Reducing Bureaucracy in Policing - Home Office

� Apply a risk-based proportionate approach to force audits and inspections. Scale audits
according to known risk and simplify compliance requirements. Recognise continuous
improvement.
� Recognise inspired leaders who set clear, simple ethical standards which are consistently
reinforced by action.
� Question the value of force comparisons, develop compatible performance measures which
encourage and recognise ‘doing the right thing’, rather than ‘doing the thing right’.
Incentivise the right behaviours.
� Develop a new type of knowledge base which records solutions to ‘real community
problems', identifies what works and “good practice” to balance disproportionate attention
given to crime statistics.
� Reconfigure force structures to realise and maximise opportunity costs gained by removing,
rationalising and streamlining systems and processes.
� Replace a blame culture with a learning culture in support of continuous improvement to
drive out unnecessary bureaucracy, create efficiencies and enable transformational
change.
� Improve commissioning and co-ordination of projects, share learning and good practice to
eliminate duplication of effort and waste.
� Apply continuous improvement principles to the PDR system, make it purposeful and more
proportionate to need, role and requirement.
� Develop POLKA into the search engine of choice for police professionals.
� Removing unnecessary bureaucracy should be mainstreamed and part of normal business,
adopting a proportionate response based on risk and harm, with an explicit requirement to
reduce costs, add value and get it right first time.
� Develop and adopt complimentary performance framework for whole of CJS with common
purpose of ‘reduce crime, prevent reoffending and reduce the prison population’.
� Formally recognise the use of professional judgement, discretion and alternatives to arrest,
consolidate different options (community resolutions, restorative solutions) in a coherent
way which is victim led, proportionate and appropriate.
� Consider evaluation of Modernising Charging Pilots with a view to rolling out improved
arrangements where charging decisions are taken by the appropriate person according to
the complexity and seriousness of offence.
� Robustly manage and fully embed streamlined process across all criminal justice partners
to fully realise the benefits.
� Assess progress of integrated prosecution teams across policing and criminal justice with a
view to sharing experience, identify what works and how the costs and benefits of
integrated working can best be exploited.
� Remove requirement to complete disclosure schedules prior to first hearing in Magistrates
Court and consider shifting trigger point for more serious offences at Crown Court to the
point when a not guilty plea is entered.
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