inefficiency can't be tolerated and that the days of 43 police fiefdoms are over, but the initiatives so far announced; more collaboration between forces, the development of shared services, and centralised procurement, produced insignificant results under the last government.

And anyway such initiatives are at odds with the traditional Conservative doctrine, restated last week in a speech given by Theresa May to the National Policing Conference, that policing is primarily a local and not a national matter.

The home secretary made clear that it is not greater effectiveness or efficiency that should drive police reform but the need to build strong local communities and give them 'a major role in the planning and delivery of the public services they use'.

Thus 'police force mergers will not be allowed to happen unless they are voluntary and … have the support of local communities'.

In earnest of this the government wants to 'swap the top-down bureaucratic accountability for local, democratic accountability by abolishing police authorities and replacing them with 'a directly-elected individual at force level'.

A national dimension

This denial of a national dimension to policing effectively turns the clock back nearly 200 years to before Sir Robert Peel's Metropolitan Police Act. It is also unsustainable as it is inevitable that on both national security, legislative, and economic grounds most police policies and procedures will continue to be driven from the centre.

The key as a former police minister, Tony McNulty, said is to find a way 'to separate the national from the local in policing' opening the way for both national and local accountability.

The police themselves have come to understand this. Even before the financial crisis many, including the current president of ACPO Sir Hugh Orde, were suggesting the need for an independent inquiry into policing, including examining again the case for major structural reforms, but the idea has so far failed to find resonance with the politicians of any party.

It seems inconceivable that within the next two years there will be 43 freshly elected police commissioners from 43 newly drawn constituencies, overseeing 43 different responses from 43 chief constables to arbitrary reductions in the local precepts and central grants. Perhaps the cuts won't be that severe.

Perhaps the police commissioner idea will be significantly modified by the time the Police Reform & Social Responsibility Bill, promised for the autumn, is published. One can only hope so.

Robert McFarland is was formerly a chief executive with the BOC Group. More recently he has been involved in government reviews, all associated with aspects of the criminal justice process and is author of Police Reform – thoughts of radical change

Analysing crime patterns

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 12:30:00 GMT

Professor Robert Haining looks at the data that goes into estimating the small area level risk of burglary

The British Crime Survey reveals that nationally, areas with council flats, high unemployment and persons living alone or with many lone parent families, and areas with furnished flats and bedsits housing young single people are among the most at-risk of being burgled.

Over the past 12 years, I have been involved in a number of Home Office projects, as well as for local police forces, analysing crime patterns to help tackle crime and disorder in local areas, by developing and applying Spatial Ecological Analysis (SEA) to crime data.

SEA is a highly refined research methodology for analysing the relationship between, in this case, area crime rates and the social class, socio-economic status and demographic characteristics of area populations as well as the geography of offenders and victims of crimes.

With my colleagues, I analyse crime in localities defined by the Census, such as areas each containing on average 125 households that are similar to each other in tenure and type of dwelling.

Crime data for these analyses come from the police's own recorded crime database so that the accuracy of any analysis depends on the accuracy and completeness of these records.

UK National Census and local authority data at the area level on household composition, living arrangements, household tenure, accommodation type, population turnover, economic circumstances and social and ethnic composition figure prominently in helping to explain geographical differences in particular crime rates.

Selecting areas for burglary

Rational choice theory suggests two stages to burglary: First the burglar selects the area to commit the crime in, and second the burglar selects the particular target (household) within that chosen area.

Choice of area is a balance of risk against reward, while taking into account the effort involved. A burglar selects the area according to the potential reward in which case affluent areas might be favoured over less affluent and deprived areas. But any area where households are expected to have high value and easy to steal goods are attractive.

Some areas have fewer formal (eg police) or informal (eg neighbourhood watch) guardians than others. Affluent neighbourhoods where residents are absent for extended periods during a day or at weekends and areas with low levels of collective responsibility are particularly attractive to burglars as the risk of getting caught may be low. Burglars often choose areas that they know well but where they will not be recognised, in which case an area near the burglar's own residence or work place can be suitable. Familiarity with the area and minimising the effort required are also part of the burglar's equation. Within this ecological framework, the choice of which particular household to burgle is often opportunistic.

Intelligence-led policing

Cartographic visualisation often using Geographic Information Systems (GIS), mathematical modelling and spatial data analysis are familiar to geographers, but they are also valuable tools for the police's operational procedures. Intelligence-led policing underlies the UK's National Intelligence Model for operational policing and it is driven by a national crime profile where there is a high level of individual and geographical repeat victimisation and where a large proportion of crime is committed by a comparatively small number of offenders.

