Processing Performance Data
93. A common concern amongst the four Chief Constables
in Wales was the number of departments and agencies that required
performance data from the police. Chief Constable Terence Grange
of Dyfed-Powys police highlighted this problem. He told us that
he provided information to "umpteen departments in the Home
Office", and averred that one part of the Home Office rarely
knew that another part of the Home Office had already requested
that information. He also listed the Policing Standards Unit;
the Audit Commission; Her Majesty's Inspector of Constabulary;
and the Health and Safety Executive as further bodies that demanded
information. In total he believed there to be nine separate bodies
to which he had to submit information.[132]
Chief Constable Mike Tonge of Gwent police agreed that the provision
of information was a heavy burden. He argued that:
"in my previous force we used to provide about
a thousand pages of information to the police authority alone,
but if you then add to it Her Majesty's Inspector of Constabulary,
the Police Standards Unit, the Home Office and all the other agencies
that we deal with then it is a lot of data. Then you couple with
that data to our partners whom we work with, which is very important.
It is a huge amount of effort".[133]
94. Barbara Wilding, the Chief Constable of South
Wales police highlighted the cost implications of providing that
level of information. She estimated that the cost to the force,
was £328,000 in "just the people we employ to receive
the data and marshal it".[134]
Furthermore she explained that that figure did not include the
opportunity costs of those who initially gather the data. She
strongly argued that it was
"an awful lot of the public's money that is
being gathered to fulfil this complete plethora of different ways
that people want the same data gathered. If you had one structure
that managed everybody's concerns we would probably be able to
release more of the publics money to put into operational policing".[135]
Chief Constable Terence Grange of Dyfed-Powys police
confirmed that the burden also had an impact on his staffing costs
as he had a couple of staff members in his Corporate Services
department who "spend virtually all their time gathering
this information to pass it on to various governmental departments".[136]
95. Chief Constable Mike Tonge was concerned that
the 2004 Plan had only added to that burden:
"The Government did say last year, actually,
the new National Policing Plan will have less targets and monitors
in there and they will be more qualitative, but I have to say,
having read it, there are even more measures in there and not
many have dropped off the agenda." [137]
He believed that the police were now "over-taxed"
in terms of providing data to those departments and agencies.
However he saw an opportunity to reduce that burden in the long
term though the shift from the quantitative to the qualitative
type indicators.[138]
96. During our visits to the forces in Wales, we
witnessed, first hand, that this issue was not restricted to headquarters
and management staff. Anecdotal evidence from Cardiff indicated
that Community Beat Managers now spent a significant part of their
time re-producing the same information on separate forms to be
fed to separate agencies and into separate databases.[139]
This was a common complaint in all the force areas we visited.
97. We agree that the measurement of performance
is both necessary and desirable to gauge the success, or otherwise,
of the police forces in Wales. However, we share the concerns
of the Welsh police forces that the collection of data for the
wide number of performance regimes represents an onerous burden.
We recommend that the Government look closely at that burden and
consider a streamlined approach to data collection that would
reduce the impact on the police time.
101 
