 I welcome everyone to the 11th meeting of the Justice, Subcommittee and Police in 2015. I asked everyone to switch on mobile phones and other electronic devices completely. No apologies have been received, but I welcome Roderick Campbell as a visitor to the committee. Item 1. I am inviting you to consider item 3 in our work programme in private. Are you agreed? Thank you very much. Item 2 is call handling. It is the main item of business today, this evidence session with HM Inspector of Constability in Scotland on the final report in its independent assurance review and call handling published last month. I welcome to meet a Derek Penman, HM Inspector of Constability in Scotland, John Bainbridge, associate inspector and Laura Payton, lead inspector, a rogue inspector, which is scary. Are you mind members that the focus of this session is on the report? The circumstances surrounding the tragic death of John Eulen, Lamara Bell and the M9 in July are subject to a live investigation by the Police Investigations Review Commissioner, who submitted an interim report to the Lord Advocate on her investigation earlier this week. We therefore cannot discuss or allude to the specific case today, but I know that you know that. I will go on to questions from members. John Eulen Mr Penman, in your report, there was an initial focus in meeting deadlines in increased productivity rather than on a well-managed project with a focus on customer service, good relations and thorough process design. Could you expand a bit more on that, please? Certainly that was a general observation that we made in terms of how Police Scotland were managing their change programme. I think that what we would have expected to have seen would have been a well-managed programme with clear work streams, with dependencies between them. There was clarity about what was being delivered and when. What we found when we looked at that was that the impetus rather than managing the change was very much around bringing the change in within a time frame and a particular focus around call answering times in particular and driving productivity through. That is what we found in that comment. I allude to that. It is important that we learn from mistakes, but it is also important that we understand things going forward. Is that focus on productivity still an issue? The understanding now is to make sure that there is a service to the public and Police Scotland has performance indicators that focus on the greater service, which is effectively about productivity within it. One of our recommendations in our report is to have a much broader performance framework that focuses on the quality of the service that is being provided to the caller. One of the things that has been asked of by the Cabinet Secretary for Justice is to work with Police Scotland and the Authority to develop those measures to ensure that the focus is not simply on productivity but that there is also a focus on quality. With regard to the project, and that is not an exact quote, I mentioned that the project board agenda is inconsistent at an offering doors key areas of governance such as risk management. The presumption would be that this was all about risk management given the nature of the employment area and the nature of the work. Can you comment on that at all? Again, the comment is in the context of what goods would have looked like and something that is a significant change programme that is going to bring in something new that is part of a critical function of Police Scotland such as call handling. What we would have expected would have been a very robust and professionally managed programme of change and within that would be the identification of risk. The management of that risk is part of that process and what we found is part of that. That was weaker than we would have expected in there. Can you ask about the police culture, which I have some knowledge of from the past, and that is the presumption that rank with it brings certainly responsibilities with knowledge? Is that in any way tied up with the fact that seniority of police rank meant a presumption of the level of knowledge, and we are talking about very technical matter in the question of call handling? Probably, as a generalisation, our view would be that there are senior officers who are conducting projects and have duties that are not necessarily police duties. One of our recommendations was very firmly based around the need to have professionally trained and experienced project and programme managers to assist those who are leading the change to deliver that. Our view is very clear that it should not be about police officers and rank, it should be about capability and capacity of individuals who are doing that work. One of them is very clear about having properly qualified and experienced, because they are different things, programme and project managers. There is clearly a role for people who understand the business to be involved in the change programme and to oversee that, but one of our recommendations is to ensure that the senior officers who are leading those projects, who are the senior responsible officers, are also properly trained and understand project and programme management. Finally, on the rationale behind, which I fully support for a wide range of reasons, behind your interim report suggesting the retention of the existing northern control rooms, please. The end-state model is to build what Police Scotland refers to as a virtual service centre, which is effectively the motherwell, Govan and Bilson Glen sites, so three sites, but technology joins them together to effectively act as one. That would have the ability to support area control rooms in the east, in the west and also in the north. Effectively, any calls from anywhere in the country would come into the virtual service centre, but that centre would have the ability to direct the incident to an area control room so that it could be managed by police officers to attend. That is not in place at the moment, so if you do not have the link between the service centre and the area control rooms, you have to rely on manual transfer of information. Our initial view from our report was that that introduces a degree of risk. Our view is very much just now about Police Scotland's need to consolidate the virtual service centre, make sure that it is properly staffed, properly equipped, that the technology is working with robust processes and that the control room in the north, which will be in Dundee, is up resourced and properly working, and that technology is all tested before they start to close any call centres in the north. You should not ask a question that you do not know the answer to, but it certainly is here. The public perception is important, and we talk about productivity, and it is about the speed with which someone who is in distress enough to phone the police wants a response. The public perception would be that there is a very clear rationale for retaining Aberdeen and Inverness, and that would complement whatever arrangements are put in place. Would you care to comment on that? I have been clear that it is not for us to comment on the final model around the control rooms. Having said that, what needs to be in place is less about where the service is located, but the service is provided to the communities in the north-east or in the highlands and islands of Scotland and Tayside. That is a test on how the new system will work. As the system is designed, calls from those areas will be able to be taken at the central belt. If the technology training processes are there and mapping and things to support local knowledge, there is no reason why that service cannot be provided. As long as that can then be passed into an area control room where the officers who are working in those communities can be properly tasked, it should all work together. Can I ask what an area control room is? Wait a minute, that is a finally, finally, finally. I will let you back in and we will work. I have a big list, John. Elaine, Kevin, Margaret and Alison. I will let them all have their shot and then you can come back in if you have another finally, finally, finally. Elaine. On that issue that John