Analysing crime in small areas and for specific Police Force Areas (PFA) is exceedingly important as the police are territorial in their organisation and one aspect of resource allocation for them is by geographical area. Studies that focus on particular PFA provide additional local insight that supplements the evidence from national surveys. Spatial ecological analysis of crime has potential to provide the police with highly detailed information on local crime, which can be used to identify priority areas for police resources.

Our figures demonstrate that most burglars live within a 2km radius of their target areas.

Professor Robert Haining is in University of Cambridge's Department of Geography. This is an extract from a presentation he is giving on Wednesday 7 July at the fourth ESRC research methods festival

Exploring modern probation

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 13:24:00 GMT

Philip Whitehead bring a philosophical point of view to the changes in the probabtion services since 1997

Since New Labour came to power in 1997 and until replaced by a Conservative-Liberal alliance in May 2010, this 13 year period of government has been extraordinarily difficult for the criminal justice system and particularly the probation service.

New Labour interpreted its mandate in 1997 as being granted permission to modernise the public sector which is comprised of numerous institutions.

More often than not the process of modernisation pushed the public sector – education, health service, youth justice, police, criminal justice and probation – into the arms of a rising army of managerial bureaucrats.

Out with organisational structures which should put people first, and in with a blanket of targets, procedures, systems, and processes which have strangled the life out of staff who require the autonomy and discretion to do what is often difficult and demanding work.

In fact bureaucratic targets have been exalted at the expense of working with and understanding people, who are the recipients of the state's public services. The outcomes and complicated effects of these modernising monstrosities and cultural catastrophes on probation, which has a long history reaching back to 1907,have implications for the entire public sector.

In other words the probation domain, which is analysed by resorting to numerous bodies of social theory, serves as a case study which has much wider applicability throughout public services.

Past 13 years has shifted the organisational emphasis

Where probation is concerned the past 13 years has shifted the organisational emphasis from the language of clients to criminals and offenders; from striving towards achieving rehabilitation to casting the net of authoritarian and punitive responses; from providing advice, assistance, and friendship, to punishment, containment, and control; from providing social welfare and social work help to probation's emergence as a correctional arm of a much more punitive state.

Fundamentally, the political encouragement of a tougher and more robust approach to people who offend can be said to constitute a collective moral failure because it fails to understand that human behaviours must be located within a wider political, social and economic context of late modern capitalism, sometimes referred to as neoliberalism.

In order to help analyse and explain the past, I have looked at social theory associated with Durkheim, Weber, Marx, and Foucault to explore and explain the rapidly changing set of events since 1997, together with innovative empirical research from solicitors, magistrates, court clerks, barristers and judges, to investigate a complicated field of enquiry and suggest ways forward for those who work in probation, criminal and social justice.

Probation may well have a different history compared to other organisations within the public sector, but the issues with which it has been confronted with during the past 13 years have much in common with other public sector organisations. Therefore the analysis contained in this new book alludes to issues that will resonate with the whole of the public sector.

Philip Whitehead is reader in criminal and social justice at the University of Teeside and author of Exploring Modern Probation: Social Theory and Organisational Complexity, published by The Policy Press

Vetting and barring: Managers need to be aware of the CRB checks

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 16:18:19 GMT

Every public sector organisation needs to be aware of Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) checks, but how many are really getting to grips with the ramifications of the government's controversial new scheme?

Because the public sector tends to be self-sufficient when it comes to Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) checks, checking services are not receiving many applications from the sector.

This is worrying as I doubt whether managers have really got their minds around the full impact of the impending scheme, which comes into place on 26 July.

The burden of the scheme (which regulates all those working with children and vulnerable adults) comes in several parts. Initially, there's carrying out the registration with the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA). The timetable runs to 2015, with each employee's registration keyed to job change or the date of their last CRB. This demands careful scheduling or mass registration, not to mention deciding whether to pay for it, at upwards of £64 per head.

Managers must also try to foresee the impact of problems with registration. What do they do if an existing employee is barred? How will they manage delay or an error by the ISA? Given the issues in the past with major IT-based innovations (I'm thinking of the changes to the issue of CRBs and passports), organisations need to have some contingencies laid down.

Increased demand

If an organisation is registered to carry out CRB checks directly then it will need to re-engineer its provision to allow for a major hike in demand from colleagues. If not, managers must review current suppliers to ensure they are able to cope both with an inundation of applications and increased demand for added-value support.

