Learn PEEL: The Forward Facing Answer Framework

Position

I think wellbeing support has to be proactive, not reactive. It needs to be built into the rhythm of the team rather than triggered only when someone is visibly struggling. The Sergeant is the single most important factor in whether wellbeing actually happens, because we are the only rank close enough to notice the small changes that matter.

Why it scores: Commits to a clear view in the first sentence and stakes a claim about the Sergeant's role, so the panel knows where you stand before any detail.

Evidence

The National Police Wellbeing Survey, run through Oscar Kilo, consistently shows that officers who feel supported by their immediate supervisor report lower stress and a lower intention to leave, and that the reverse holds for officers who describe their supervisor as distant. The same evidence base is clear that early, informal check ins work better than formal interventions, because by the time someone needs a formal referral the trust to use it has often already gone. In my own experience as an acting Sergeant during a difficult eight week period last year, the officers who came to me for support were almost always those I had already spoken to informally. The ones I had not checked in with did not come forward, even when I could see they were struggling. That taught me something I had not fully understood before: wellbeing is not a programme you deliver, it is a relationship you have already built.

Why it scores: Names a real source instead of waving at research, then grounds it in a specific personal experience, which is what lifts Evidence above opinion.

Explore the tension

The strongest argument against this is that proactive wellbeing support can start to feel like surveillance. Officers can feel monitored when they confide in their supervisor, and there is a legitimate concern that formalising informal conversations damages trust rather than builds it. I have to take that seriously. Some teams, particularly those who have had poor leadership in the past, carry a deep mistrust of management driven wellbeing initiatives, and a well meant approach can land as another box ticking exercise. There is also a workload tension. Ringfencing time for individual conversations across a team of eight to twelve has a real cost, usually to my own admin time or my own rest, and if I do it unsustainably I burn out and become exactly the supervisor I am trying not to be. So the question is not just whether to be proactive, but how to do it in a way that is sustainable and does not feel like monitoring.

Why it scores: Engages two genuine challenges, surveillance and sustainability, and argues them fairly rather than dismissing them, which is the judgement being tested.

Lead

What I would do is build short, structured one to ones into the shift pattern: fifteen minutes, every four weeks, with each officer. Not performance meetings, not appraisals, a genuine conversation about how they are and what is getting in the way of them doing the job well. I would be transparent from day one that nothing said is recorded or escalated unless they want it to be, because that is the trust foundation and without it none of this works. Alongside the one to ones I would protect two specific behaviours. I would be visible at briefings and handovers, physically present rather than just on the system, because presence signals attention. And I would actively notice and acknowledge good work, because the national wellbeing data shows recognition is the cheapest and most under used wellbeing intervention available. To keep it sustainable I would not try to carry it all myself. I would coach my most experienced constables to keep an eye on the newer ones and to flag early when something seems off, so the support is built into the team rather than resting on me alone. I would measure it by whether officers came to me with problems before they became crises, whether welfare related sickness in my team trended down over six months, and whether officers leaving the team mentioned wellbeing positively on their way out. If those were not moving in six months, I would ask the team directly what would help instead, because wellbeing is not something I can impose on them.

Why it scores: First person and specific, with concrete actions, a sustainability safeguard and three ways of knowing it worked. The longest section, because the marks ride here.

Position

I think rebuilding trust starts with visible, consistent presence and follow through on what we have already promised, not with new initiatives layered on top of broken ones. Communities do not lose faith in policing because we lack ideas. They lose it because we do not deliver what we said we would. Restoring confidence is therefore less about innovation and more about discipline.

Why it scores: A clear, slightly contrarian stance, discipline over innovation, which lands harder than a safe answer.

Evidence

The College of Policing's research on legitimacy finds that procedural fairness, whether people believe officers treat them with respect and whether they feel listened to, is one of the strongest drivers of public confidence, and the Crime Survey for England and Wales tracks how that confidence has moved over time. The Casey Review documented how trust collapses when communities see no accountability for previous failings. Locally, our 2024 HMICFRS PEEL inspection called out inconsistent neighbourhood engagement as a driver of declining confidence, particularly in our most deprived areas, where confidence scores have fallen by nine percentage points over three years. That same legitimacy research points to a wider pattern: it is not the dramatic incidents that drive long term confidence, it is the cumulative effect of thousands of small interactions where the public either feels respected or does not. The pattern across these sources is consistent. Process matters more than outcome, and consistency matters more than ambition.

Why it scores: Named sources, national and local, drawn to one consistent conclusion. That breadth is what a board wants behind a view.

Explore the tension

The legitimate challenge to my position is that we are under genuine resource pressure, and visible presence costs officer time we do not have. Anyone arguing the opposite would say we should focus on response times and detection rates, because that is what is measured, that is what HMICFRS reports on, and that is where political pressure sits. I take that seriously. There is no point being visible if we are failing on the core service, and I have sat in enough silver meetings to know that abstracting officers to neighbourhood engagement has real operational costs. There is a harder challenge underneath that one too: the communities with the lowest trust are often those where more police presence is itself contested, and more officers on the street can be experienced as harassment rather than reassurance where the relationship is fraught. My position has to be defended in two directions, resourcing and legitimacy. I would argue the two are connected, though. Communities that do not trust us do not report crime, which makes detection harder, which makes confidence worse, which deepens the resource problem. Breaking that cycle starts with how we show up, not how often.