Finnie had raised about the northern call centres, whom you recommended that the closure should be suspended, did it surprise you to learn that staff have been undertaking one-to-one interviews on redundancy? They have been called in for redundancy interviews, apparently. It does not surprise me because it relates to the statutory consultation around redundancy and what Police Scotland's position has been on that is that they will not close those locations until such times as they can demonstrate to the Scottish Police Authority and with some independent assurance that they are ready to be closed and that they have everything in place to take over the service that they provide. They are still continuing along their planning assumptions, which would include the consultation around that. Assuming that all those things can be put in place and assurances can be given, then the staff will be allowed to leave in those areas in terms of early retirement and volunteer redundancy. My understanding is that the consultation is taking place, but I have received an assurance from Police Scotland that those individuals will not be allowed to leave and that those control rooms and call centres will not close until such times as the assurance that they have been provided. It is effective that the statutory consultation is part of the voluntary redundancy arrangements, but the assurance that Police Scotland has given is that the staff will not be allowed to leave until such times as the assurances are given for the new system. It cannot be very good for your staff morale, though, surely. I am sure that you have been very much aware of the problems with staff morale through the closure process. Absolutely, and what we found consistently was a tremendously dedicated workforce and call handling across the country from that, and I think that that is testament to some of the results that we found in our audit in the service being delivered to communities. What I would say is that that consultation is taking place. We were clear with Police Scotland that they should make staff aware that we will not be able to leave until such times as the system is stable and is able to be moved across from that. I was also clear in my interim report that there was a need to make sure that the staff were given the same assurances around any packages that they might receive in terms of voluntary redundancy and real retirement so that they were not being prejudiced by having to stay on later. You mentioned your report that there were disparate views, I think, that you said, in terms of what would be the best national model for call handling. Do you feel that there was adequate consultation across the country in terms of what the final model might look like and whether there were other alternatives to what was being proposed? I did not look as part of our review specifically at the extent of consultation. What we did was track the idea of rationalising control rooms that first appeared in the outline business case for police reform at a very high level, which recognised that the 10 control rooms service centres at that time would not be sustainable and that they would rationalise and savings would come from that. That then moved on to some further design work prior to Police Scotland taking place that made some other assumptions and then it moved into what Police Scotland referred to as the strategic direction, not a business case but a document called the strategic direction, which did list some options and those options then went to the Scottish Police Authority and the Scottish Police Authority endorsed them as to the extent of the consultation locally and others. We did not look at that and it was unfair to decide whether that was sufficient or otherwise. You mentioned in your report that you need to develop what you call a bespoke emergency services address a gazetteer for Scotland between the different emergency services. The opportunity was lost to look at whether or not you could have co-located call centres for the emergency services that might have retained some of the local knowledge and some of the local flexibility that exists in the previous model. Again, it was not something that we specifically looked at around that. I have a personal view and my personal view is that when there is such significant change happening across Scotland with the emergency services, clearly there are opportunities that could be taken from there and actually that might also assist in savings and also the co-located service being provided to the public as to whether there are opportunities missed in that or whether these opportunities can be recovered as things move through, as I suspect, as a matter for Police Scotland and the Authority. My personal view is that there are potential opportunities for those things to have taken place. That is my personal view as well. Do you believe that SPA and Police Scotland have learned the lessons of that particular exercise? What would you expect to see in future for similar types of work? Obviously, they are not going to be the same thing, but the type of large-scale change, what sort of improvements would you expect to see in their processes in the future? Certainly, in terms of Police Scotland and the Authority, both have co-operated with us thoroughly throughout our review. Police Scotland in particular was extremely helpful and open in everything that we needed to do and the staff at all levels were very honest and open with us. What we have identified, not just in terms of call handling but Police Scotland and the Authority's approach to wider change and that whole large moving from 8 into 1 and then building something new and sustainable, has to be managed as a significant programme. I think that we have identified in our report that that requires professional skills and good governance and that also provides transparency so that everyone understands what the transition plan will be. Police Scotland and the Authority have given an absolute commitment that they will follow through 30 recommendations in our report from there. I have engaged with Police Scotland and the Authority. We would hope to meet them prior to Christmas to start to work through the detail around governance structures and how they will manage this project in particular. A key feature in our report is the recommendation that there needs to be independent assurance of projects at key stages. Before the move to close any further control rooms in the north, we would expect the planning assumptions, the resourcing of people, the technology, the processes, all to be independently checked and assurances given to the Authority to say that Police Scotland has got those right. There is a degree of confidence to move forward. In many respects, I will answer your question about lessons that have been learned and assurances that have been provided. I hope that we can start to develop from there. However, I also hope that it is not just about call handling that other major projects such as this will now get brought together into a more cohesive programme and more discipline provided in relation to how they are managed. Mr Penman and I have some shared history with the Grampian Police. I wonder what you have done here and what the SPA and Police Scotland have done, whether they have looked at past history. Obviously, in Grampian, there were difficulties around moving to the Aberdeen service centre, which caused quite a bit of grief in communities throughout the north-east. There were some major teething problems with that centre in terms of lost calls, but those problems were eventually ironed out. Have you yourselves or have Police Scotland and the SPA looked at those past experiences to see whether any of the troubles that are currently occurring are similar to what happened in Grampian and whether any lessons can be learned from that in terms of trying to iron out those difficulties? That is a fair question. Does the service learn from its experience moving through? I think that the experiences in Grampian would have been replicated across the country, not least of all in the east. Several years ago, when they rolled out new technologies, I have a vintage when I can remember that