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The Challenge
The result of the Force’s HMICFRS PEEL inspection was published in March 2023. This highlighted several areas for improvement, including the need to obtain a more detailed understanding of demand and ensuring it had the right capacity and capability to service that demand. Furthermore, concerns were raised around the timeliness of the Force’s response to incidents.
While immediate steps had successfully ben taken by the Force to improve response performance, it wanted to use its data to provide a robust, sustainable, evidence-based assessment of response resource requirements.
Process Evolution’s Approach
Process Evolution undertook a comprehensive data collection and analysis exercise, supported by several focus groups consisting of response officers and management teams. Assessment of the historic demand, workload and resourcing data, alongside benchmarking against other UK Forces, provided confidence that the response function was not under-resourced but identified that the existing resources were not being utilised as effectively as they could be.
Simulation modelling enabled Process Evolution to quantify the impact of changing resource locations, deployment protocols and shift patterns on the Force’s capability to provide a timely response; in particular reducing the variability in performance across different geographical areas and allocating resources fairly across the commands.
Results
Process Evolution recommended several changes to the allocation and deployment processes of response resources including:
- Rebalancing of Establishment resourcing across the commands to better match demand requirements, while allowing for differences in the geographical makeup of each area
- Alongside recommended minimum staffing levels which are achievable and in balance with these Establishments
- Changes to shift patterns within the existing core structure to address previous reductions in resources at peak demand times and to reduce variability in day-to-day resourcing levels
- Implementation of a forward deployment plan to improve the consistency of resource availability and to reduce the variability in immediate response performance across geographical areas
Furthermore, our modelling approach demonstrated to North Yorkshire Police that a hybrid response/neighbourhood model was not an appropriate model for the Force at this time. Implementing our recommendations will enable the Force to improve immediate and priority response performance and reduce geographical variability at no additional resource cost.
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