Productivity Within Policing

Tuesday 23rd April 2024 Written Statements

[The Minister for Crime, Policing and Fire (Chris Philp)]

Today the Government have published our response to the independent policing productivity review.

Improving productivity across the public sector is a priority for this Government. Increasing the productivity of policing means ensuring our police officers are able to do their jobs effectively and stripping away the unnecessary barriers they face. This will free up police time so that officers are able to concentrate on frontline work, protecting the public, detecting crime, and catching criminals. This will make the public safer and allow them to feel safe, increasing confidence in policing, another priority for this Government.

In August 2022, the Home Office commissioned the National Police Chiefs’ Council to conduct an independent review of productivity in policing, providing clear, practical and deliverable recommendations to improve efficiency and effectiveness across the functions of policing. The review was published on 20 November 2023 and identified many opportunities for policing to improve productivity, with the potential to save 38 million hours of police officer time every year. That would be the equivalent of another 20,000 officers on our streets.

Our response sets out the Government’s support for the review and their recommendations. We have already announced investment of over £230 million at the spring Budget to drive productivity and performance improvements across policing. This will include additional investment into technology and innovation measures such as facial recognition, using drones as first responders, redaction, rapid video response, automated triage of 101 calls, knife detection and robotic process automation.

The Government will create a new Centre for Police Productivity, based in the College of Policing. This will be established from autumn 2024 and set the foundations necessary for policing to deliver the 38 million police officer hours identified by the independent review.

The Government are confident that policing will rise to the challenge of meeting the ambitions of the review’s recommendations. Our response outlines how we will support them in doing so.

A copy of the response to the policing productivity review will be placed in the Libraries of both Houses and is available at www.gov.uk.

[HCWS422]