Lincolnshire police chief welcomes 'ongoing scrutiny' on Force's performance

As reported, His Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMICFRS) identified five causes of concern for Lincolnshire Police, leading to the force being placed under enhanced monitoring.

These concerns include deteriorating investigation standards, a gap between income and expenditure, inefficiencies impacting financial planning, inadequate incident response time, and issues with managing the workforce.

In response to the report, Chief Constable Paul Gibson said:

"The concerns raised in this report are not new to us because we were made aware of the Inspectorate’s findings at the end of last year and we have been working closely with HMICFRS in the months since. "I fully accept the majority of the findings within the report, and since coming back as Chief Constable, I have been working hard to improve the issues raised, which are starting to show considerable progress.

"It is also worthy of note that the Inspectorate has recognised that demand outstrips our resource, which goes to the heart of the perennial funding challenges we face, while also identifying several areas of good work.”

The Chief Constable said they had introduced a bespoke programme of work to address some of the areas of policing that that have been highlighted in the report, with staff dedicated to these service improvements, and considerable progress already being made to transform the force. He said: “Our programme of work includes, but is not limited to, the establishment of a new unit to improve investigations; introducing training and processes to ensure we are positively addressing any incident attendance delays, which is already delivering improvement; recruitment of additional staff through redeployment into the team that manages violent and sexual offenders; revision of our performance frameworks, which is already delivering improvements, completion of Victim Needs Assessments, which now stand at 87%; progression of refresher training for FCR and frontline staff; improved supervision of crime; an independent audit of our strategic planning that will be reported back to the Home Office; and the sign-off of our strategic financial plans.

“In addition, last month we were offered and have accepted a £5.7m financial support package from the Home Office who have accepted that we are an outlier in how we are funded.

"Along with PCC Marc Jones, we have had regular and meaningful engagement with the Policing Minister, the Home Office, local MPs and other stakeholders for some months now, for which we are grateful, and this funding means we will not have to significantly reduce our number of police officers or police staff for at least six months.

“I would also point out that we are still protecting the public effectively in so many areas, which goes to the performance point I made earlier.

"It is also notable that national crime data ranks us as being the 12th safest county in the country, having been ranked 15th previously, and crime is reducing in the county.

"All of this is set against a backdrop of a force made up of dedicated and hardworking staff, demonstrated in the very fact that our officers carry one of the largest workloads when compared to other forces, yet still achieve all these positive outcomes.”