Dear colleague
Following the recent correspondence from the
Home Office regarding confidence targets and local public opinion surveys, we
have been discussing possible implications of moving towards a more standardised
approach to local surveying with colleagues in the Home Office. There is a
feeling that police authorities/forces should be in a position to publish local
public perception data reflecting the new `confidence` questions on a quarterly
basis, at local authority level. This can largely be achieved through
including the specific BCS question within existing local surveys.
Initially, the Home Office would like to
know how achievable this would be in the near future (i.e by October).
In addition, the Home Office would like to
know how feasible it would be to move towards a more standardised approach to
conducting surveys to enable comparison between police and local authority areas
across the country. This may involve a more standard approach to
methodology, such as sampling, telephone/postal etc. In effect, this may
result in a process similar to that used for user satisfaction surveys, but
aimed at the `general public`, which would either replace, or be conducted in
addition to existing local surveys. However, it should be noted that the
Home Office do not wish to receive this data centrally.
We anticipate that the Home Office would
like to be in a position to give advice to the Home Secretary on the way forward
before Easter, and we are very keen to fully represent the views and interest of
police authorities and ensure advice to the Home Secretary clearly reflects
this. Although the Home Office Chief Statistician (Paul Wiles), will be
collecting technical information from forces about current processes, we are
also keen to establish an overview from police authorities.
To achieve this, May Nahar from the APA will
be contacting each police authority before the end of next week to ask a number
of specific questions related to your approach to surveying. I have
attached the draft list of questions May will be asking for your information,
hopefully this will simply involve a 10 minute conversation with a police
authority officer to pull together headline information. If you would like
to discuss this issue in any more detail, please feel free to contact myself or
Ritchie Forbes.
In addition, a paper will be presented to
the APA Council on 8 April with the intention that a clear APA
position on this subject can be agreed.
Regards
Tania