I was recently unfortunate enough to have attended a seminar on the new appraisal system for all staff in my force. The PDR system will, allegedly, allow us all to monitor and record our “professional development”, set diversity objectives and list our skills and “competencies”. The PDR system requires supervisors and line managers (Sergeants & Inspectors in my day) to complete the extensive form itself, carry out a risk assessment, fill out a supervisor’s check list and then send it to personnel with a covering memo. This is a considerable task.
The headquarters disciple of political correctness who delivered this piece of news made the huge mistake of asking for any comments at the end of the session. I couldn’t resist this oportunity to get revenge for the last 60 mind numbing minutes of complete nonsense, and raised my hand.
“Why” I asked, “are we doing this, where have all these new objectives come from and who decides on these competencies?”. The reply was predictable. “The Home Office require us to complete these PDR forms and compliance will be inspected by HMIC”.
“Hang on” I said in my most innocent voice, “the Home Office also require us to cut down on the amount of paperwork we have to complete don’t they?”. I was briskly informed that this was not very helpful.
We will leave aside the minor issue of a child just out of college with no experience of life, let alone frontline policing, telling me (an Inspector) that I am not being helpful. I felt that this was a valid point. What exactly do the Home Office want? Do they really want us to continue to adopt ever more complex and weighty procedures for the way we manage our staff, or do they want us to cut down on paperwork?
The answer is that they don’t know what they want. Two of our last three Home Secretarys have been sacked for either behaviour bordering on corruption or incompetence. So now we are told to ignore the Home Office requirement to “stamp down on bureaucracy” and fullfil the Home Office requirement to destroy a rainforest for each member of staff’s PDR every year.
Who decides which policy from the elected government we ignore? It certainly is not the child who delivered the message and told me I was’nt being helpful, it was probably that persons boss, who probably has a carparking space and air conditioning.
You couldn’t make it up.
Good luck with your new blog Boss. I am really looking forward to being enlightened as to what grips your s**t. Probaly the same things that grip ours!
Just a thought but I hope that the above verbals, are not the actual direct speech of what you said in the meeting, it would make it too easy for you to be traced.
Good luck,
Steve
I quite agree with what a pointless waste of time PDP/PDRs are. I’m a Special and supposed to do one.
So I give up my free time to help out the police (insane I know) but instead of being out on the streets I sit in an office and do paperwork.
Then I go and bother a sgt or inspt and waste their time so that force policy can be followed and a box can be ticked.
So how does this help my career? Well it wont I dont have one I’m a special and in the real world my boss wont care.
My solution to being told its ‘force policy’. I’m a volunteer and its my policy not to waste my time doing pointless paperwork, after all what are they going to do, dock my pay?
The number of times I’ve seen 20 year officers moaning about going off on a course to learn how to fill in a pdp, makes me glad not to be a regular.
I can’t stand the members of Management, especially Specials management, who think they can tell people how to Police, when they haven’t been on the streets for years.
It beggers belief sometimes. However there are some top cops out there in management who are a pleasure to work for.
Hi,
I’m a victim of management incompetence within the police; I worked for six years as a support officer and then had to retire because of local govenment pension issues; I asked to retain my job as an agency worker (taking a 50% paycut in the meantime) and I was eventually given this role.
Last September I was told that because I was an agency worker I would be replaced by a member of staff of North Wales Poilce by somebody that they would re-deploy. Five months later I found work elsewhere and left – NWP have still not found anybody to replace me. My post cost the Police about 7k per annum, I did my work in an average of 25 hours a week. NWP were proposing to replace me with a person working full time at a cost of at least 14k. Quite a cost saving.
Did I hear that Richard Brunsome has been awarded the Queens Police Medal? – probably not for financial management!
Cheers,
Peter
The skippers cheat in the met. We as PC’s write the PDR’s for them as they’ve got too many other ridiculous mountains of monotonous “supervision” to do (that is, if they’re not out doing risk assessments for something completely bleeding obvious). If we’re lucky, they’ll be able to check that we can actually do the things we can say we do before the deadline.
Home office targets are the single most time-wasting beuracratical jokes going that invariably manage the impressive feat of defeating (or certainly hindering) the very object they are usually trying to achieve. Have you ever had activity analysis sheets? Every shift we had to fill out a time card detailing what we doing over the entire shift in 15 minute blocks. The objective was to see how much time we did doing paperwork. The sheets themselves took over half an hour to complete. Couldn’t make it up indeed
And who benefits from all those time sheets? Who uses that mountain of information (90% of which is made up anyway)?
It all goes to the Home Office. It is of absolutely no use to the force, yet we spend hours and thousands in feeding a great statistics monster in London.
Madness
How refreshing that you can now have your say anon. What nonsense you now have to deal with. It all started with P.A.C.E and computerisation, which was meant to rid you of paper. Heaven help you if the proposed mergers come off. You will be inundated with confusion and more new forms.
Keep your heads up.
Ted
I don’t know if it’s any comfort, but every large organisation in the British Isles has at least as much mindless bullshit inherent in its organisation. Maybe one day a government will arise where the Home Secretary is a former Chief Constable, the Department of Health is run by a retired GP and Education goes to a former teacher… (but preferably one whose world-view bears no resemblance to David Blunkett!)