Merseyside PEEL 2016

The force maintains oversight of fair and respectful treatment through an effective governance structure. This includes meetings about the use of force and stop and search, scrutiny from its independent advisory groups and independent custody visitor scheme and scrutiny from a force-wide equality, diversity and human rights group.

Merseyside Police regularly seeks feedback on the public’s perceptions of fair and respectful treatment through formal and well-established arrangements that allows the force to get a fuller understanding of the people it serves using this feedback to improve services.

The force works closely with people who have less confidence in the police to ensure that they know what the force understands by fair and respectful treatment. However, it could do more to understand how the wider public perceives that police treatment is fair and respectful, particularly those of the public who rarely come into contact with the police.

Merseyside Police continues to ensure that its workforce behaves ethically and lawfully. It has a strong ethical culture and its workforce understands what serious corruption is and how to report it when they see it.

The force monitors the risks to the integrity of the organisation well through its comprehensive vetting of officers and staff. It identifies early warning signs of potential corruption by sharing information internally and with other forces.

Merseyside Police provides public reassurance that the force ensures that its workforce behaves ethically and lawfully by publicising misconduct hearings on its website, including information about attending open hearings, and releases the outcome immediately. It takes officers or staff to court in cases of abuse for sexual gain, rather than dismissing them and allowing them to avoid punishment and be able to apply for other work, even though this could compromise the force’s reputation. It uses internal publications, presentations and the chief constable’s road shows as well as other activities to communicate to its workforce the behaviour it expects and the consequences of not complying with these standards.

The force has made progress on the two recommendations that HMIC made in 2014: communicating to its workforce lessons learned on integrity and corruption across the service: and publicising and monitoring its policy for accepting gifts and hospitality.

In our 2016 national overview of police legitimacy, we recommended that all forces should have started to implement a plan to achieve the capability and capacity required to seek intelligence on potential abuse of position for sexual gain. In 2017, we reviewed of the plans put in place by all forces to in response to this recommendation.

Abuse of position assessment – Merseyside Police

Merseyside Police is good at ensuring it treats its workforce with fairness and respect. Evidence for this comes from its culture of inviting feedback, listening to staff and taking action on their comments.

The force has a good understanding of the wellbeing needs of its workforce. It has analysed its management information thoroughly to identify wellbeing risks and threats to the organisation. As a result it provides good services to support the wellbeing of officers and staff and is investing more in this area. The force is also raising awareness of the greatest threats to workforce wellbeing, such as pressure on people’s mental health, and it has started to train supervisors to spot early warning signs. However, across the force staff do not feel consistently supported and attribute this to the variable quality of their supervisors.

Merseyside Police is not able to demonstrate whether its performance assessment process is effective, as it is based on an assumption of competence; only where staff need development or are going for promotion do they receive a PDR. We found some good examples of informal performance assessment, but we also found officers who had not an assessment of performance for three to four years.