Dorset Police 2024

We are bringing together a number of areas of work under Project Evolve with the common aims of:

• Continuing to improve our service by putting the public first
• Ensuring we spend every penny of public money wisely
• Making it easier for our officers and staff to do an even better job

There are a number of things we need to progress over the next year or so to assist us in realising our vision and delivering on our priorities and we will be gathering these together under Project Evolve. It is not a revolution or wholesale change of what we do. It is an evolution, building on the fantastic work each and every one of our team deliver day-in day-out. We are a good force, with great people and we have strong foundations, but we cannot afford to stand still. We need to make some changes, but we are not ripping things up and starting again, we are building on our existing strong foundations. We will be making changes incrementally; at each stage we will test and evaluate them to see how far they have tackled the problems we are seeking to solve and whether the shape of that problem has changed.

Last year we worked with consultants from Process Evolution to help us understand how we can better manage our demand across our operational and investigative functions, including how to best meet surges in demand at different times of the year.

We are taking their findings and recommendations into Project Evolve to manage the implementation of them alongside changes needed elsewhere to ensure we don’t unintentionally have an adverse effect on another part of the organisation, and that we are setting all our teams up to succeed. Under phase one there are three key areas under review:

• Reviewing the shift pattern of patrol officers within Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole, to match that worked by other officers and staff across the Force to build better relationships with colleagues and provide a better service to victims. The change also promotes a better work life balance for officers and following consultation, we expect to implement this from Monday 2 September 2024.
• Rolling out enhanced video contact where officers contact victims of crime remotely via a video chat function offering the victim greater choice in how we investigate their crime. A trial last year found we were able to respond to victims much faster, improved the quality of our investigations as officers had more time, increased the number of people being brought to justice and improved victim satisfaction with the police. We are currently exploring how this can be used by more investigators where appropriate.
• Ensuring we are getting the front end of responding to the public right by enhancing the triage process within Contact Management to ensure we utilise our finite resources effectively on investigations where there are reasonable lines of enquiry. This work will help us to ensure victims are kept up to date and that we’re able to deploy as soon as possible to urgent and priority calls. It will also help us to free up time for our frontline teams to be proactive in preventing crime and doing the best job we possibly can.

Phase two of Project Evolve sees further reviews into other areas of policing such as how we set up and care for the 8,300 people who pass through our custody suites each year as well as the structures of our Prevention Department. Other areas within scope are a realignment of detectives within our Criminal Investigation Department to deliver capacity to areas of high harm and vulnerability and how we deliver neighbourhood policing through our dedicated local teams of officers and PCSOs.

Spanning all the areas of Project Evolve is cost challenge where we are required to find ongoing cost savings to ensure the Force is able to deliver a balanced budget each year. Last year the Force delivered cost efficiencies of £6.2m in 2024/25 and is expected to find a further £5.7m in savings this year.

We’ve already applied savings of £1.8m to department budgets where we’re asking senior leaders to manage their costs with even greater scrutiny. These reductions are being achieved through a reduction in utility costs, savings from process automation, reduction in software licences, utilising technology to minimise on travel costs and removing vacant staff posts from structures where this will not have a significant impact operationally.

The remaining £3.9m of savings required will be delivered through the major Project Evolve business cases as outlined in phase one and two which will enable cost saving and income generation activity. The Force is also set to launch a suggestion scheme where officers and staff can put forward ideas of where they believe savings can be made to constantly evolve our operations and deliver a police service which offers value for money to our communities. Dorset is very much a people force and we achieve way more than our size. But that doesn’t mean we stand still, we owe it to our communities and our colleagues to look for ways to continually improve and to do the best we can with what we’ve got. We care about providing a good service to the public, we care about the impact of workloads on our colleagues, and we care about making Dorset safe for everyone.

Throughout everything we deliver as part of Project Evolve, we are encouraging officers and staff across the organisation to adopt a preventative mindset and consider what they have done that day to make someone safer. Helping to deliver our vision to make Dorset a safe county for everyone.