I could manage call demand in a police office simply by taking one phone off the hook around that. As local calls were brought into local police stations, a lot of that has been nationalised over the years and there has been a lot of experience gathered as that has moved forward from me. In terms of where lessons specifically learned around that, I suspect that not would be the answer from what we have said, especially the experience in the Highlands and Islands, where recently they moved to having a lot of local officers answering phones into bringing them all into Inverness. There was a lot of experience gained there in terms of local knowledge and place names that are similar in things, and what we suggested is that a lot of that should be captured and that people should learn from that moving forward. It is often the case that similar experiences have happened in the past and that we have new investigations into why there is a difficulty when the solution might actually be in the heads of some folk who were involved previously in the service centre situation in Aberdeen and from what you describe, although I am not sure about it, the situation in the Highlands and Islands. Sometimes we reinvent the wheel in terms of trying to get to grips with some difficulties. I am quite sure that those problems will not be dissimilar to the ones that were experienced in Aberdeen. I think that it would be very worthwhile for those folks in charge of the projects to go and speak to folks in Aberdeen and possibly in Inverness to hear about their experience previously and to garner knowledge from them. I am being parochial about Aberdeen, but I think that they made a very good fist of those changes. I think that that knowledge is probably there, and I do not think that that knowledge should be lost, but I am probably getting overly parochial. Can I change? I think that instead of giving a lovely evidence session, you should then tack a question on to see if you agree. I can follow up, because perhaps it is more about what lessons were learned in any shortcomings in the Grampian area, or any other, but across the force. My view to that is whether they were learned or experienced. The issue for me is that what you then had is that you have service centres and control rooms that are actually working well in those areas. Actually, there is good practice across the country, which has probably taken it slightly different from what went wrong, to actually what now works really well in those areas. There is definitely something there in terms of Police Scotland looking around the country to see what works particularly well. For example, in the legacy Grampian, there is a very strong focus and quality of service to the public. In the east, for example, there is a very strong focus on managing demand and dealing with calls at the first point. That saves demand from being passed on to police officers on the street, so it gives them more capacity to deal with other calls. There is definitely something there. Police Scotland recognises that in designing their new model and also designing new technologies is to garner in that what works well across the country. Again, Police Scotland, having spoken to them, seems to be keen to capture that. The quality of service that was provided by Grampian, probably, I would imagine, led to much less complaints about call handling there. Would I be correct in saying that? In terms of looking at the actual quality of service and complaints, it would be difficult to comment on the complaints. What I would say is that they had a different approach, which was to try to manage the call when it came in and resolved that call for the complainer. They also have some interesting work, for example, where, if road safety is a priority for the force that it would be, and there are people who are identified by people phoning in to say, I have just passed a driver registration number, ABC123, and they are on a mobile phone. One of the things that the call centre and Grampian are able to do is to pass that on to someone within their service centre who would make a phone call to that person around a mobile phone. I thought that they were going to phone the person who was driving with his scar on their mobile phone. They would be caught out. My point was that, rather than just leaving that as something that there is no evidence for or nothing to deal with, they would introduce a system in terms of supporting road safety to contact that driver to make him aware of that complaint and to provide some advice in relation to road safety. It is just an example of the service centre doing something else rather than sending out a police officer. The best value and quality that came from our range maybe shows that the decisions around about closure there were the wrong ones and maybe that will be rethought out, one hopes. I will move on from parochiality, convener, on to— Why was the evidence given rather than that? Parochialism, I am used to it. On to some of the things that really concerned me about certain aspects of this. You talked earlier about the aspirations to create a virtual service centre, which is a fairly good aspiration. At the other end of the scale, your report talks about scribble pads. When you have a situation where folk are having to rely on writing things down because the system is far too slow, how could you actually get to that aspiration of a virtual service centre when you have those very obvious flaws where folk are having to write notes? Probably two things there for me. One is that the virtual service centre is a technology that links up three sites with the same systems and the telephony, so any calls can come in and they can manage within that. That exists currently in terms of technology, and I will move on as I understand it. Can I stop you there, Mr Penman? The difficulty in all of that is that it is very difficult to share the information between the three centres from something that is written in a notepad. If you take the notepad aside just now—I will come back to that if I may—the systems that are designed just now are for the call to come in and be automatically directed to someone who is available for that person to record that information on to a system called a CRM system. That is a contact-related management system. Basically, it records the information on there. It also would demonstrate if there were any previous calls that would come up. That would be recorded electronically, not on a scribble pad but electronically, and then if it required a police attendance, it would then automatically generate a message if you would like to send to an area control room, which is the front-facing side for police officers to go. There is a process in technology that allows all that to be linked up. What that does, if it is virtual, is that it does not matter where the call comes from, it has the ability to send it around the country and do that. The scribble pad has always been an element of control rooms and policing. Effectively, there is legitimate use for scribble pads, which is that when call-takers are taking a call coming in, the person who they are receiving it from might be under duress, they might be drunk, they might be incapacitated. Actually, the information does not come out in a particularly structured way often enough. There is a need sometimes for call-takers to be able to write down a telephone number or write down and address quickly a name, and that is why there is a value in having scribble pads. It should not be used to record the call in its entirety because the ICT systems allow them to do that. What we have picked up in our review is that there is a legitimacy around scribble pads, provided that their use is controlled and there is guidance around them, and that is what we have asked Police Scotland to provide. From that, the bypassing of the systems potentially is another issue, which would mean that people would not put them on the system and would write them down and put them on afterwards, and that is something that the system should prevent from happening. I have got some concern about that. It is difficult for us in some regards, because we are not there at the front line. Common