And if the service is sold to external customers, it is imperative to review its continuing viability. Staffing levels and skills will need to be cranked up, any service promise revisited and the duty to protect the organisation demands new terms of business to address the issue where non, or underperformance leads to potential liability.

Toxic threat

Perhaps the most toxic threat to managers is the new duty to refer. Where one thinks that there may be a risk of harm, an invasive new process is triggered. Employees must be suspended or moved to work not involving children or vulnerable adults. An investigation will determine the reality of that risk. If it leads to a manager thinking the risk is genuine, the person must be permanently removed from regulated activity and referred to the ISA.

The impact of this will be readily appreciated, ramifying on job descriptions of senior managers, disciplinary and grievance procedures, and contracts of employment.

Above all, managers must remember this. Failure to meet the demands of the new scheme creates criminal liability, with prison and hefty fines flowing (not to mention unemployment) from a guilty verdict.

Barry Clark is co-author of Vetting and Barring – a practical guide to the new CRB/ISA scheme. A former superintendent of the Metropolitan Police Force, Clark is of the UK's leading experts in vetting and Criminal Records Bureau checks

HM Prison Services pushes its graduate recruitment

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 12:01:07 GMT

From prison officer to governor is just one of the paths available to the right kind of graduate who is looking for something different and is comfortable working in a sometimes challenging environment

In these challenging times, it's important for businesses to review their graduate programmes carefully to ensure they are offering the optimum package to university leavers and attracting the right candidates.

The Prison Service, and now the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), has had a variety of direct-entry programmes for high-potential graduates over the past 30 years.

However, many graduates still might not think of us as a graduate recruiter and almost certainly won't understand the sheer variety of opportunities that exist in an organisation like ours.

We tend to recruit relatively small numbers of graduates each year, particularly when compared to many of the blue-chip companies.

But if graduates are looking for a role that will genuinely challenge them on a daily basis; take them out of their comfort zone; and in return given them lots of opportunities for progression and responsibility very early on in their careers, then a place on the NOMS Graduate Programme might be for them.

Over the past 18-months we have reviewed all of our fast-track schemes and in fact decided not to recruit within the graduate market in 2008-09.

The organisation was going through a significant change programme at this time and it seemed like a good opportunity to review what had gone before and design a new programme, fit-for-purpose for the next five years and beyond.

A brand new programme

We talked to the business about what they want from graduate recruits, and we talked to around 20 graduates who have been through one of our earlier incarnations of a graduate scheme and then used this to design a brand new programme.

The graduates all felt that consistency of opportunity was one thing that was really important to them all, along with sufficient support when they are out in their establishments.

Bringing the funding of posts back into the centre of the organisation will help us to influence the consistency of opportunity and we have put a range of support mechanisms for new graduates in place including a buddy already on the programme in NOMS; a mentor within their establishment and one outside of their establishment; a central support team; and a fast-track champion in their region at senior management level.

The four-stage assessment process to get a place on this programme will be rigorous, as we are looking for talented individuals who have the potential to succeed in every role that they find themselves in, and to be operating at senior management level within a relatively short time frame.

Successful candidates will need to be able to communicate with people from all walks of life, have excellent leadership skills, be passionate about what we are trying to do, and have the resilience and tenacity to deal with some challenging situations in difficult environments.

Once on the programme, candidates will spend seven weeks at our national training centre in Warwickshire getting to grips with the organisation they have joined and then learning all they need to know to prepare them for their first placement, which will be between six to 12 months as a prison officer in one of our establishments.

If successful in this first role, candidates will then go on to be a first line-manger and 12 months later a middle-management role, or governor grade, in one of our establishments.

They will be supported throughout the programme, both locally and centrally; they will have a mentor; regular development workshops and the opportunity to apply for non-establishment based secondments in NOMS and the Ministry of Justice.

Once they have passed their operational manager assessments, they will then be able to apply for managerial posts across NOMS and we will encourage them to look to their next promotion, into senior management.

Jim Heavens is head of resourcing at the National Offender Management Service (NOMS)

Volunteers for justice – a survey on skills

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:00:00 GMT

They provide essential services such as advice and support to crime victims, witnesses and families of offenders, as well as working with young people at risk, but there is no real network of advice and support for the volunteers themselves

As many commentators and contributors to this website have been saying recently, these are tough times for the third sector. But as Andy Gregg of the London Advice Services Alliance (LASA) said last week, the sector can get through the recession – collaborative working and tackling issues of leadership and communication can help, but a sector so reliant on the work of volunteers must ensure that these people have the skills they need to perform efficiently.

