Police Performance - Surrey Police

The scale of the financial challenge is significant, with the Force facing a Medium Term Financial Plan savings target of around £30 million over the five financial years from April 2011 to March 2016. Good progress has already been made to meet this challenge with many of the Force’s cost reduction and efficiency programmes already producing significant benefits with over £13 million planned from our Strategic Change programmes in 2011/12. In fact the Audit Commission wrote in its Annual Audit letter that .”You continue to manage your finances effectively and in 2010/11 delivered a balanced budget, achieving £10m of savings and maintaining balances which are in line with those anticipated by your medium term financial plans. Whilst managing the financial challenges in 2010/11 you were able to maintain high levels of overall service. In addition, you started your investment in future service priorities by increasing the overall numbers of police officers employed by the Force. Your ambitious Operational Policing Review is well advanced and is beginning to deliver savings that should enable you to meet the funding gap identified in your medium term financial plans.”

Even prior to the most recent organisational restructuring, Surrey Police was assessed and praised by the Audit Commission: “The organisation manages its finance very effectively and demonstrates good value for money”.

Prudent financial planning and an early appetite to initiate fundamental programmes of change has placed Surrey Police in a good position to face future challenges.

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At the same time and despite the difficult challenges, the Force has delivered notable improvements in meeting public demands with both confidence and satisfaction levels increasing and crime levels decreasing. To summarise our performance for our end of year (April 2011 - March 2012)

• Public confidence remains high with 89.8% of the public surveyed this financial year confident in their neighbourhood police compared to 88.2% in 2010/11. This is 9.8% higher than the target set for us by the Local Policing Plan.



• Customer satisfaction for anti-social behaviour (ASB) stands at 78.4%, which is 1.7% higher than the level achieved in 2010/11 of 76.7% and is 2.4% points higher than the end of year Local Policing Plan target of 76%. Final year end figures for this will be available in June 2012.



• At the end of March 2012 the Force had recorded 13283 serious acquisitive and violence with injury crimes over the last financial year. The Force has recorded a year on year decrease in violence with injury of 28.9% and domestic burglary of 6.7%. With crimes in this category at 11.93 per 1000 population, the Force exceeded the end of year target of less than 13.6 serious crimes per 1,000 population.



• The Force has recorded a serious crime detection rate of 19.9% which is exceeding the Force end of year target of 18.6%. Latest performance demonstrates the continual improvement in the Force’s serious crime sanction detection rates when compared to performance end of 2009-10 of 17.1% and 2010-11 of 18.8%. The Force set a strategic objective in February 2011 to improve detection rates and reduce crime and this has been reinforced recently by our key focus to relentlessly persue criminals.



• Latest data shows the Force is recording a year on year decrease in Domestic Burglary of 6.7%. This demonstrates an improvement from the end of Quarter 2 when the Force was recording a financial year on year increase of 0.2%. The Force ran an initiative with Crimestoppers throughout Quarter 3 called Operation Candelight which contributed towards the reduction in burglaries.



• The latest National British Crime Survey (BCS) results, published in January 2012, give us a good independent assessment of the public view of how we are doing. It revealed that we continue to have the highest overall public confidence in the country, which we believe demonstrates that we made the right decision to buck the trend of other forces and grow, rather than reduce, our front line. We are the first Force to achieve an overall confidence level of more than 80% and our current level of 89.8% is 16.6% higher than the national average and there are many other areas where we’ve shown notable improvement over the past five years, for example, we are now first nationally on the Community Understanding indicator (‘police understand the issues that affect this community’), up 16 places since March 2007.

• The Force continues to improve public safety in Surrey by delivering crime reductions through a focus on prevention, disruption and dismantling of criminality, we have successfully dismantled 16 Organised Crime Groups since April 2011. There has also been a 10.4% reduction in the annual volume of crimes recorded since April 2007, a reduction in serious acquisitive crimes and violence with injury (this includes domestic burglary, robbery and vehicle crime) of 23.4%.

Our focus is on putting the people of Surrey first by:

• Keeping Surrey safe
• Relentlessly pursuing criminals
• Ensuring the public are confident that we will be there when needed
• Providing value for money without compromising our standards or our professionalism.

We now need to aspire to improve our Force standing in relation to detecting the full scope of crimes, from the investigation of neighbourhood issues and anti social behaviour through to more serious violent and acquisitive crime, rape and murder. We are here to serve the people of Surrey, they are our absolute focus and should have the confidence to know that we are here for them. These key aims are at the heart of everything we do, no matter what our role.

We have agreed new targets for 2012-2013 with the Police Authority and these have now been published in our updated Policing Plan Local Policing Plan

We will begin to report against these new targets with our next update in May/June.