sense has to come into play, obviously. If an ICT system is not operating quickly enough and the information has to be recorded, then I can well understand why folks are having to rely on pen and paper to make sure that they have the ultimate amount of detail that they possibly can have. However, my difficulty in all of that is that, in terms of the scribble pads, then trying to get that information to wherever that call is going to is going to be very, very difficult indeed. Is it not? It would be impossible in terms of a scribble pad to send information on. The point that I am making is that the scribble pad is designed to allow operators to take down information. If you are trying to get what is your name and address and what is other information, something things can come out and there is just a need to have that. Everything should be recorded on to the computer systems. The computer systems are designed to divert those messages and to task and action all the stuff. Everything that goes into that system means that nothing can then be lost from that system. We are quite clear that the systems that are there have the capability to do that. There are issues around the slowness of them, which we have asked Police Scotland to address in relation to that. Also, because the systems have the ability just now, because they are separate systems, there is an ability for those systems to be bypassed. For example, if you have the three systems that I spoke about without making this too technical, but if you have three systems and one of those systems does not work, if that means that your other two systems do not work, you have nothing within your control room. If you actually have the ability if one system does not work but your other two do, and you can still make it work and there is business continuity arrangements, then that, to my mind, could be okay, provided there are proper safeguards in place to do that, and it is the safeguards that we have asked for. Because the systems can or are capable of being bypassed, what we have said to Police Scotland is that you have to make sure that you can check when they are being bypassed, if they are being bypassed, in order to ensure that it is not being done for any inappropriate reason. Just to explain to me again in simple language that is bypassing. Yes, I realise that it is inherently complex reporting, I am conscious of it. I am sure that you are used to explaining to people like me, simple people, just to explain to me, because that is very important in this business of something coming down and how the information does not get lost somewhere in the past. It might be helpful to just explain. What happens is that when somebody phones into Police Scotland, it is captured with the telephone system and that telephone system automatically directs the call to the next available caller, so the call takers do not actually have to accept the call if they are free, it will automatically come to them and they will answer that. Once they take the call ignoring the scribble pad there— If they are not free, sorry, what happens? If they are not free, it will go to the next available caller, so the telephone system will identify it. In the virtual site that would mean potentially if everyone was busy in Edinburgh, it could then divert to another call, to Glasgow or to Motherwell. That is a virtual part. The telephony works out in those who are free for a call and will direct them with appropriate skills to that call. That is the telephony. Police Scotland then needs to have that system recorded, so obviously you know what the phone call is. Every call should be recorded. What happens is that the telephony system speaks to another system that is called the CRM system, the details of it. It passes some information from the telephone system, for example, the phone number that is being phoned. That gives the ability to check any previous calls that come up, and that is really helpful for people to know if it is the second time they are phoned or the third time they are phoned, so it gives a caller history to them. They would fill that information out on the system and that records the call. When the call is recorded, they have a choice about whether they need to send it off to a police officer to attend or whether they have just dealt with it. If it requires a police officer to attend, the system basically press a button and the system then generates it into a third system, which is called the command and control system, and that is the one that the area control rooms are different. They are the effect of where the roads will look after the police officers on the street. What it does, it will then pop up electronically to say that the call has been received in the service centre and it now requires an officer to attend it, and they will then manage it on that system. I guess that it is quite complicated. No, just to explain to you one thing. Does this business of the call going to one person and then it gets directed to find that there has been a previous call for a number, is one person aware of all this, or is it the system only then? The system would be—if you answered the call and there have been previous calls made, as you are answering that call, the system will show you previous calls. That is very important, because that then allows the call-taker to say, hang on, this is now the third domestic violence call that we have received from this person. Is there a vulnerability issue here, or are you phoning about your lost property that you phoned about earlier in the day, or is this the sixth time that you phoned just now? It gives them a history so that they can help the customer or the member of the public. If it requires a police officer to attend, the system then automatically generates another incident that is managed and attended separately. Those systems are all designed to work together, and they should not be bypassed, because they pass data to each other and help the call to be managed. If, for example, the telephone works but the CRM system is not working or is slow, the risk would then be that they do not use the CRM system, they will write the stuff down. If it needs an incident, they will then directly put it into the first system but not put it in the second system. That is a potential risk in them. The difficulty is that, if your CRM system does not work, the ICT system fails. That may happen. If you tie your other two systems in too closely, then potentially nothing works for you, so you have to have the ability to work around them. My view would be that, when they should be few and far between those systems failing, and what we said to Police Scotland is that if they do fall over or fail, you need to find a way of knowing when people are there. Again, without being overly technical here, hopefully, the main link is the incident recording system and the CRM system. We have asked Police Scotland to check all their instances and see how many instances, on a regular basis, have been created outwith the CRM system. That would indicate where people have potentially bypassed the second one. By doing that management report, they can quickly establish whether or not people are bypassing the system. Are you saying that bypassing the CRM system because it does work? There are two scenarios to be fair. One is that it is slow and not working well, in which case it could potentially be bypassed and people might have to wringle back in and retrofectively fit in the second system. That is not something that would be encouraged and that is why you have to check some balances. There may be a legitimate reason because the system is not working because it is broken down and is temporarily unavailable, in which case you would expect the incident to be written down and recorded properly, and then put on to the other system and potentially put on afterwards, if that makes sense. I have just the last bit. Have you asked Police Scotland to report back to the number of times that has happened? No. What we have asked Police Scotland to do is for themselves to them to introduce processes where they will monitor the number of occasions that the incident systems have been created. The number of times that systems