Successful collaboration is challenging, but also crucial to meeting demands on policing

With policing facing a host of challenges around managing growing volumes of demand, the increased complexity of calls involving multiple agencies, and the ever-present financial pressures on delivering an effective service to the public, closer collaboration – both between forces, and with partner agencies – has never been more important.

One of the main themes of the Police Foundation’s 2022 Strategic Review of Policing was the idea of greater regionalisation of policing, to address some of the pitfalls of the 43-force model in England and Wales, and reap the benefits of larger scale infrastructure and co-ordination.

There is an increasing onus on police forces to become more efficient in sharing data with each other and with partner agencies, to strengthen the fight against criminality and create effective cross-agency delivery. The data sharing responsibilities for agencies recently introduced as part of the Serious Violence Duty put a legal requirement on police and their partners to share relevant information more effectively.

But if the drive for forces and agencies to collaborate more closely is to succeed, the technology and frameworks required for those collaborations to work smoothly will need closer attention – and in some cases upgrading and improving – so procurement becomes part of the challenge.

For Nick Chorley, Director (EMEA) of Public Safety & Security within the Safety, Infrastructure & Geospatial division of Hexagon – and a veteran of a number of blue light collaboration projects – the road to successful partnerships around data sharing and joint working requires several criteria to be met by all agencies involved.

“Trying to solve collaborations through procurement can be beset with problems, and it only really works if you’ve sorted out the politics right at the beginning,” explained Nick.

“In my experience, those collaboration and partnership projects that are most likely to fail have typically involved a combined agency that hasn’t properly come together and worked out a plan for how they should collaborate and why.

“It’s been more of a marriage of convenience – it was convenient for them to procure similar systems at the same time – but beneath all that the operational groups involved actually want different things.

“By contrast, we have seen some great successes where the politics have all been sorted out in advance, and you’ve got top-down sponsorship from the chiefs, and buy-in across the organisations.”

Top-down support

One such project is the North West Fire Control, a collaboration between the fire and rescue services in north-west England, which emerged from the collapse of the national FiReControl project after chiefs in the region decided that the hard work that had gone into preparing for the original initiative shouldn’t go to waste.

“It was a project for which there had been top-down support from the chiefs for the duration of the procurement and for the project itself, and it’s still going today, almost 10 years later,” said Nick.

“It can be hard to get people to pull together in the same direction like that – and even harder across different disciplines or agencies – but when it works, it delivers successful outcomes.”

If the buy-in from senior leaders is crucial to the success of a collaboration or partnership procurement, then the understanding and commitment of those officers and staff who will be using the technology is just as important in actually making it work.

“It’s got to be an absolute strategic goal of a group or a set of forces, one which is not only endorsed by all the chiefs involved, but also communicated and understood right down at grassroots level,” continued Nick. “The same is true for regular procurements within a single force or emergency service, but even more so when it comes to collaboration.

“If the senior management have led the procurement, but haven’t explained the ‘why’ to the rank and file – who will implement it and make the system a success – you will get a lack of purpose and goal setting at best, and a whole lot of conflict at worst. Management must explain and ‘sell’ why change is needed, but involve the operational team to work out how that can best be achieved.”

The need for standards

Of course, collaborative projects are not simply down to the people involved; the technology and systems in use by the different agencies must also be able to communicate with each other at some level, particularly when it comes to command and control and centres.

“That doesn’t mean you can’t collaborate with separate systems; but to do so effectively, you do need to have some common standards, and if possible some common or shared infrastructure,” explained Nick.

One such initiative in the UK was Multi-Agency Incident Transfer (MAIT), a common standard for the sharing of incident information between control rooms, developed jointly in 2016 by the Government, emergency services and commercial organisations.

More recently the NG911/112 initiatives have established the Emergency Incident Data Object (EIDO) as part of the standard, defining a data object that first arrives – partially populated – with a telephone call to the emergency services, and then becomes more complete as each public safety answering point adds information collected from the call or other related data sources.

“The aim of these standards is that if a call needs to be transferred from one agency to another, and possibly on to another, that whole ‘object’ can be transferred as part of the call – as long as everybody in that chain, or the various different systems, can read it and understand it.

“That data object can then be opened up alongside the call, so that when the caller ends up speaking to their second or third person in a row, they’re not frustrated by having to answer the same questions over again because all the details they’ve already given are there in front of the operator.

“The good news with standards such as EIDO is that both the European Emergency Number Association and its North American equivalent have adopted it, so there is significant potential there for collaboration amongst suppliers to the industry.

“But we’re still a long way from it taking off across the sector; I’m hoping that it will, but it does need a huge amount of commitment and collaborative working for that to happen.”

Successful synergies

One area of blue light response where Nick has seen real success in collaborative approaches to control rooms has been within the Ambulance Service; but that success has not just been dependent on standardised tech and operator and chief officer buy-in.

