Chief Constable's Foreward

I am pleased to present our 2030 Vision for Police Scotland, details of the next phase of policing reform and our planned commitments for phase one delivery to 2027. In my first Annual Policing Plan (2024/25), I committed that we would develop this integrated long-term plan.

The Scottish Government’s 2024/25 funding allocation signalled commitment to the development and implementation of a model of policing which delivers improved services while being sustainable and affordable.

When I took command at Police Scotland, I made clear that I want the people of Scotland to trust us to keep them safe. I want people who contact us to have confidence in our service delivery and I want us to continually improve and perform at a high level.

I set out my position that our operational priorities should be determined by threat, harm and risk. I want us to emphasise prevention, problem solving and proactivity and I expect us to invest to support officer and staff wellbeing.

To achieve that, it was clear that we needed to simplify our strategic direction and improve how we prioritise. Police Scotland is a large organisation which operates in a complex environment with responsibilities that go beyond preventing and responding to crime and disorder. Every day we deal with very vulnerable people in the most difficult of situations. We ask a lot of our officers and staff and adopting a clear strategic direction and prioritising against it is critical to supporting them and the service they deliver to communities.

While we remain committed to the strategic outcomes jointly agreed with the Scottish Police Authority in the Strategic Police Plan (2023), I want our 2030 Vision and the commitments underpinning it to reduce complexity across our planning landscape and help our people, our partners and our communities to understand where we will prioritise investment and service.

The demands we face continue to grow and change. The public sector funding context remains challenging. We need to become more productive, more efficient, more responsive and more engaged. We must harness the potential of digital technology and innovation and we must maintain progress towards becoming a truly inclusive, anti-racist and anti-discriminatory service. All of this is fundamental to our 2030 Vision.

We will continue to require the Scottish Government’s support to re-shape our organisation and our services to allow us to operate sustainably in the future.

My very clear priority is our frontline. I want to significantly strengthen our operational capacity and raise professional standards further. This means continuing to recruit and train police officers, working with our elected representatives to give us modernised vetting, conduct and performance regulations that are fit for purpose and lifting frontline deployable officer numbers significantly above their current level. It also means managing and reducing unnecessary demands on our people that have either grown up through our own custom and practice or decisions taken by partners across the criminal justice sphere or wider public sector.

Much of the work outlined in year one of this plan is already progressing at pace. This includes Police Scotland’s central role in the implementation of the Digital Evidence Sharing Capability (DESC), the successful contract award for a national roll out of body worn video and the establishment of a Mental Health Taskforce. All of these steps will help to deliver system-wide efficiencies and improvements in the criminal justice system and in the care provided to people in mental health crisis.

With our clear and simplified long term strategic direction, our focus is now on delivering successfully. I am committed to ensuring that those who lead have the skill, energy and commitment to deliver. Given the scale of our longer-term commitments to change and improvement set out in this three-year plan, we will look again at how we ensure effective resource allocation, agile governance and sound performance management as we strive to achieve best value across everything we do. We will look to work with partners whenever we can to deliver the best results.

The next phase of police reform is now underway – and we will work every day to deliver our vision of a thriving workforce – police officers, staff and volunteers who work to deliver safer communities, who reduce crime and who support victims effectively.