have been manually created would be an indicator of when people might have bypassed the system. What we have said to Police Scotland is that you need to check regularly your systems and where it shows that people have manually entered things on. You need to go back and check what the reason for that was. That would identify, hopefully, very few and far between, but it would potentially identify people who might be bypassing the system. I am sorry to intervene, but I understand it now. In terms of the systems that are currently being used, are they new systems? Have they recently come into being? Or are they older systems that have been adapted to take a nice sense of what is going on here? It is the latter. I will support Police Scotland's approach to that. Police Scotland has taken a view that it will procure a whole new suite of technologies with £50 million worth of investment. That is known as stage 7 of the project, which is something that it is looking to develop a tender document for at the moment. It will bring in a whole new suite of technologies. We have made recommendations on making sure that it is properly specified and that it is professionally assured. There are also checks and balances that I am speaking about previously that are built into the system. What it did is that it selected an interim suite of technology, and that was based on what it already had, what could be scaled up, what licences existed and what was cost effective to do. It chose them. I understand all that and I understand the reasoning for that. You are saying that a tender is currently being prepared. How far off would it be before a new bespoke system would be in place? From my recollection, I think that the next stage is planned. A couple of years comes to mind at the time that it comes in and is prepared and then moves on. I am just looking to see if John can find something on our initial timeline for it. It is stage 7 of our project. I think that this is really important that we get the answer to this, convener, in June 2016. Yes. End of June 2016 is the time that it is put forward, so that is next year. That is when the tender is put forward. How long would it take to get to the stage of actually being able to procure and then the operational stage? The folk around this table are well aware of how long it takes to deal with procurement, installation and final operation of ICT equipment. Is there any idea of that at all? I do not. In the figure that I am giving you, which is the end of June 2016, is Police Scotland's estimate of when that will be done and when it will be delivered. My professional view would be that, since we are still looking at the invitation to tender document and that we have now asked them to have that gateway reviewed and checked and to make sure that there are other requirements on it, I suspect that that would take longer. I do not think that there will be a position to come back until such times as if we engage with contractors and work to what that timeframe would look like. I think that it is extremely important that we find out from the police service exactly when those timescales are. Beyond that, and I am finished now, I think that it is important, as Mr Finnie says, for us to get the current definitions of what control rooms, control centres, service centres and all the rest of it actually is. If I can say it, those definitions are contained within reports. Sorry, I just have not explained them very well. What one thing is, we need a realistic timescale for when this would be operational. You are telling us that this figure, given of the end of June next year, is going to put words on your mouth, is not realistic. My view is that I do not think that Police Scotland will be able to give you that information because they have not yet gone out to tender, so they have not got a supplier who is able to tell them what can be delivered and when from there. I do not think that they would have an idea when it will be until the actual award of contract. John Finnie, do you want to come in with that? Thank you. Mr Penham, is there any direct link with the I6 project? No, it is not that I am aware of in relation to that. I would defer to John if there is anything. There will be a degree of integration. The reason why I am saying that the timescales is that I would not imagine that Police Scotland would be positioned to be confident around the timescales until such times as it has got the tender document done until it engages with suppliers and suppliers come back with firm proposals around delivery, then I think that they will have a better idea of the time needed to do that. One of the key findings under people was that initial assumptions on the C3 staffing levels were limited by lack of debt legacy data and comparators. When exactly were those assumptions made? How were the levels of staffing decided? Where were the faults then shown to emerge? What lessons have been learned from the future? What will be Scotland? It made some initial estimates based on legacy force data. It had difficulty in using the legacy data from eight forces because it was captured differently and the base data on what was known within Strathclyde. John, will you provide some details on what the estimates and things were around that time, if you could hand across? The first thing that I would say is that we asked for detailed information regarding the staffing establishments and the actual numbers in terms of full-time equivalents at each stage in this change programme. We have had difficulty getting clarity on that. It is considerably unclear exactly how many staff they should have had and actually had at each stage in this programme. I can say what we do know and this is information provided by Police Scotland. In terms of the C3 division, which is the command and control division that we are concerned with, the actual staff numbers in total terms, on 1 January 2015 it was 1450 full-time equivalents, 1 April 2015 it was 1460, 1 July 2015 1494 and 1 October 2015 1563. There is a rising trend in staff numbers. In terms of planning assumptions regarding the change programme, there are three reference points. First comes from a product that was commissioned by Police Scotland, external consultants called Sabio, who in March 2014 estimated that the number of staff required in the national virtual service centre, which is not all of C3, it is just those that take the calls, would be between 379 and 447. Then later in May, on 4 May, Police Scotland conducted a review of the strategic direction and that figure was honed down to 400 in that national virtual service centre function. More recently, at a project board for C3 on 23 June, the figure was revised to 416. So, those are planning assumptions in terms of the numbers of staff that they expect to be undertaking call handling in the national virtual service centre. What we found is that that is based on assumptions of only the number of calls and the volumes of calls coming in and also the average time to take a call. So, they actually make assumptions on what they know and then they try and put the correct amount of staff around some of that. One of the things we picked up on is that that depends on the type of model you want for call handling. If you want a very effective call handling service where you take the call, take the details and then pass it out to an area control room to be dispatched, it's a much shorter time on the phone compared with if you want a service centre that will spend longer with the person on the phone and will seek to resolve the issue they have and not send a police officer. So, there are issues again within the planning assumptions in how they actually design that. What we have said in all of that, probably the thing that would be important to yourself is, before they move to bring the control rooms from the north end, they will have to work those planning assumptions out again and demonstrate what it is that they are doing, however they calculated the number of people needed against the call volumes that they have to satisfy independently, whether they have the right number of people available to take the calls that they're going to take. When, really, I'm trying