Bloom accredited supplier Servoca Resourcing Solutions provides contract, fixed term and permanent resource and outsourced services to the criminal and civil justice sectors.
Bloom and Servoca worked with one of the UK’s leading police forces to deliver support in secondary investigations into specific crime types. The historical model of buying in contingent labour has no data on outcomes, which means there is very little evidence of success. This model is also resource-intensive in terms of management of people as well as tasks, and so dilutes the potential benefits that can be achieved, highlighting a need to explore innovative delivery models. Servoca identified an opportunity to implement a system of employing civilian investigators to build capacity and deliver efficiencies.
Challenge
The primary key objectives outlined by the client were:
• To increase resource capacity, allowing police officers to focus on more complex tasks and/or return to frontline duty
• To test collaboration between front line policing and the Provider
• To improve outcomes for victims and witnesses in terms of reducing the backlog of outstanding investigations and, in turn, improve the force’s relationships with the public
Solution
Servoca were compliantly procured through Bloom and the NEPRO3 framework to achieve the agreed objectives and deliver a fully managed service to the client. The civilian investigators were recruited, trained and deployed and their vetting applications were fully supported. All aspects of their employment were managed by Servoca throughout the project lifecycle, including pay, welfare, leave and performance management, allowing the client to manage work allocation more effectively.
Servoca provided weekly deployment availability to inform tasking and a weekly work return detailing tasks undertaken and outcomes achieved. They also provided a monthly collated performance report which included details of spend to date and predicted future costings, with Bloom also scheduling and chairing a monthly performance review meeting to open up communication.
By choosing Bloom and Servoca, the client benefited from a strategic partnership rather than a customer/supplier relationship, as well as teamworking, a fully managed service, timely intervention when performance issues were raised, joint problem solving, a foreshortened
procurement process and a straightforward online process for managing payment approvals processes.
Servoca were also able to deliver significant cost savings for the client: on the basis of like-for-like competent experienced investigators, 4 civilian investigators under a managed service model could be deployed for the cost of three senior police officer investigators.
The project generated positive feedback from the customer, victims and witnesses regarding their interactions with CIs. Servoca received reports of CIs rebuilding relationships between the police and the public. The additional resource allowed employees to spend more time with vulnerable people than would otherwise have been possible.
Outcome
As a result of the project, the following outputs were delivered over the course of 6 months:
Service Total Outputs
• Statements Taken 2234
• CCTV Retreived 2748
• Local Directed Enquires 3396 premises
• Other Tasks 3348
Additionally, there were reported outcomes as follow:
Personal Robbery
• Cases that were charged/summonsed improved by 10%
• Cases that were closed with No Further Action (NFA) reduced by 8%
Assault with Injury
• Charge/Summonsed improved by 3%
• NFA reduced by 7%
Other violence
• Charge/Summonsed improved by 8%
• NFA reduced by 9%
Serious Wounding
• Charge/Summonsed improved by 6%
• NFA reduced by 12%
Burglary Residential
• Charge/Summonsed improved by 11%
• NFA reduced by 13%
Open Crimes
• Robbery open crimes reduced 17%
• Assault with Injury open crimes reduced 20%
• Other violence open crimes reduced 24%
• Serious Wounding open crimes reduced 7%
• Burglary open crimes reduced 14%
Overtime
For each of the Strands operating with Civilian Investigators Overtime rates improved.
• Safeguarding: 6016 hours during January to June 2019 reduced to 1542 during 2020
• ERPT: 6622 to 3253
• CID: 3792 to 2218
