Information on time spent on patrol by police officers has been collected only since 2003-04 and is set out in the following table, for England and for the Metropolitan Police. The Home Office does not collect data for individual boroughs.
Time spent on patrol refers only to time when an officer is patrolling but engaged in no other duty. It is inappropriate to look at this element in isolation from other activities.
The front-line policing measure provides a fuller picture of police officer activity because it assesses time spent by police officers on core policing duties such as patrol, responding to 999 calls, as well as activities of CID and specialist officers.
Percentage patrol Percentage FLP England Metropolitan Police England Metropolitan Police 2006-07 13.5 12.8 64.3 61.7 2005-06 14.4 12.9 63.7 61.9 2004-05 15.3 13.4 62.2 62.4 2003-04 14.2 13.7 62.1 65.0
Information on time spent on patrol and paperwork by police officers has only been collected since 2003-04 and information for England and Wales is set out in the following tables. Table A contains data for all officers and table B for patrol officers.
Time spent on patrol refers only to time when an officer is patrolling but engaged in no other duty. It is therefore inappropriate to look at this element in isolation from other activities. The front-line policing measure provides a fuller picture of police officer activity because it assesses time spent by police officers on core policing duties such as patrol, responding to 999 calls, as well as activities of CID and specialist officers.
Percentage Year1 Time spent on incident- related paperwork Time spent on non incident- related paperwork Total time spent on paperwork Time spent on patrol2 Frontline policing measure3 2003-04 10.3 9.8 20.1 14.2 62.1 2004-05 9.9 8.5 18.4 15.3 62.6 2005-06 10.8 8.5 19.3 14.0 63.1 2006-07 11.4 8.5 19.7 13.6 64.2
Percentage Year1 Time spent on incident- related paperwork Time spent on non incident- related paperwork Total time spent on paperwork Time spent on patrol 2003-04 8.8 10.0 18.8 18.0 2004-05 8.1 8.3 16.4 19.1 2005-06 8.6 7.9 16.5 17.3 2006-07 9.2 7.9 17.1 17.1 1 Data was not collected before 2003. The information is taken from activity analysis, which is collected by all forces over a two-week period in each year and provides a snapshot of how officers are deployed. 2 Includes officers on foot/car/beat patrol, CID and traffic officers. 3 Data was not collected before 2003.
The time spent by police officers on paperwork and other administrative duties remains an inevitable, but often necessary part of the process of protecting the public. We are, however, taking measures to reduce the time spent on these activities in order to increase the time police officers are able to spend on front line duties. These measures include: improving custody management working practices and processes; streamlining and providing greater local flexibility over performance management requirements; and providing a new £50 million capital fund to support wider access to time and paperwork saving innovative electronic fingerprinting and mobile data technologies.
Reducing bureaucracy is one of the four key strands in Sir Ronnie Flanagan’s review of policing. There were 13 recommendations on this area alone in his interim report published in September this year.