The National Policing Plan runs to fifty six pages and requires all forty three police forces in England and Wales to produce three-year plans which incorporate ten Public Service Agreements with seventeen key performance indicators; four strategic priorities with ten core actions, seventeen local actions and nineteen more key performance indicators; six performance domains with twenty one Best Value Performance Indicators; and three reform-priority areas with fifty one local planning points.
The seventeen key performance indicators, which are linked to the ten Public Service Agreements, include violent crime, youth crime, organised crime, antisocial behaviour, seizure of assets, efficiency, drugs, and feelings of public satisfaction and safety. They also require police to cut the number of burglaries, robberies and car crimes, measured per thousand of population. The nineteen peformance indicators which are attached to the four strategic priorities also require police to cut the number of burglaries, robberies and car crimes, but measured this time by the absolute number which are recorded by police without reference to population. These nineteen targets also cover efficiency (to go up by 2% per year), road traffic deaths (to go down down 40% in ten years), community participation (up 5% by 2006), sick days (down to 11.5 per officer by 2006), value for money (up), overtime (down), police visibility (up), ill-health retirements (down), recruitment of women (up), child deaths on the road (down) and so on, each with its own precise numerical indicator.
In producing these local plans, the 43 forces are required to consult with local police authorities, the other criminal justice agencies, the Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships, Youth Offender Teams, Drug Action Teams and the new Criminal Justice Boards – all of whom have their own multiple sets of priorities, performance indicators and targets. And, in doing so, police are also required to take account of the new white paper and bill on anti-social behaviour, a new action plan on rape, new best practice on street crime, the new crack action plan, the latest guidance from the organised crime strategy group, the UK threat assessment, the new national strategy to promote learning in the police, the new national recruitment standards, the new strategic guidance on community volunteer schemes, the new strategy for a healthy police, the five-step plan outlined in the Justice For All white paper, the new code of practice for crime victims, the joint chief inspectors’ new report on child protection, new national standards on the quality of public/police contact, the Gender Agenda, the five key issues identified by the Stephen Lawrence Steering Group, new guidance on community cohesion and the new strategy on community empowerment in crime reduction. The national drugs strategy, however, has been scrapped. But it’s been replaced.
This is not quite the end of it. All of this has now been arranged into a new Policing Performance Assessment Framework which will require some additional performance indicators under five new domain headings. In addition, the Home Office has just created the new National Centre for Policing Excellence which will issue new statutory codes of practice for all 43 forces. And all of this, of course, is subject to the work of the Bureaucracy Task Force, under Sir David O’Dowd, which has produced 52 recommendations. Which are currently being converted into a new action plan.