to establish where these initial assumptions need, how far back? The dates for those planning assumptions were released in March 2014. That was the 379 to 447, and that was used in January as a planning assumption. Then we have in May this year, the 4th of May, the 400 figure. I've got the figures, but was that the very first time that there was any assumption on staff levels in 2014? That's the information that we got from Police Scotland, yes. We know already that the SPA anticipated that the number of call handling sites being reduced would create challenges in retaining experienced staff and would involve a significant amount of organisational change, but the closure went ahead regardless because they realised the most business benefits. There seems to be a theme emerging here, where governance of change process has been weak with key risks in projects, services not being highlighted through existing structures, but there's been a focus on productivity and achieving savings. I'm really trying to get at the real basis of what's dominating here. Is it savings or is it delivering an effective service? If it's the latter, we're still having backfillings. Perhaps you could limitate, certainly, what kind of backfilling and why is that still happening? Is it delivering a better service to the first part and the second part, as do we still have backfillings? Police Scotland's position is that it would identify a number of benefits into the programme, which would include a better quality of service to the public. Standardised systems and policies across the country and savings were an element of that. Police Scotland's position would be a mixed range of benefits from us. We did, as a report outlines, identify that there was a focus on effectively allowing people to leave the organisation, which would in itself mean allowing savings to take place within that. The journey of savings in people is difficult to track for us. If you go back to that line business case, there were savings of £18 million identified, which is before the decision taken to the single force. When they started designing it, they said that it would be around £8.6 million of savings potentially, and currently the estimate is around £6.8 million of savings, which is £212 staff and £900,000. Our difficulty in this is actually trying to track the number of staff who are there and who have left the organisation and also how the financial savings and things are accounted for. You have mentioned Police Scotland's position. Was there too much of an emphasis on perhaps trying to make savings rather than ensuring that the adequate staff were there to handle the calls? It is difficult to say what the motivation behind it is. We can only say what we found where it is at critical stages of the project when, for example, the Stirling centre closed and moved into Bilston Glen, and then when the Gwynorthys closed and moved in, there were insufficient number of staff available at that time, and that was precipitated by allowing staff to leave in those areas. What we found with staff who were able to leave, which I suppose we would have allowed for some savings to be had for Police Scotland at the same time that those things went ahead. Having said that, there were attempts by Police Scotland to recruit new staff into those areas, and there was a lag in that recruitment coming forward for them. The actual model is still to have staff in those areas and to recruit staff through there. We have found it very difficult to track down the numbers of staff who were in position at the key points in time against what the projections were. What good would have looked like would have been here is how many staff we needed at this stage, this is how many we have. Here is the shortfall, and based on that shortfall, here is how we intend to address it. We had difficulty in finding that. Could you confirm how much backfilling is still going on? That seems to me that we are still plugging the gaps. Perhaps one way to assess where we do not have the manpower is to look at the overtime payments, which were not anticipated and have been paid again to fill the gaps. They are going down slightly, but I think that it is an area that we would want some reassurance on because it is not good for a morale, it is not a way to run the service. One of the assurances that we gave is that the staffing levels in these three are now stabilised. That is based on the fact that we went out before our report was published to check on that. There has been additional staff recruited into the virtual service centres in Edinburgh and in Govan, so they now have the staffing levels up to what they see as necessary for that. That has manifested itself in terms of the performance figures that they have now being met. We were looking for when we went and visited service centres, are there a lot of calls waiting to be answered? There should have been an indication that there is not enough staff on for the calls coming in, and what we identified was that they had staff free waiting for calls to come in at that time. Having spoken to staff in those areas, they feel that they have now got additional staff around them in that area. Our view would be that the staffing is stabilised for the current level of volume that they have. We need to have assurance to make sure that when the call volumes and calls come in from the north, they have sufficient capacity to manage that. In backfilling, because we know that it is still going on ACC, Richardson confirmed that just yesterday or Tuesday? In terms of backfilling, my view would be that there is very limited backfill in taking place now within the C3 environment. We now have the staffing up to the levels required, and we have recruited a number of new staff in those areas. There was an element of backfilling going on at the time when they were struggling to meet demand early on, and the main drew from officers who were working already near the control room. People who were working in the call handling environment were brought in to deal with that, and there were some officers who were brought in from out with that. My view would be that there is not significant backfilling going on in relation to the service centre, and we did not see much evidence of that when we were out. In terms of dealing with gaps, and the number of gaps has reduced as staff numbers have increased thanks to the injection of finance. There are three options, essentially—pay overtime to increase capacity. Backfill from officers from divisions who have previously worked in the room to fill positions temporarily. The last one is shift swaps among other people within the division to backfill places. As I said at the beginning, the number of occasions that occur has diminished significantly since the establishment and, more important, the strength of staff has increased. Finally, convener, what measures are being taken to monitor this very closely in the future, because it seems to me the absolute achilles sale on this over? Yes, that ties in with the need for a performance management framework that is broader than just around productivity. The performance management framework should include the quality of call handling as perceived by the customer, the public, as well as through some sampling of the way handlers, operators deal with calls. Timeliness, obviously, to meet service standards. Utilisation—staff utilisation—to ensure that staff are productive and that the anticipated after-call activity is within expectation. The last one is quality utilisation attrition. The attrition is around the service failure. Those are the calls where people hang up in the midst of a conversation, or they might be represented calls or they might be inappropriate calls. We estimate about 30 per cent of calls that come through the system that are not appropriate for the 999 system, for example. That presents an opportunity to reduce demand. You have to monitor the appropriate use of the system to ensure that it is used for its purpose and that the whole procedure is operating efficiently. Can I ask you—it is about the figures that you cannot get your hand on—the historic figures and the call centres and the difficulty. Where is the SPA