Final Report of the Morris Inquiry: The Case for Change

BUILDING CAPACITY
We also recommend that Operational Command Unit commanders and
departmental managers should use this data to ensure that the officers and
staff for whom they are responsible receive the training they need to do their
jobs and that there is fair and equal access to appropriate training
opportunities. A pre-requisite of this is full devolution of training budgets.
Training for management
9.72 Progression, as either an officer or a member of police staff, will normally
involve taking on a managerial role or increasing the managerial component of an
existing role.
9.73 If the MPS is to move forward in the way we envisage, it needs to equip its
managers with the skills and confidence to manage people, as well as operational
matters. Everyone in the organisation needs to understand that it is only by
managing the Service’s officers and staff effectively that the best operational results
will be achieved.
9.74 We have received a substantial body of evidence suggesting that officers in
the MPS are frequently given managerial responsibilities without being given the
training and support they need to discharge those responsibilities effectively. The
following comment, made during one of our visits to police stations in London,
says much about how first line managers are prepared for a managerial role:
“You get taught how to deal with the custody computer, but not how to deal with people.”
9.75 The MPS disagrees that its managers have not been given the tools to
discharge managerial responsibilities. Management skills are tested in promotion
examinations and promotion assessments are also designed to test management
skills. It does acknowledge, however, that not all individuals in the MPS with
managerial responsibility choose to use these skills on a daily basis.
9.76 In addition, the Deputy Commissioner acknowledged that the MPS could do
more in equipping its personnel to take on managerial roles:
“This is my example: the majority of the management training through which I passed which
was in service was delivered at the police staff college at Bramshill. There was a special course,
junior command course, intermediate command course, senior command course, and some
people, for some very good reasons, effectively abolished most of those courses leaving
effectively two book ends. I am not sure what other forces did, but I do not think this Service
picked up the fact that it was about to lose a kind of process through which at least managers
were exposed to the basic tenets of line management. We just did not do it. So we have
those in the sergeants’ course, we have those in the inspectors’ course, and then it just ceases.
There is no coherent Met management piece.”
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