Report Summary
This report provides members of the Scottish Police Authority People Committee with an overview of Police Scotland's Policy Assurance Report . This was presented for discussion at the meeting on 27 November 2023.
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To view as accessible content please use the sections below. (Note that tables and some appendixes are not available as accessible content).
Meeting
The publication discussed was referenced in the meeting below
People committee - 27 November 2023
Date : 27 November 2023
Location : online
Implications
PERSONNEL IMPLICATIONS
There are 3.8 FTE resources dedicated to the management, creation, and amendment of People Policies within P&D. Eighty documents from the National Record Set have been identified within this report as having a direct impact on employment matters. There are 6048 hours available within P&D to undertake the work excluding leave and a 7% abstraction rate between November 2023 and March 2025.
Governance, Audit & Assurance oversees and maintains the National Record Set through its Policy Support Unit. There are no dedicated resources within this unit to author service delivery documentation. Instead, the unit works with owning departments as subject matter experts on the development, implementation, review and update of Policy, Standard Operating Procedure and National Guidance ensuring that all governance and consultation processes are correctly followed. The team also undertakes the publication of Force Memoranda on behalf of the Force Executive and apply quality assurance checks for all EqHRIAs aligned to service delivery documentation.
LEGAL IMPLICATIONS
The introduction of a rational decision-making model is intended to improve the quality and fairness of decisions while still complying with relevant legislation. Legal implications associated with this paper and its recommendations are:
• Compliance with the Equality Act 2010
• Freedom of Information Act 2000
• Employment Rights Act 1996
• Human Rights Act 1998
EQUALITIES IMPLICATIONS
While the decision-making model uses factual and statistical information to apportion scores to factors, it also requires judgement in some areas and may be influenced by bias. In mitigation, the model has been shared with stakeholders including workforce representatives and diversity staff associations to check the rationale and challenge thinking. This is intended to ensure everyone affected by decisions from the model understand how they were made and to ensure the model is fairly applied. An EqHRIA has been conducted to understand how the decisions and the factors included affect separate groups. Suggestions put forward to improve the reliability of outputs have been accepted where practical or provided rationale when rejected using the EqHRIA.