in the middle of all this? The SPA will have a role to oversee that. Right, but they do not appear—excuse me, wait a minute—to have a role, but they appear to be invisible. I am pleased that your Majesty's inspector of constabulary cannot inspect the SPA, or can you? I can. Well, that is good news, because I am asking myself. They were supposed to be overseeing all the stats, data and figures, and how come they cannot give answers? My fair to fair recommendations have also been directed towards the Scottish Police Authority in terms of tightening up and proving governance. At the time when it became apparent that there were issues in Bill St Glenn and the call performance was not going well, the Scottish Police Authority intervened and asked for performance figures, and there were issues around numbers and monitored at that point. What we were saying is that, at some of the critical points going back, it was hard to assess what times and what sufficient staff were in place around that. Picking up on Ms Mitchell's point, the Cabinet Secretary for Justice has written to me to ask two things. One is to work with Police Scotland and the Scottish Police Authority to develop a range of performance indicators to ensure, for example, not only are calls been answered quickly, because that is only one very small part of performance management, but also the whole range of things going through, but also including things like staffing levels and numbers and recruitment and vacancies, and also ICT issues and things, so we get a much more balanced picture of performance moving through. SPA should have been doing this before. You had to come in with your big boots. I think that we are to a degree, but given the experience that we have, and the experience that we have had from John Rogers and others around the country, we are looking to assist and actually bring something together to assist us. The cabinet secretary has also asked us to do unannounced visits to service centres across Scotland for the duration of the programme rolling out. What I would intend to do would be to take that performance management information as it is done and use that as a means for us to risk assess when we do our unannounced visits what it is that we are looking for. When we are out, for example, I will be very keen to see if there are issues around staffing and recruitment, what are those numbers, how are those numbers being met and what the abstractions are. I think that we are in a much better place moving forward now around that. I think that there is greater clarity about what is required moving forward. It is taking a bit longer than I think the committee would have expected with a few years of this now. Forgive me that that is not directed at you. It is a comment. I am Alison. Thank you very much. Can I return to the earlier questions about the North control room? You said in response to Elaine Murray that you were not surprised that locally they were still going through the redundancy interviews and processes. Would you not agree with me that putting people on notice leads to staff attrition? It does. Again, it is about how Police Scotland managed that through temporary staff around that position as well. I suppose that my other observation that we found in the report was that although they are doing the staff consultations one-to-one now, at least they have opportunities for staff to be engaged and to speak with Police Scotland around that and potential timescales. We have made it clear that the service centre should not close in the north until such time, so that might mean that it is a while. One of the criticisms that we had from staff was that, when an instance were made that things were going to close, there was very little engagement with them up until that point. I absolutely accept its potential in settling for staff to go through this process just now, and it may lead to staff attrition to some extent. My view would be that it is allowing staff to get a more informed picture of where they are. The thing that is missing for them, which is important, would be the time frame still for that to happen. That is my point, but it is very open-ended and it makes the system more unstable, because you will have people leaving if they find another job beforehand. Have you any indication of what the timetable would be round about that? Not definitively, but what we have asked as part of our recommendations is for Police Scotland to plan in detail what it refers to stages 5 and 6, which is effectively bringing the new control room up in Dundee, and then transferring the calls from Nimbarnes, Dundee and Aberdeen down into the central belt. We have asked for that to be planned out in a high degree of information and have it independently assured, and that should then contain the timelines and things that are in there for us. The forecast is now, I think, for March 2016. That is the forecast originally that was put to their stage. I suspect that Police Scotland has not demonstrated yet what that timeline looks like. They are still working towards that, but they have not yet evidenced that, or had that assured. It may slide out further. I would still maintain that we should do what we can to keep those control rooms. However, you said in your report that performance in the north continues to be variable when it was improving elsewhere. What do you attribute that to? Some of it has been an issue that the challenges have had about maintaining staff. Again, that has not been because of the statutory consultation, that is because staff have had potential 18 months, 20 months now, of knowing not uncertain about their future. Staff may choose another job if they can, others may hang on to see if they can have voluntary redundancy around that. There are some aspects around some of the technologies and things that are in place and how they are being measured. There is also a degree where although calls are not being answered in the north, they are being transferred down into the central bell from there. What we have said is that they need to stabilise that position and they need to keep the control rooms and service centres in the north open and monitor that performance more closely. It seems to me that it is not yet stabilised and that perhaps a moratorium with a proper timetable on it, say, a year's grace or something, would help to stabilise it and improve the situation in the north. My view about how that should play out is that Police Scotland, who are just now working on that detailed plan around what is needed to be done and delivered to allow the service centres to close, is what they have been asked to provide. I know that they are working hard on that just now. It needs to be assured. I think that once that is done, that would not give a much more informed view about what the timelines and things would be from that. That would perhaps be the time to take decisions around how long the service centres would be open for. If everything works well and they can demonstrate that they have the staff in place and the technology is robust and they can do that and people are satisfied, that would allow the service centres in the north to close. If that does not come through from the kind of due diligence that is done and more work needs to be done, then obviously that is going to move it out. What I have been absolutely clear about in our report is that the north should continue and be maintained until such times as Police Scotland are ready to move and actually that there are sufficient staff, the technology is working properly and the processes are in place and in many respects the lessons that were learned from closing, sterling and going north this are actually learned and Police Scotland can do this in a way that provides a good service to the public. Can I turn to the issue of system outages? You say in your report that between January and September 2015 there were 151 outages with average incident duration of approximately three hours. Can you explain to the committee the impact of those outages? Again, it is hard to say specifically around that because they relate to a whole number of systems that would take place within there. What we have said in the report is