Reducing Bureaucracy in Policing - Home Office

Barriers: (combination of)
� Complex accountability and confused governance arrangements, particularly at a national
level which create shared but diluted responsibility, where decision-making can be passed
on and no-one held ultimately responsible.
� Over-reliance on quantifiable performance and productivity measures - what gets counted
(inspected) gets done at the expense of long term qualitative improvements.
� Disproportionate and overlapping inspection and audit regimes - requiring demonstration of
compliance with inflexible clinical 'production line' process
� Incompatible external and competitive internal performance measures which fail to value or
incentivise partnership and collaborative working
� Inconsistent leadership, lack of trust, poor risk management and an ‘institutionalised’ blame
culture
� Basic skills shortages, lack of experience in decision making and excessive use of gate
keepers
� Insularity, parochialism (”not invented here” syndrome) and the pursuance of personal
interest rather than the common good
� No formal recognition of appropriate and proportionate ‘out of court’ or alternative disposals
� Fragmented and dysfunctional systems and processes, where greater attention is given to
recording than investigation, numbers managed more than people and analysts used as
statisticians
� Incompatible IT
� Poor commissioning, co-ordination and sharing of learning from projects resulting in
duplication of effort and waste
� Poor benchmarking, hasty implementation, disparate monitoring and evaluation
arrangements with tendency to implement solutions before fully understanding problem
� Over-reliance on short-term, stand-alone ‘statistically significant’ solutions promoting
transactional rather than transformational change
� Political timetables and adoption of solutions that demonstrate the greatest statistical
benefit
Whilst there is a danger of feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of the challenge, particularly when
whole industries have been built around the capturing of information “just in case”, there is an
opportunity to turn each of these barriers into a lever for positive change. On the positive side there
remains a huge appetite and enthusiasm to cut out waste and duplication which must be tapped
into.
Coalition Government
The coalition government has a clear mandate to reduce bureaucracy and the police service
cannot ‘afford’ to miss the opportunity this presents.
With unnecessary bureaucracy being added at every tier of policing; from the local to the national,
it is almost impossible to calculate the cumulative effect, but I would estimate one third of effort is
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