HMICS Scrutiny plan 2025-28

LEADERSHIP AND VISION

This examines the purpose of the organisation, why its work is important and considers how it creates and delivers sustained value for its stakeholders. It assesses organisational vision and what it is attempting to achieve in the long term, through the choices it has made for current and future courses of action. It considers the organisation’s primary purpose and priorities, its strategy to achieve those aims, and any improvements it could make to be more effective.

It also looks at how well the organisation identifies and understands its stakeholders needs, understands the wider context within which it operates, its own capabilities, major challenges and opportunities. As with our previous framework, there is a strong focus on implementing effective governance and performance arrangements to support delivery of the purpose, vision and strategy.

It examines how well the service or organisation is led. It also considers organisational culture and values and how well leaders steer and nurture these. We consider how collaboratively leaders work to create the conditions for supporting change, creativity and innovation, enabling the organisation to meet its aims.

DELIVERY

This considers how the organisation identifies and uses specific types and categories within each of its key stakeholder groups and its understanding of needs and expectations to achieve continued engagement, building sustainable relationships. It assesses the levels of involvement of stakeholders (e.g. service users, officers and staff, governance bodies, partners and suppliers, business and wider society) in deploying strategy and delivery and examines the contributions they make. It looks at whether these relationships are based on transparency, accountability, ethical behaviour and trust.

One of the key stakeholder groups considered in detail is that of people and how the organisation attracts, engages, develops and retains both officers and staff. Fundamental to this is the process of workforce planning and its alignment to purpose, vision and strategy. The theme also considers the wider group of partners and how relationships are built and maintained to ensure support for creating sustainable value. The concept of wider social wellbeing and the contribution made by the organisation is also included.

It encompasses the concept of creating best value, which is a statutory duty placed on both Police Scotland and the Scottish Police Authority by the Police and Fire Reform (Scotland) Act 2012. The organisation’s clearly defined purpose, enriched by the strategy, defines for whom the organisation should be creating best value; it also includes expectations of environmental sustainability and associated strategy and delivery.

It also examines driving performance and transformation, the first with a focus on successfully managing delivery of current business operations, and the second managing the constant internal and external changes to the organisation that need to be addressed in parallel if it is to remain successful. In combining the assessment of these aspects, the theme maintains a focus on the necessity for the organisation to deliver for today while preparing for the future. Major elements considered in enabling performance and transformation are innovation and technology, the ever-increasing importance of data, information and knowledge, risk management and the focused use of critical assets and resources.

OUTCOMES

This focuses on the overall performance of the organisation or service in relation to its purpose, vision, strategy and perceptions of the organisation by stakeholders (both current and past). We look at success in delivering demonstrable, high-quality and improved outcomes for service users, communities and the public in general. Evidence for this could be obtained from a number of sources, including reports and data sets, public surveys, focus groups, research, press or social media, external recognition or compliments/complaints.

We also look at how an organisation or service area’s strategic priorities, aims and objectives have been achieved, including those that are nationally or locally determined. Evidence of demonstrable outcomes includes trends over time, target measures and other aggregated data which provide an indication of success in maintaining or improving the quality of the service provided, both overall and when benchmarked with similar services or organisations. These results should be effectively utilised by the organisation to monitor, understand and improve its overall performance and to forecast the impact this performance will have on both the perceptions of its stakeholders as well as its future strategic ambitions.

This framework can be utilised across a range of scrutiny activity that HMICS undertakes, such as thematic, audit and assurance, collaborative and strategic reviews, which is described in more detail in the following section. More information on our framework is also available within our corporate plan.