Merseyside PEEL 2017

Merseyside Police is good at treating the people it serves with fairness and respect. The workforce understands the importance of treating people fairly and with respect and the force’s leaders encourage and support the use of professional discretion by officers and staff to ensure they do so, in line with its community first strategy. The force has clear processes in place to monitor use of stop and search and the use of force although it is not fully compliant with the national minimal recording standards for the use of force. It has excellent arrangements for external challenge and scrutiny.

Merseyside Police continues to work hard to ensure that its workforce behaves ethically and lawfully. Clear leadership is displayed by the chief officer team regarding the force’s values and ethos through the ‘just’ principles and the community first strategy. The leadership sets clear behavioural expectations for its workforce, and opportunities exist to consider ethical decision making at all levels.

Merseyside Police has a complaints process that is clear, informative and easy for the public to use. Complainants receive a consistently good service from the force. The workforce can identify discrimination in all its forms and are confident that they would respond to it appropriately. The force has well-trained and experienced detectives within its professional standards department (PSD), with the necessary skills and awareness to identify and conduct good investigations into allegations where discrimination may be present. However, we found some examples of cases not having been referred to the IPCC when they should have been.

Merseyside Police is good at treating its workforce with fairness and respect. The force encourages challenge and feedback from its workforce through a range of channels, and makes the necessary improvements. At the time of our inspection, we found clear frustrations from uniformed officers about shift patterns; however, the force had listened and responded to these promptly. The force may, however, need to do more work to communicate this action to the workforce more effectively.

There has been clear development regarding wellbeing, led by the chief constable. We found that wellbeing awareness had increased notably and the force has invested in additional wellbeing resources to support its workforce. There is an increased awareness of stress and mental health, which the force has identified as its biggest risk to workforce wellbeing. However, changes to the force’s operating model have left some of the workforce feeling isolated from their supervisors – who were not able to identify and support wellbeing concerns – and too busy to take up wellbeing services. The force is looking at how it can address this issue.

The force has emphasised the importance of having one-to-one meetings with officers and staff to discuss performance and wellbeing. Its process for managing individual performance has improved since our last inspection, but it is not yet being used by all officers and staff. The force is developing its talent management programme to develop the leaders of the future and has taken concerted action to improve the fairness of the promotion process. The force is conscious of the need for its workforce to reflect the communities it serves and it has carried out media campaigns to try to increase the diversity of its new recruits.