At Leapwise, we regularly work across all levels within the security, crime, and justice sectors, whether that’s with individual police forces on their local priorities or national organisations on system-wide changes. You can learn more about those kinds of projects in our Police Scotland, APCC, or Norfolk and Suffolk Police case studies.
At times, these two levels can feel far apart. Local leaders can sometimes struggle to understand national policymaking or police co-ordination efforts, finding them opaque or inaccessible. National leaders, by contrast, can feel that there’s so much going on locally that it’s impossible to keep up or coordinate effectively.
In this ‘external voices’ Leapwise blog, we asked Laura Debnam – a Transformation Lead in Norfolk and Suffolk’s Joint Transformation Programme – to share her expert insights into this local-national divide. Having worked at the NPCC, the Home Office, and several local forces in her career, she offers an invaluable insight into what the local and the national levels sometimes misunderstand about each other.
How National Policing, Local Forces and Policymakers Can Work Together More Effectively – N&S Transformation Lead Laura Debnam’s view
I first started out in policing while I was still at university, completing an internship with Humberside Police where I worked on demand management. That really opened my eyes to what a career as a police staff member as opposed to an officer actually involves (something I think is still unclear to many.)
After I graduated, I joined Suffolk Police’s Improvement and Innovation team, delivering business change to support those in frontline public services. I then spent time in Greater Manchester Police working on incredibly tough but motivating issues like hate crime and VAWG. Today, I’m one of the leaders of Norfolk and Suffolk’s Joint Transformation Programme, where we’re working with Leapwise to improve services across both forces.
But I’ve also had the chance to see policing from other perspectives. When I worked at the National Police Chiefs’ Council, I was involved in mapping all the complex governance and co-ordination structures that exist at the national level. I also worked on improving how decisions were tracked and recorded at Chiefs’ Council meetings, supporting how national decisions on strategic policing priorities are made.
And finally, I also spent time in the Home Office Delivery Unit through a period that includes last year’s General Election. As the Lead Policing Adviser, I was working right in that complex space where Whitehall, politics, and policing all interact to try and solve problems. While everyone I engaged with was incredibly committed to things like the Government’s Safer Streets mission, I also saw the ways in which these different worlds struggle to understand each other.
3 Local-National Insights
Through all this experience, I’ve seen the misconceptions that both the national and local levels have about each other. I want to talk about 3 observations that really stand out:
1. National policymaking moves at a different speed to local force action
People working in most organisations are usually both wary of change taking place and, in a slightly contradictory way, frustrated that decisions aren’t taken quickly enough on things they care about. I’ve seen people working in national organisations express those views and heard the very same from people in local forces too.
So, there is some alignment! But I think it’s easy for those of us working at the local level to forget that national policymaking moves at a different speed because there are different constraints. That can be as simple as when Parliament’s sitting – legislation obviously can’t make progress when there’s no-one to vote on it – or the challenges that civil servants face in trying to secure ministerial attention. For example, the Home Secretary heads up a department where policing battles for focus with migration issues that often drive the news agenda. Ahead of a General Election campaign, things get – as I saw – even tougher to push through.
Keeping this in mind is crucial for local leaders. When you try to influence national action can play a huge role in whether you succeed in persuading people to give you what you want.
2. National leadership is much more complex and challenging that it seems
The creation of PCCs has meant that, for most chief constables, there is now greater political scrutiny and accountability than there was in the past. Waves of devolution, creating much more empowered local government structures, have added to this. So, just like national government, local forces now face complex pressures and accountability models.
However, when I worked at the Home Office, I was struck by how much more intense these can seem at the centre. Policy decisions are watched and challenged by attentive media outlets or pressure groups, effective and informed opposing politicians, and face cross-Whitehall pushback from different departments. It’s a high-scrutiny, high-pressure environment with what feels like less time to think.
This is all compounded by the fact that national leaders are trying to engage with an immensely complex local policing system. You’re trying to use levers to make change happen while working with dozens of people you might not have any connection with. Even trying to map what’s going on across the system can be confusing, with so many forces doing the same things in different ways. When I work at the local level now, I have much more empathy for my national colleagues: making policy in such a complex environment is no easy task.
3. National leaders can learn more from the local level – but that requires clear messaging from forces to the centre
The 43-force model is regularly criticised. And it’s true that with so much variety in local practice, co-ordination from the centre can prove to be incredibly challenging. But it also offers opportunities: forces are constantly innovating and finding new, effective ways of doing things and sometimes the centre isn’t good enough at identifying that best practice.
As someone working at the local level, I think the onus is on us to be as effective as possible in how we communicate our achievements and our innovations. Of course, the most important thing is explaining how we’re changing things to our fellow colleagues in force, as we need them to come onboard for any improvement to actually take hold. However, really changing things requires scaling-up best practice from local to national.
How do we do that? Local innovators have to develop clear, simple messaging around what we’re doing well. Can we explain how it works in practical terms (remembering that many policymakers won’t be as aware of all the operational realities as we are)? What problems is it solving? What benefits could it offer and how strong is the current evidence base? With that lined up, we then need to communicate with the right people and at the right times to spread our message.
A better model of collaboration
We talk a lot in policing about collaboration, and that’s important, because so much of what we do can’t be done alone. But we all know that making that extra step – of adapting how we communicate with partners given their own needs and pressures – is often much harder.
For me, that’s what we need to strive for when local forces engage with national leaders and vice-versa. If we can understand the pressures the ‘other side’ faces and meet them halfway, the chances of success are so much higher. Given we all share the same public safety mission, I think it’s an achievable goal.
To learn more about building effective partnerships between national organisations and local forces, you can reach out to the Leapwise team via the button below.