“Collaboration is hard, and can seem particularly so in policing, but one area where Hexagon had more success is the Ambulance Service, and I think that’s because of the synergies.

“It’s all one NHS of course, but there’s lots of different parts – you’ve got the Ambulance Service, the hospitals, individual GP surgeries, all sorts of walk-in clinics and so on – but they’ve got a real imperative to work more efficiently and join things up better.

“For instance, with the advent of the 111 system about 10 years ago, all of the 999 ambulance CAD systems had to put in place a web service that let any of those 111 providers connect digitally to the nearest Ambulance Service when they needed to escalate the call, and automatically request an ambulance.

“So typically, 111 calls are for medical advice – how to do this or that, or signposting the caller to this surgery or that pharmacy. But in some cases, the caller has been too cautious and should have called 999, or their situation worsens while they’re on the call.

“At that point the 111 operator can press a button and all the information can get sent to the Ambulance Service, and an incident is automatically created so that the 999 despatcher can send an ambulance to them.

“That is a great example of collaboration working really well; exactly what made that happen where other approaches have failed I’m not sure, but part of that may have been because it was mandated – all care providers had to deliver this service for the 111 providers when it started.

“Mandating something doesn’t always work, but it did in this case. And I know in policing, we’d love to see that collaboration working as well with 101 as it does with 111.”

The way forward

Hexagon’s own efforts to help the police and others in the blue light sector to improve their collaborative approach to command and control, and strengthen the combined response with other community services, has enabled the launch of the company’s HxGN Connect system, described by Nick as a “CAD of CADs”.

“When we first started developing HxGN Connect, we’d already recognised the issue that if you try and join CAD systems directly – one to another in a mesh – you get the problem of translating data and information from one service and system to another,” explained Nick.

“Even if you get the technology working correctly and the messages going backwards and forwards, there is a semantic layer above that where the receiver interprets the same information differently from the sender because it is often presented in a different format or does not include enough detail; it doesn’t lead to great collaboration.

“We felt the solution was not to join the CADs up directly, but to join them up through an intermediary, a shared platform and portal where you aggregate the data, and make it available to multiple agencies on a ‘need-to-know’ basis so they can – in the same view, at the same time – see and agree the response needed and follow the audit trail of actions taken by each agency.

“That’s the original ethos behind HxGN Connect. To enable that, we knew we had to control how that data was shared and how it was displayed. So, for example, if we transfer information about a particular problem that only the police are working on to the aggregation area, then only police agencies can see those elements of the data.

“The Ambulance Service can’t see those bits of data – and vice versa, the Ambulance Service couldn’t share patient records with the police.

“So far we’ve seen the greatest interest amongst those organisations on the periphery of the emergency services, such as social services, utility companies and mountain rescue.

“And while each emergency service will continue to use its own CAD system for its internal operations, a collaboration portal is the place where they can most productively work together to collaborate on a response. Many are enthusiastic about the prospect of being able to share incident information in a controlled fashion and task more appropriate third responders or agencies.

Expectations for the future?

For Nick, the collaborative and partnership approaches already being provided by HxGN Connect reflect the ‘joined up government’ approach being pioneered in the UK by those such as Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham.

“I remember being really impressed by his manifesto about joined up government for Manchester. He was looking at the issue of why the police do so many different things, picking up jobs that should have been carried out by other agencies but who for some reason couldn’t be reached, especially ‘out of hours’.

“The point his manifesto was making was that a police officer is a very expensive resource, one who receives thousands of hours of training, and has an incredibly unique power – the power of arrest.

“And that’s what they should be used for, primarily; a lot of these other tasks should be handed off to other agencies who in turn are trained in handling mental and social health issues. So the basic idea was, well, let’s enable working a lot more closely together in a region or in a community, and really join up the government services and the emergency services so that they all operate more effectively.

“I would love to see more of that happening, but the agencies will always have competing interests, and that is maybe one of the reasons why it hasn’t to date worked effectively between the different agencies in the UK. True collaboration starts at the top, and all three shades of the blue lights are different ministries, different government departments, with different views on priorities.”

But the need for greater collaboration won’t just come from political or policing leaders; public expectations will also play their part.

“Citizens expect these partnership systems and collaborative approaches to work, because that’s what they’re used to in other parts of their lives,” added Nick. “When they hand off between a website and their bank, there’s a security check, they pay from their bank account, and the money goes to the website where they bought the thing from – it’s all joined up. So they cannot understand why in 2023, force A can’t speak to force B, or agency A to agency B, in the same way.

“Collaboration is hard; but whether the drive is coming from policing, from politicians, or from the public, the desire and need for more effective service provision and delivery through partnership and collaboration is there. It’s got to be the way forward.”