Recommendation 102

HM Government Acknowledged

All communities should have confidence in the police. The police’s ability to fulfil its duties is dependent on its capacity to secure and maintain public trust and support for their actions, as part of the model of policing by consent. The Home Office agrees with the Committee on the need to monitor trust and confidence in policing both nationally and at a local level. The Home Office and policing partners place great importance on the regular collection, monitoring and evaluation of a range of data broken down by ethnicity. This is not just limited to information on trust in the police but also includes data on, for example, the use of police powers, complaints and misconduct, recruitment, vetting, and victims’ services. The National Policing Board, chaired by the Home Secretary, has also established four strategic policing priorities where we want to see improvement in policing—importantly, this includes being trusted by the public to work together across the policing sector. The Home Secretary uses the Board and its sub-governance to hold the sector to account for delivery of these priorities and to ensure we are collectively delivering what matters to the public. Ethnicity data is central to effective policing and policymaking, ensuring we can understand the impacts of the policies we design and to help us mitigate disproportionate impacts. The Government has made improvements in the way it collects and uses this data in recent years, including on stop and search and community confidence, where it uses various sources such as the Crime Survey for England and Wales, internal polling, and data from forces. The Home Office, with policing partners, will continue to explore how we can improve recording and the quality of data across policing, such as collating more granular ethnicity data, improving the use of qualitative data and reducing levels of missing ethnicity information. Inclusive Britain also sets out a series of actions in relation to reporting responsibly on race, using data effectively and also specifically on improving the way data is reported in relation to stop and search. Alongside the publication of the Beating Crime Plan, the Government announced Part 2 of the Home Office’s review into the role of Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs). The conclusions of Part 2 were published on 7 March 2022 with a focus on scrutiny of the PCC model and ensuring PCCs have the tools and levers they need to better equip them to fight crime. The role of PCCs in securing and maintaining public confidence in policing and tackling crime was one of the key areas examined, leading to a recommendation that involves amending core PCC Guidance to reflect PCCs’ role in securing and maintaining public confidence and how PCCs should reach out and engage diverse communities in order to close the confidence gap. A further recommendation was also identified for the College of Policing to work with the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners (APCC) to ascertain what works in building public confidence and engaging communities. The Home Office will continue to work with bodies such as the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) and the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners (APCC) to consider how best to support forces in collating data on confidence and making this publicly available. We also support the use of data in better informing leaders, such as PCCs, with the information needed to hold forces to account. Part 2 of the PCC Review outlined a set of recommendations to improve PCC’s ability to access and interpret data to better understand how effectively and efficiently their police force is operating within the wider criminal justice landscape. The policing landscape continues to change, and so the Home Office will continue to work with policing partners on how best to consider community confidence against trends in data and set out what action is being taken across policing in England and Wales. The Home Office will work with our policing partners to deliver these recommendations.