DN 20/2021       Date 25/11/2021 

Investing in Early Action Together

The Commissioner has decided to approve investment in the Chief Constable’s proposals to refine North Yorkshire Police’s Operating Model to give greater focus to prevention and early intervention. Across three business cases covering Place-based Working, Customer Contact and Intelligence, the Commissioner has approved a total £12,360,353 investment over a five year period, consisting of £88,025 capital and revenue investment, £1,293,840 for a growth of 8 PCSOs to the establishment, and the allocation of £10,978,488 of roles funded through the National Uplift Programme.

Background

The Chief Constable has developed the Early Action Together Programme to enable NYP to develop a new policing operating model focused on embedding prevention and early intervention to deliver the objectives of the Police and Crime Plan.

The programme delivers against the aims of the Chief Constable’s Early Intervention and Prevention Strategy:

• We will embed primary prevention and early intervention as a way of working.
• We will introduce a place based approach to reflect the needs different communities across North Yorkshire.
• We will accurately collate information with our partners and communities in order to build insight to identify the challenges our communities face, seeking to resolve them at the earliest opportunity.
• We will improve our understanding of the impact of our activity so we can ensure we have a common purpose with partners focussed on the needs of our communities.
• We will identify the most effective way of tracking and showing the difference our partnerships are making for our communities.

Four programmatic areas are being considered and this DN coves three – Place-based Working, Customer Contact, and Intelligence.

The Place-based Working programme will see an enhanced focus on building problem solving skills and capacity within NYP, creating a dedicated team to improve training on problem solving skills and to provide problem-solving advice and quality assurance to local teams. Enhanced training will develop a network of problem-solving champions across NYP, ensuring that this is a core skill and approach within all departments. This programme will also redefine neighbourhood policing to embed it as a specialism and career-pathway in its own right, increasing proactive and targeted activity to generate more positive outcomes for communities. Finally it will work with local partners to regenerate community safety hubs, aligning form, function and purpose across the area and putting more police resource into the hubs to increase their capacity and capability. This programme will receive total funding of £2,923,434, including £19,396 of revenue funding and £2,884,642 of funding through the national uplift programme for 5 Sergeants and 8 Constables.

The Customer Contact programme will improve access to, and engagement with, a police officer or PCSO at the earliest opportunity for those who have experienced low level, low risk crimes or incidents. It will build capacity for Neighbourhood Policing Teams to be more present in communities and for Response Teams by installing a dedicated team linked to the Force Control Room to deal with Schedule grade calls that would otherwise fall to these local teams. A pilot has already demonstrated positive outcomes and improved customer feedback with more timely contact being made, enhancing trust and confidence in policing. This programme will receive total funding of £8,600,079, including £47,925 of capital and revenue funding, £1,293,840 for a growth to establishment of 8 PCSOs, and £7,303,314 of funding through the national uplift programme for 1 Inspector, 7 Sergeants and 40 Constables.

The Intelligence programme will improve tasking and briefing across the Service providing a more intuitive, reliable system that will be a single point of truth and that better links into other records systems. This will allow for real-time information to be provided through tasking and briefing and allow for more comprehensive and immediate Service-wide updates. It will also allow for more immediate feedback on intelligence leads, improving preventative and pro-active policing. This programme will receive total funding of £839,432, including £67,000 of capital and revenue funding and £772,432 of funding through the national uplift programme for 4 Constables.

Now that these business cases have been approved, NYP intends to engage closely with partners to discuss the detail of their proposals and implementation, and ways of enhancing early action together.

Decision Record

The Commissioner has decided to approve investment in the Chief Constable’s proposals to refine North Yorkshire Police’s Operating Model to give greater focus to prevention and early intervention. Across three business cases covering Place-based Working, Customer Contact and Intelligence, the Commissioner has approved a total £12,360,353 investment over a five year period, consisting of £88,025 capital and revenue investment, £1,293,840 for a growth of 8 PCSOs to the establishment, and the allocation of £10,978,488 of roles funded through the National Uplift Programme.

Jennifer Newberry

Acting Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner for North Yorkshire

Statutory Officer Advice

Legal, Management and Equality Implications

The Commissioner’s Chief Executive and Monitoring Officer, having read this report and having considered such information as has been provided at the time of being asked to express this view, is satisfied that this report does not ask the Commissioner to make a decision which would (or would be likely to) give rise to a contravention of the law.

Financial and Commercial

The Commissioner’s Chief Finance Officer and S151 Officer has advised that the costs set out within the decision notice relate to the total costs of implementing these business cases across a 5 year period. The vast majority of the costs relate to increases to Police Officer numbers – there are 50 extra posts included within these proposals – this is growth that is factored into the current financial plans as part of the National Uplift Programme and therefore this is affordable to the PFCC, subject to the confirmation of the recurring funding for the final year of the Uplift Programme.

The proposals also set out the need for the permanent growth of 8 PCSOs – these are not currently included within the financial plans – and therefore this growth will be added into the budget for 2022/23 and beyond. This annual growth of £280k is expected to be funded from savings however if this is not possible then it is likely to ultimately lead to pressures on future precept proposals.