Police and Crime Commissioner for Staffordshire, Matthew Ellis today received HMIC’s overall judgement of Staffordshire Police, as the final of its three major inspection reports was revealed.
HMIC carried out assessments into three key over-arching areas last year, where the force was deemed ‘good’ overall in efficiency and legitimacy and today was judged as ‘requires improvement’ in the final category of effectiveness.
Mr Ellis said he did not challenge the overall rating of the latest report, but believed questions should be asked about HMIC’s overall consistency and approach.
‘The third and final element of the PEEL assessment for Staffordshire Police adds a ‘requires improvement’ to the ‘good’ and ‘good’ of each of the other two parts.
‘This is a mixed picture, both for police performance in Staffordshire and the consistency of HMIC’s approach to inspection on the ground.
‘The latter is of particular worry, as inspections by them play a critical part in assisting PCCs across the country in ensuring police services perform for local people.
‘Apart from 52 pages of factual inaccuracies acknowledged by HMIC inspectors, there appears to be inconsistency in approach between different inspection teams in different geographical areas and departures from stated national guidance in others.
‘I have raised concerns previously where HMIC said that Staffordshire Police were ‘outstanding’ in community engagement when the facts were clear, and supported by public feedback, that the force fell well below that assessment and needed to improve.
‘More recently after initially assessing the police here as compliant in only 1 of 5 criteria around Stop and Search procedure, after looking at the same evidence again changed it to 5 out of 5 compliant.
‘Last month HMIC changed the already published ‘requires improvement’ in crime recording to ‘good’ just short of ‘outstanding’.
‘There are significant improvements needed in some of the work Staffordshire Police do. I want to use assessments by HMIC to help focus efforts to ensure improvements happen. Inconsistencies in approach and having to revisit assessments after publication, is unhelpful in achieving that.
‘HMIC must be more consistent in approach both locally and force to force for their information to be truly useful in assisting PCCs. I’m writing to the Home Office accordingly.’
