South Wales PEEL 2016

South Wales Police is good at treating the people it serves with fairness and respect. The force has a clear vision and values that emphasise the importance of fair and respectful treatment, in line with the Code of Ethics. The values and the Code are well understood by staff, and well reflected in force policies.

The force is good at seeking feedback and challenge from those people who have less trust and confidence in the police, including those who are less likely to complain and take part in traditional forms of engagement, and it uses a range of methods to do this.

The force is good at acting on learning and feedback to improve the way it treats the people it serves and usually shares this learning across the force, and sometimes more widely with partner organisations and other police forces. The force sometimes evaluates the effectiveness of its actions, but it needs to improve the way that demonstrates to the public about the improvements it has made in response to feedback and challenges about police treatment.

South Wales Police is good at ensuring that its workforce behaves ethically and lawfully. The force has an effective vetting process in place that follows national guidance, to ensure it recruits ethical officers, staff and volunteers, but has a large backlog of outstanding cases to clear. The force communicates clearly about acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, and staff understand the values and behaviours that are expected of them.

The force has clear policies on business interests, notifiable associations, gifts and hospitality, and the use of social media, and these are well understood by the workforce. The force has good monitoring and auditing processes, but does not routinely follow up on business interests that are refused. The force has effective reporting processes. The ACU generally takes a reactive approach, waiting for reports to come in, rather than being proactive in seeking cases to review. Nonetheless, there is some particularly positive work being undertaken in relation to tackling abuse of authority for sexual gain. The force publishes misconduct outcomes internally and externally.

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 – South Wales Police

South Wales Police has a clear desire to treat its workforce with fairness and respect. It has various mechanisms to seek views from its staff, but a formal staff survey would provide the force with a greater understanding of those issues that have the greatest impact on staff, and in the absence of a more effective and respected performance development review process, improvement is required in this area. Staff have mixed views about how far the workforce is included in decision-making and the force does not currently have a consistent approach to identifying and understanding the areas that have the greatest impact on workforce perceptions of fair and respectful treatment.

The force understands and values the benefits of workforce wellbeing. It takes some steps to identify and understand the wellbeing needs of its workforce – both physical and psychological – and does preventative work to improve wellbeing. This ensures that many supervisors can intervene early to support people with welfare issues.

The force’s current performance assessment process is ineffective, which is consistent with the findings of our 2015 legitimacy inspection. The force has plans to implement a new performance development review system soon.