Police Reform : An Outline Business Case ?..........Not Yet
COSLA & Improvement Service Response
Nobody least of all COSLA would deny that reform should in part be driven by political intuition, experience and feeling. However, neither would anyone deny that those political ideas need to be tested to ensure that any proposals will actually achieve the objectives suggested. These principles are at the heart of COSLA’s stated position that we are in favour of reform where there is evidence and process that sustainable community benefits will result from the reform process. It is in this context that the Government’s preferred option of a single police force for Scotland should be assessed.
The traditional way of assessing the evidence for change is through the production of a business case and local government along with other parts of the public sector have been used and skilled at developing detailed business cases to assess the effect of reform proposals.
This is not a dry bureaucratic process but the process by which those charged with the governance of our major public services demonstrate that their political intuition and principles are actually backed up by hard evidence that any changes can be successfully implemented.
The only document available to fulfil this purpose with regard to police reform is the outline business case developed and supported by Scottish Government. The question is does it adequately do that job. It is tempting to assess the business case by looking at the facts and figures and questioning their accuracy and the conclusions drawn from them but even this credits this document with a value greater than it actually has. The truth is this document isn’t a business case. It isn’t worthy of serious detailed consideration and it isn’t a proper basis upon which any politician should take a decision as important as reforming the Scottish policing service. The document is frankly incompetent, misleading and undeserving of the title outline business case.
For a business case to exist certain elements must be in place.
- Firstly, a business case contains a clear, unequivocal, unambiguous and detailed statement of what the business under consideration is planned and supposed to achieve. If there is no statement of what the business has to do there can be no assessment of the part that different policies, structures and processes might play in its success or failure. This document contains no statement of a “purpose” for Scottish policing for the next 25 years and indeed we have been told by Government officials that one of the first jobs to be done after restructuring will be to write a new policing purpose for the Scottish Police Service. In other words, the proposal is to design a service and then decide what its got to do rather than deciding what the outcomes should be and deciding the design of a service ideally placed to achieve them. This is a fundamental flaw in the outline business case.
- Secondly, in order to move safely through a change process another crucial element of any business case would be the collation and interpretation of accurate, unchallengeable baseline information regarding the costs, performance standards and, in this case, public perception of the service to be reformed. No such information exists on a consistent basis for the police service in Scotland. This is a second fundamental flaw in this outline business case.
- Thirdly, as a consequence of these first two points there can be no clear statement of the priorities for change that need to be addressed within the reform process and no option appraisal that explains the costs benefits and potential risks of the proposed changes. No part of the public sector or the private sector would consider change without such an explicit option appraisal.
- This document contains a number of figures. However, the basis of these figures is that they were culled from previous reports written for a different purpose earlier in the reform discussion process. These reports themselves indicated that detailed modelling and additional work would be required to reliably examine the costs and benefits suggested by the figures and that “current analysis” was held together by unvalidated assumptions. In other words, such detailed evidence as there is in the outline business case is drawn from documents which themselves said that evidence was incomplete, unreliable and based on assumption.
- The drawing of conclusions from such data is never explained in the outline business case not because the explanation is unforthcoming but because the conclusions on the basis of the evidence are entirely inexplicable. The idea of applying sensitivity analysis to information which is a purely hypothetical projection of baseline information drawn form non-validated data and assumptions is unprofessional.
- Lastly, even if all the difficulties outlined above contained in the current outline business case could be overcome and corrected, an outline business case would never form the basis for final decision making. It might confirm political intuition to the extent that further detailed work was necessary or it might lead to the conclusion that a potential reform process was worthy of further consideration. What it could never lead to is a final decision that affects something as important as policing and community safety for the whole of Scotland. Deciding to pursue reform with a considerable period of further detailed work on the basis of this outline business case would be bad enough given its obvious failings. Implementing change on the basis of the case so far would simply be irresponsible.