As the anniversary of her appointment approaches, the Wiltshire Chief Constable and PCC announced their intention to spend over £100 million on the police estate over the next ten years.
This includes a £90 million redevelopment of the force headquarters in Devizes. The local Devizes policing hub will relocate to the existing headquarters in London Road, with a new operational policing site, training facilities, and administrative office space.
Nearly £20 million will fund a new policing hub in the south of the county, near Salisbury.
The PCC and Chief Constable asserted that this spending will better place officers to respond to incidents and have a local presence.
The news received a mixed welcome in the comments section of local newspapers. For example, if we need a new hub in the south of the county, why was the Salisbury police station closed in the first place? The answer will involve funding or, more accurately, the lack of funding during years of austerity.
This is an eye-watering sum of money and begs questions about value for money. In seeking answers, I attempted to gauge Wiltshire Police’s current performance.
I first looked at the force’s website and accessed a monthly breakdown of the incidence of crime by postcode. The data does not show current trends by offence type and offers limited insight into performance.
Equally frustrating is the absence of any information regarding the detection of crime; in modern terminology, the acronym FAT captures this information, i.e. Further Action Taken, whether that be a charge, caution, or penalty notice.
It was always the case that a minority of offenders committed a disproportionately large number of offences, i.e., serial offenders. Manage them well, and crime rates stay low. I don’t imagine that this has changed.
Similarly, the risk of being caught will have some deterrent effect for those less problematic offenders; if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.
In my search for further information, I turned to the PCC’s quarterly report to the Wiltshire Police & Crime Panel outlining performance. The most recent report consists of 23 slides covering September to December 2023.
The slide deck provides immensely detailed statistical data. I’m confident it would be illuminating if you had the time and the stamina to study the content. There is no summary giving a snapshot to indicate whether performance is going in the right direction. It is challenging to see the wood for all those trees.
I did pick out a few snippets which might be of interest. For example, response times for the category’ immediate response’, essentially emergency calls, are well within set targets, i.e., fifteen minutes for urban areas and twenty minutes for rural areas.
Is having to wait fifteen minutes for the police to attend when your life is at risk acceptable? I vaguely remember that the target used to be ten minutes; I could be wrong.
The report notes that officers are spending more time at crime scenes to take advantage of all investigative opportunities and improve standards in investigating crime. Other reported limitations include geography and minimum staffing levels. Taken together, they will impact on response times.
Domestic burglaries have decreased, with the exceptions of Chippenham and Trowbridge, which have seen increases. I imagine the reintroduction of a dedicated Burglary Team in July 2023 has had some impact; the Swindon Burglary Team had an exceptional record.
The more disappointing news is that the police detect only 4.8% of domestic burglaries, or under five in every 100 offences. This is a pitiful level of performance.
The bottom line is I couldn’t conclude whether this spending on modernising the police estate can be justified in terms of current performance. How will a shiny new headquarters improve response times or improve the detection of domestic burglaries?
Turning back to the PCC’s report, there has been an increase in offences of violence with injury. One of the issues linked to reoffending is the lack of suitable accommodation for offenders released from prison, especially for those with complex needs. This has the impact of increasing the risk of reoffending. Would part of the £100 million be better spent addressing this situation?
There is a different question that is worth considering. Does it matter whether Wiltshire’s police administrative and training facilities are based in Devizes, Portishead or Winchester? I suspect most people will be more concerned that when they need the police, there is a timely response.
We have a Victorian model for policing with 43 police forces in England and Wales with their individual PCC, Chief Constables, and police headquarters.
The Home Secretary is telling the police to ‘get back on the streets’ and ‘back to basics’; I’m not sure what this means, but it makes for a rousing sound bite.
If we are to have a sensible discussion about policing, we need greater transparency regarding performance, proper funding and a policing model fit for the 21st century.
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