Third sector organisations are crucial to the delivery of justice services across the UK. They provide services such as advice and support to victims, survivors and witnesses of crime, and to the families of offenders. They work with young people at risk of committing crime, offenders, ex-offenders, on community safety projects and much more.

They are integral to a successful justice system.

With the help of BMG Research, the Skills for Justice department conducted a survey which provided responses from over 500 telephone interviews painting a picture of the situation across the UK.

We found that volunteers are absolutely vital to service delivery.

They make up two-thirds of the third sector workforce in the justice sector, and to a large extent, do the same types of jobs as paid workers. However, due to the sometimes difficult nature of the work they do, organisations can sometimes find it difficult to recruit volunteers, a point mentioned in the Neuberger report – Volunteering Across the Criminal Justice System.

Despite this huge reliance on the work of volunteers, approaches to attracting and supporting them are mostly informal – recruitment tends to happen through word of mouth, investment in training for volunteers compared to paid staff is relatively low and any training given is usually 'on the job'.

There is also a limited emphasis on the management of volunteers, only 2% of the paid workforce is identified as having a role that includes volunteer management. This suggests that organisations and volunteers themselves could benefit from a more structured approach to the training, development and management of volunteers.

Whilst there is no doubt that there is a commitment to training and development, with 76% of establishments formally assessing skills needs and 73% having a training budget, organisations do find it difficult to address skills needs, largely due to lack of funding, lack of time and a lack of appropriate provision.

The employers we spoke to seem to have a high awareness of national training initiatives, but there is low take-up, 82% being aware of apprenticeships, but only 10% involved, and in England 69% aware of train to gain, but 32% involved.

Joanna Stuart, head of research, Institute for Volunteering Research, said: "Once organisations and agencies have volunteers, good volunteer management is key to keeping them. This research and other studies have shown training and development for volunteers involved in the justice sector are under resourced. This raises serious issues amongst organisations, funders and the wider justice sector about the way volunteers and their involvement is successfully supported."

We will be using this research to inform our future work with third sector organisations in justice, and we want to build a better understanding of the key issues that lie behind the figures we have.

While it is clear that the contribution of volunteers in the justice system is absolutely crucial, it seems that in order to get the best out of them, an investment in their skills development through a more structured approach to both training and management could make that contribution even greater.

Felicity Winter is director of policy and communications, Skill for Justice

Police modernisation

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Police forces need to link up their IT systems if they are to work more effectively

The introduction of the government's policing pledge in the spring highlighted a significant shift in UK policing strategy.

The pledge, a set of promises aimed at improving communication between residents and their local police force, sets its sights on providing the customer service we have only previously seen from the private sector – a goal that will be welcomed by many.

However, in order to increase arrests and conviction rates and deliver improved services to victims, witnesses and communities, the right technology needs to be in place. It's not just about the "face" of policing being more acceptable to the public it serves; rather it is about using technology to connect the organisation from the back office, through the front office and right into the front line.

But just how well equipped is the police force to do this? Richard Lambert, director-general of the CBI, recently pointed out that a lack of joined-up thinking across the 43 forces in England and Wales was responsible for it taking almost a decade to rollout the Airwave digital radio service.

Indeed, police and law enforcement agencies have long recognised that they have been operating in "information silos", employing multiple databases, systems and custom software to meet their individual departments, specialist units or local team investigation needs. This has created challenges over integration, information sharing and data quality.

Fortunately, there are many IT initiatives underway that are helping to alleviate this problem. They include the recently announced police national database, designed to be a central repository of crime data, and crime mapping, which makes crime details available to the public in an interactive and informative way. While it's true that each of these initiatives will deliver benefits, without a coherent and joined up vision and plan to bring them together, resources will be used in a less than optimal manner.

The National Policing Improvement Agency has begun work on a new IT strategy to increase efficiencies across police forces in England & Wales; this is a step in the right direction. One clear way to begin the process is to build solutions on an open platform, based on open standards and interoperability between data systems. This will allow police forces to automate processes, streamline intelligence gathering, and increase productivity and efficiency across force boundaries. It will minimise administration and bureaucracy, and ensure that all back office activities contribute to a more effective investigative progress, where work is correctly prioritised, assigned and monitored. This will then lead to more effective and successful investigations. If evidence, a person or a crime scene is connected to multiple cases, this association will be instantly recognisable to police officers. The benefits are obvious.

Technically this open standards approach is deliverable right now. What's now needed is for the NPIA to lead the way and drive this change throughout the 43 UK forces. Strong leadership at the centre will ensure this happens quickly.

Simon Godfrey is principal of central and local government at software firm SAP