Report Summary
This report provides members of the Scottish Police Authority People Committee with details of Recruitment, Promotion and Succession Planning activity to the delivery of Strategic Outcomes, progress made in relation to relevant strategic commitments and an assessment of the impact in improving performance, mitigating strategic risks and delivering recommendations from audits/inspections. This was presented for discussion at the meeting on 25 February 2025.
Meeting
The publication discussed was referenced in the meeting below
People Committee - 25 February 2025
Date : 25 February 2025
Location : Online
Strategic Commitment
Relevant Recruitment, Promotion and Succession Planning commitments sit within and across the People Strategy, Strategic Workforce Plan (SWP) and Policing Together. These include:
• Attracting and retaining talent with clarity on skills capabilities and experiences needed
• Creating a culture and mechanisms to identify and nurture talented individuals through a mix of effective recruitment, enhanced development opportunities, strategic workforce planning and succession planning ensuring we have the right people in the right place at the right time
• Values-based recruitment, development and promotion processes that remove barriers to under-represented groups to ensure our workforce is as demographically representative as possible
• An improved brand and candidate experience
• Leadership development to support leaders for the future
2.2 As well as delivering the strategic intent of the organisation this work supports the mitigation of strategic and organisational people risks and the delivery of relevant HMICS Inspections (See Appendix A).
People Risk - If policing does not invest time/resource in identifying future talent and developing current/future leaders, there is risk of lack of capable, resilient and diverse leadership, resulting in lack of strong accountability and weakened ability to deliver/support effective policing and develop organisational culture.
People Risk - If officer attrition remains high there is risk skills/ knowledge associated with rank/role will be difficult to replace without capacity for remaining officers to take on workload of leavers, resulting in poorer quality of service.
There is a clear link between the activity being progressed (Appendix B) and these risks. However, it is recognised that the range of activity ongoing and being planned needs to sit within effective talent and succession planning frameworks to support medium and long-term strategic workforce planning (as outlined at section 4). It is also recognised that there needs to be a focus on authority/police staff as well as police officers in this area. More focus will be placed on this in year two of the delivery of the People Strategy and SWP.