Why it scores: Defends the position against resourcing and legitimacy at the same time, then connects them, which shows genuine depth rather than a token nod.

Lead

As an Inspector, my first action would be to audit what we have already promised the community in the last two years and find out which commitments we actually delivered. I suspect that exercise alone would be uncomfortable, and that is exactly why it has to come first, because nothing I do next has credibility until I have reckoned with what came before. Then I would publish a quarterly accountability statement, jointly with my neighbourhood team commanders, showing exactly what we said and what we did, and I would take it to community forums in person rather than delegate it. I would also make sure every public commitment we make from here on has a named owner and a date, so we stop generating the very promises we then fail to keep. Inside the team I would ringfence neighbourhood engagement hours and protect them from response abstraction unless authorised at Superintendent level, because that is the only way the protection actually holds. I would also invest specifically in our newer officers' interaction skills, since the legitimacy research shows it is the small everyday encounters that drive long term confidence and those encounters are mostly carried by our newest people. I would measure success on trust scores in our local survey, neighbourhood meeting attendance, and reported feeling of safety in our most deprived wards, and I would review monthly with the Chief Inspector. If the numbers were not moving in six months I would not double down, I would go back to the community and ask what I was getting wrong, because trust is something they grant us, not something we deliver to them.

Why it scores: Opens with an uncomfortable, credible first move and runs across teams with built in accountability, pitched at Inspector scope rather than one team.

Position

My view is that Right Care Right Person is the right direction, but only if we treat it as a partnership handover we are accountable for, not a withdrawal we are entitled to. Done well it gets people the right help and frees officers for police work. Done as a cost cut dressed up as reform, it transfers risk onto people who cannot carry it, and the harm, and the blame, come straight back to us.

Why it scores: Backs the reform but reframes it as accountable partnership, which is exactly the senior judgement the question is testing.

Evidence

The national picture is clear that much of the demand reaching the police is not really a policing problem. The College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs' Council have both set out that a substantial share of calls involve mental health or social care needs the police are not best placed to meet, which is the premise the Right Care Right Person agreement is built on. HMICFRS has repeatedly found that people in crisis are failed when agencies argue about whose responsibility they are. The early adopter forces show the lesson runs both ways: where the health pathways were genuinely in place first, demand fell and outcomes held up; where the police simply stopped attending before partners were ready, vulnerable people were left without a response and the coronial and IOPC risk landed straight back on policing. Our own threshold data and partnership maturity vary a lot across my area, so a single switch off date would be safe in some places and dangerous in others.

Why it scores: Handles a contested topic with no single clean statistic by naming who has set out the premise, rather than inventing a figure.

Explore the tension

The strongest challenge to a cautious approach is that demand is now so heavy that waiting for perfect partnerships means never starting, and every month we delay is officer time lost from frontline policing. I take that seriously, because the operational pressure is real and the public also expect us to be available for crime. There is a harder ethical tension underneath it. If I hold back, I am arguably keeping the police as the service of last resort, which entrenches exactly the over reliance the reform is meant to end, and which is not fair on the people who deserve a proper health response rather than a police one. So the honest tension is not whether to do this, it is how to move fast enough to relieve genuine pressure while moving carefully enough that no one in crisis falls through a gap I created. I cannot fully resolve that, but I can manage it deliberately rather than pretend it is not there.

Why it scores: A genuine ethical dilemma, fairness to people in crisis against operational pressure, not a soft tension chosen because it is easy to dismiss.

Lead

As a Chief Inspector I would not set one switch off date across the area. I would lead it pathway by pathway, starting only where the health response is evidenced as in place, and keeping the police response live everywhere else until it is. My first move would be to agree a shared risk threshold with our mental health trust and ambulance partners in writing, so the decision to decline a call is a joint clinical one, not a unilateral police one, and I would put a senior clinician into our control room decision making rather than leave call handlers to carry it alone. I would build a simple safety net: any call we decline is reviewed within twenty four hours, and any adverse outcome is reviewed jointly, so we learn quickly rather than after a death. I would brief my Inspectors and Sergeants myself on the difference between a handover and an abandonment, because the culture risk is that pressure to reduce demand quietly becomes pressure to say no. I would also agree an explicit route back to police attendance for any case where the partner response fails on the day, so the safety net is real and not just a review after the event. I would hold myself accountable to the Superintendent on whether declined calls were genuinely picked up by the right service, whether our own response times to crime improved as demand shifted, and whether any vulnerable person came to harm in a gap. If the harm measure moved the wrong way, I would slow the rollout in that pathway without apology, because the point of the reform is better care, not less responsibility.

Why it scores: Organisational in scope, sequenced, with a real safety net and an escalation route, and it ends willing to slow down on principle.