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.

Evidence

The Police Federation's 2023 wellbeing survey showed that officers who feel supported by their immediate supervisor report significantly lower levels of stress, lower intention to leave the service, and lower sickness absence. The same survey showed the inverse: officers who described their supervisor as distant or transactional were three times more likely to report poor mental health. Oscar Kilo's evidence base reinforces this. Early, informal check-ins are consistently more effective than formal interventions, because by the time someone needs a formal intervention 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.

Explore the tension

The strongest argument against this approach is that proactive wellbeing support can start to feel like surveillance. Officers can feel monitored or assessed 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 experienced poor leadership in the past, carry a deep cultural mistrust of management-driven wellbeing initiatives, and any well-intentioned approach can feel like another box-ticking exercise. There is also a workload tension. As a Sergeant managing a team of eight to twelve officers, ringfencing time for individual conversations has a real cost, usually to my own administrative time or my own rest. If I do it unsustainably, I burn out trying to look after everyone else, and I 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.

Lead

What I would do as a Sergeant is build short, structured one-to-ones into the shift pattern: fifteen minutes, every four weeks, with each officer. Not formal performance meetings. Not appraisals. A genuine conversation about how they are, what they need, and what is getting in the way of them doing their job well. I would be transparent from day one that nothing said is recorded or escalated unless they explicitly want it to be. 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 on shift handovers, physically present rather than just on the system, because presence signals attention. And I would actively notice and acknowledge good work, because Federation data shows recognition is the cheapest and most under-used wellbeing intervention available. I would measure success three ways. First, did officers come to me with problems before they became crises? Second, did welfare-related sickness in my team trend down over six months? Third, did exit conversations with officers leaving the team mention wellbeing positively? If those numbers were not moving in six months, I would ask the team directly what would help instead. Wellbeing is not something I can impose on them, and I would rather adjust my approach than persist with one that was not working.

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.

Evidence

The Crime Survey for England and Wales consistently shows the strongest predictor of public confidence is procedural fairness: whether people believe officers treat them with respect, whether they feel listened to, and whether they see officers in their neighbourhood. The Casey Review was explicit that trust collapses when communities see no accountability for previous failings, and that the public are far more forgiving of mistakes acknowledged openly than mistakes denied or minimised. Locally, our 2024 PEEL inspection specifically called out inconsistent neighbourhood engagement as a driver of declining confidence ratings, particularly in our two BCUs with the highest deprivation indices, where confidence scores have fallen by nine percentage points over three years. The College of Policing's own research on legitimacy points the same way: 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 all three sources is consistent. Process matters more than outcome, and consistency matters more than ambition.

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 also a harder challenge underneath that one: the communities with the lowest trust are often those where increased police presence is itself contested. More officers on the street can be experienced as harassment rather than reassurance in places where the historic relationship is fraught. My position has to be defended against two directions at once: the resourcing argument and the legitimacy argument. 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.

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 have actually delivered. I suspect that exercise alone would be uncomfortable, and that is exactly why it has to come first. 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. I would take it to PACT meetings and to community forums in person, not delegate it. Inside the team, I would ringfence neighbourhood engagement hours and protect them from response abstraction unless authorised at Superintendent level. That is the only way the protection actually holds. I would also invest specifically in our newer officers' interaction skills, because the Casey work 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 three ways: trust scores in our local survey, neighbourhood meeting attendance, and reported feeling-of-safety in our most deprived wards. 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. Trust is something they grant us, not something we deliver to them, and any plan that forgets that ends up being part of the problem rather than part of the solution.