In October 2018, Warwickshire Police and West Mercia Police agreed to end their shared services arrangements that had been in place since the two forces established a £300m strategic policing alliance in 2012. However, decoupling the partnership created a wide range of complex challenges. Chief Superintendent Jason Downes, the Programme Director from Warwickshire Police explains how his force addressed these challenges with the help of CIPFA's advisory and consulting services.
"Our alliance with West Mercia involved the two forces collaborating on approximately 90% of services, with budgets and costs pooled. The shared services arrangement covered an extensive range of operational services including protective services, such as firearms and task force, as well as local policing, major crime investigation, ICT, transactional HR, finance and estates. While the agreement saw joint services located in the optimal location for the joint estate, over the course of the alliance we saw a net migration of many shared services to the larger West Mercia force's headquarters.
"The rationalisation of certain duplicated services, processes and systems created a significant challenge when it came to separating services from the alliance – particularly as we at Warwickshire Police were the smaller partner. Once they had been combined, breaking the forces out to be separate entities again was an extremely challenging process.
"The scale and complexity of the decoupling project, most of which had to be completed to a tight 12-month schedule, was therefore daunting. As a police service, protecting the public is the number one priority in everything we do, so service interruption during the separation was not an option. To achieve this decoupling required us to undertake an ambitious multi-million pound transformation programme, which we called Evolve."
A programme for change
"We started off by prioritising the operational services, pulling them out and standing them up, which aligned closely with our core policing competencies. The Evolve programme addressed some of the more challenging elements we had in creating a model for support and professional services, the majority resource base for which had been established in West Mercia.
"The programme consisted of various workstreams and a complex array of inter-project workstream dependencies, such as delivery of network, new infrastructure and then applications. Each workstream was supported by its own scope and business case, which included identifying benefits realisation. The ICT and enabling services, in particular, were areas that we could see would be more challenging – the separation of the two forces impacted significantly on ICT, with a large number of complex relationships in the network and applications areas. This effectively required us to build our own ICT platform for existing and future requirements, including the infrastructure, data centre applications and management systems to migrate all of the relevant data to a robust, secure platform. It was a heavily technical project. This is where CIPFA's expertise and support proved crucial."
How CIPFA helped
"We brought in CIPFA in November 2019 to provide assurance that the Evolve programme had been correctly configured and mobilised. We approached CIPFA to undertake a review to assess the robustness of the programme, its structure, programme plan, and costings to ensure that we hadn't missed anything.
"CIPFA's advisory and consultancy team brought multiple layers of support. As a trusted partner that had previously worked with us on the financial requirements of the organisation and providing support when required, CIPFA enabled us to look at the programme thoroughly in terms of value for money. For instance, were we spending money in the right way, particularly around project and programme governance, and were we managing our resources and priorities correctly?
"Among the key requirements we had of CIPFA were to:
- comment on the overall design and structure of the exit portfolio programme
- validate and comment on the overall methodology of how costs had been identified and estimated
- identify where CIPFA thought Warwickshire had gaps in its thinking and/or where it may have missed elements of costs
- comment on the reasonableness of costs
- comment on the costed risks and the risk profile of the programme
"To achieve this, CIPFA assembled a small team of programme experts, all of whom had proven expertise in designing and running complex change programmes. The team based itself at the force's headquarters in Leek Wootton, Warwickshire and worked closely with the Evolve team to gain a deep understanding of what the programme was trying to achieve.
"This included 'top down' interviews with key stakeholders to gain first-hand insights into the programme and 'bottom up' detailed analysis and review of programme documentation and costs. CIPFA reviewed the entire programme plan, challenged the dependency logic and mapping, reviewed each workstream business case and challenged the team on governance and control arrangements.
"CIPFA was able to provide valuable insights around how we stood up our enabling services, bringing with them their expertise and knowledge of how other organisations – not only in the policing world but elsewhere in the public and private sector – were delivering such change. As an honest broker, CIPFA provided valuable feedback and learning for us that we were keen to adopt.
"The CIPFA team forensically reviewed all of the key documentation (including aspects such as the third-party contracts that we had in place with ICT suppliers) and gave us an honest, detailed assessment of things to consider. It also gave us that clear evidence base to assure that our plans were solid, and despite extremely challenging timelines, it helped us identify the risks we had to manage to achieve our targets.
"That certainly gave me the confidence as the senior lead on the project to communicate that assurance both within the organisation and externally to the Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) and the Police and Crime Panel.
"CIPFA was involved on several stages of the project, from the initial planning to doing work around programme management and risk management and then ICT structures. CIPFA was the trusted partner we kept reengaging with for the project – not just because we were getting the right answers, but also because they were trusted to operate and deliver in what was a high-pressure, high-risk environment.
"We were really keen to understand where our issues were and be challenged on them, and have the evidence base to be able to make change and make a difference. CIPFA has that credibility and experience around the public sector, particularly in an extremely strong financial basis/core built around ethics and values. CIPFA has the right skills and approach to provide an honest and independent perspective. It is also technology and vendor agnostic, which again underlined for us its independent perspective."
Future-proofing police financial services
"We had a vested interest to get it right, given the scale and enormity of what we had embarked upon, and CIPFA gave us the confidence that our approach was robust, understanding the context of what we were doing so we could be open and honest around the challenges we were facing and establish a clear view of what needed to be done.
"CIPFA helped us assess our planning assumptions looking at our financial projections – not only the cost of change but also the annualised running costs for when we transition into a steady state after the change. This included what our capital revenue budget would look like and whether it would be affordable, plus planning for future change, and how we set up a structure to achieve our objectives.
"The broader outcome is that we've transferred 37 policing service functions from the alliance – all our policing functions are independent now. We've moved all our enabling services out so the transition is almost complete, and we are in the final stages of completing and commissioning our new IT systems and infrastructure, which will be ready by March 2022. This has been achieved with no negative impact on policing services to the public, a key driver for the project team and the force.
"On a personal and organisational level, this project certainly opened our eyes to the value of bringing CIPFA in to provide assistance in key areas and projects. It's not only the assurance it brings – it's that genuine support that underpins it all."
Find out more
CIPFA offers bespoke advisory and consultancy services to a range of public sector organisations. To find out more, please contact Chris Tidswell on +44 (0)78 2519 0321 or chris.tidswell@cipfa.org