Police Performance Monitors (Hansard, 22 October 2003)

§ Baroness Scotland of Asthal

Today we have published the second set of police performance monitors for individual forces in England and Wales. The first set of performance monitors was published in February 2003. The performance monitor diagrams provide a quick, visual summary representation of the178WA balance of performance for a force. Although the diagrams are simple to look at, they contain a lot of information and have the capacity to reflect performance in a number of separate areas of policing responsibility.

The forthcoming national policing plan 2004–07, to be published in November 2003, describes in more detail the ongoing work to develop a set of national measures of policing performance and an associated assessment system. While this is being developed, we are continuing to monitor the performance of police forces across a set of interim indicators of policing performance, as well as through other relevant information.

The publication of the second set of performance monitors will enable the public to gauge the performance of their local force across a range of policing responsibilities. The ability to make this assessment has been considerably improved by the addition of bar charts to the original monitor diagrams, giving a more detailed breakdown of the comparison of forces with their peers. This is further enhanced by the inclusion of two years' worth of performance information, which indicates changes in police performance since last year.