that Police Scotland has robust business continuity processes so when systems do fail they are able to move on to either a manual process or are able to actually shift the resources to a different control room. My take on the actual impact is probably relatively minimal in terms of service to the public would be my take on that because a lot of that stuff has not been picked up on. For example, when we were out we came across a number of times when systems had fallen over. Personally when I was out at Motherwell the area control room had an issue where the area control room was not working at all. It had the ability, because it was a virtual centre, to transfer the demand of that area control room electronically to the other control rooms in Govan from there, manage the demand in that area at that time and then allow staff to then be moved and located. What that meant is that they had a significant system outage that required them to move staff from one area to another but the impact on the public and officers on the street was negligible around that. Does that relate to what you speak to in the report as near misses or is that a separate issue? What we refer to as near misses is to get behind the ability where staff is spending something that is complicated to call handling and a lot of processes are being changed and moved across. What we are looking to do there is to get a situation where the staff themselves, who you know how the systems work and they know the services that they like to provide, is that if, through changes in technology or process changes that perhaps they are dealing with a call, something did not go as well as it could have done or something was resolved by their experience, so nothing actually went wrong but could have been done better but they identify something that needs to be sorted, then the near miss bit for us was about them having a system where they would then feed that back into management, so management could say, so what actually happened in that particular incident? Okay, we need to learn from that and they would then amend or change processes, so the near misses for us was really about having circumstances where the staff themselves who dealt with it might have come off the phone and meant actually that maybe it did not go as well as it could have done or there are some issues around there and to make sure that that was passed through. So you are saying that at the time that you started your inspection that wasn't happening and basically the senior staff in C3 were kind of flying blind about some of the problems that there were? My view would be that if something didn't go as well as it should have done and it was apparent that managers would certainly pick that up and would certainly follow that through and some staff would come forward and do it. What our view would be is that it was probably just a bit too variable and actually hopefully Scotland needed to have robust systems and also create a culture where they encourage staff to come forward and say, can I just take 10 minutes out of my calls just now to tell you about what happened there and supervisors can go, oh okay, and then something can be done about it. Thank you. You have a short question, Rodraith. Mr Penman, in your report under the heading of the recommendation for a training strategy, you referred to the implementation of the professionally accredited industry best practice programme of on-going consistent training and development should be a priority. How much of a priority and how easy is it to access it? A view from that is for Police Scotland to actually take a look at their training. What we found was that it was variable across the country, so there is a need to build this new thing to make sure that their training has been done. Since our report have been done, they have introduced what they refer to as a training academy, which effectively is a best mentoring programme where staff are actually trained in the basic systems. They then come into the service centre environment and work alongside trainers who sit with them and tutor them alongside them and give them additional training and things, so they are not just put on to calls right away, they are actually brought in individual training plans and things can be developed. We have actually seen some significant improvement in terms of the quality of training that is being provided to staff. In many respects, that has been addressed for us. The accreditation aspect for us, I think, is perhaps more aspirational, and that is probably recognising that in terms of training, it is not just about training people how to use systems, it is something about training people in terms of customer care and to be able to handle the calls or to deal with vulnerability and other things, the softer skills perhaps, and some of that training will be available externally given the volume of call centres and things that operate across the country. Our view about the accreditation part was an encouragement to Police Scotland to look beyond in terms of what is good practice and to draw from that in terms of the training programme. We have gone about call centres, but I want to just raise one final little thing about the calls themselves. The note says that 600,000 emergency 999 calls to the three centres generally over a period, but it says that 30 per cent of those are not appropriate. That is an awful lot, 180,000 calls from the public bunging up the service. What recommendations have you got, obviously the police to take the calls in, but what recommendations have you got to ensure with the one-on-one service that people do not do that, that is a substantial number that should not be going to 999 from the public. If I can across, I have already called it for us around that, but it is 30 per cent of calls that are not appropriate. Again, using jargon is a tent to do in these reports, but it is also fair to fail your management, things coming through that actually could be resolved. If I can hand over to Laura, I will give you an indication in some examples. We carried out an audit of 1,501 calls as part of our wider call handling review, and we applied eight different tests to the calls that we listened to. The last one of those tests was that, when the call was made to 999, we asked whether we thought it was an appropriate use of that service. In almost 30 per cent of cases, we found that it was not appropriate. There were a range of reasons for that. Sometimes it was a mis-dial, like a pocket dial from a mobile phone. Sometimes it was a child playing with a phone. Other times, which is perhaps where more work could be done, is around the fact that some people still seem to be unaware that the 1,501 service was available for non-emergencies, so there is perhaps scope for more marketing of that service. In addition, 1,501 does cost the caller—I think that it is 15 pence per call, no matter how long the duration of the call. It is just a one-off cost. Some people are aware that calls to 999 are free, so they would use the 999 service if, for example, they had no credit on their mobile phone, which might be appropriate if they thought that they were in an emergency, even if perhaps the call-taker did not proceed that to be equivalent to an emergency. There are various reasons why people were using 999 when they should not have. So, if that 30 per cent takes out the children and the people who are mis-dialing, what would you say—I am not sure that I would be able to estimate that. I was quite startled to see that, because I thought that 1,501 had resolved that much more than it apparently has. I would say as well that we were quite generous with our assessment of whether it was an appropriate 999 call. If the situation was not really an emergency but the person for some reason was significantly panicked or distressed, we could understand why they might have used 999. Perhaps we are just thinking clearly enough to think that this is not an emergency, I will use 101. We were quite generous with our assessment, so I would say that it is probably higher than 30 per cent. That is very helpful. Thank you very much. Thank you for your evidence. We move now into private session at a rate of knots.