Support Services to front line public sector
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As a police officer with over 20 years experience I built on the skills and abilities learnt during my training as a teacher, including: communication and organisation, developing and enhancing them by including leadership, strategic awareness, decision making, partnership working and customer liaison.
Early retirement from the police due to injury provided me with the opportunity to offer the skills and abilities developed during more than 20 years of challenging yet rewarding public service to Warwickshire County Council (WCC).
As evident in both my policing career and my current career with WCC, I strive to develop myself wherever possible, learning from experience and acknowledging my strengths and weaknesses to fulfil my chosen and assigned roles and responsibilities to the best of my abilities.
I am a conscientious, solution focussed, hard-working and trustworthy person with a proven ability to deliver successful projects on time and in the interests of best value by leading teams of subject matter experts.
The extensive diversity of experience within my working life has developed a strong strategic perspective and drives a personal commitment to maximise the potential of WCCs capability to deliver quality services by maximising the support provided through appropriate corporate and/or directorate teams whilst minimising administrative demand.
Throughout my previous policing career and my current local authority career, totalling nearly 27 years, I have always strived to deliver effective public services both on an operational level but also as a supervisor, manager and leader and have lead teams of specialist officers in complex Road Death investigations as well as large units of highly specialist firearms officers in excess of 60 personnel, during a period as acting Chief Firearms Officer for Warwickshire Police.
I am a strong supporter and advocate of WCC’s change and transformation programs which clearly have the needs of our communities as its focus in order to meet our OOP 2020 (and on) vision “to make Warwickshire the best it can be” and priorities “to support communities & people and deliver a vibrant economy” through the consistent application of our corporate values and behaviours.
I am highly motivated to ensure that the authority is as efficient and effective as possible in delivering its statutory duties and also those duties, which whilst not statutory are ‘the right thing to do’. In order to achieve this, I am a great believer in innovation and ‘doing things differently in order to do them better’ and also believe that it is essential to proactively engage with all our critical partners, challenging them where necessary, to maximise our collective potential and am keen to explore the potential of collaboration opportunities, not only within WCC but also, with neighbouring authorities and exploring innovative solutions from other providers.
As an authority we are now faced with the challenge of planning beyond 2020 and I recognise that, to meet the challenges of increasing demand against decreasing resources we now need to focus on our ability to ‘do things better’ and wholeheartedly believe that the provision of intelligence led, agile and innovative support services is key to achieving this.
I continually learn from my experiences, both occupational and personal, and consider myself as a transformational leader; acting as a role models for officers that I have responsibility for to emulate behaviours that I personally see as central to maximising potential such as empowerment, trust, motivation, stimulation and empathy.
I am committed to the ideas and values of Health & Wellbeing. Whilst it would be inappropriate to mention specific examples of this within this statement I believe that it is evident that I care about my staff and value their individual skills and abilities by ensuring I supervise, coach, manage and lead them according to their diverse needs. By doing this I believe that I am able to maximise their potential which clearly then contributes to maximising the potential of the organisation.
I ensure that everything I design and implement has resilience at it’s core. I am a strong advocate of ensuring that knowledge lies with teams and not individuals. To this end the team I have developed are all aware of everyone else’s roles, specialisms and functions whilst having a core understanding of the role of ‘business improvement’ within Education Services and its relevance to the wider organisations vision.
Recognition of the importance of business improvement has been confirmed by it now being formally embedded in the Education Services organisational structure. This ‘built in’ resilience means that business continuity is maintained at all times and I am confident that my team are enabled and empowered sufficiently enough to sustain the service should I be successful in my application.
2022-Present
Devon & Cornwall Police, Suspect Management Officer. Responsible for the administration and management of suspects released under investigation (RUI). Data quality and comparison of policing systems involved in suspects RUI. Team representative on force wide working groups relating to organisational processes.
2021-2022
I joined Thames Valley Police as an enquiry officer with the Criminal Justice (Traffic) team where I was responsible for investigating offences where offenders had become difficult to trace/contact or were suspected of committing other offences through false nominations using PNC, Experian, intelligence systems, DVLA, ANPR and open source applications
2016-2020
I joined WCC in December 2016 within the role of Information & Performance Officer for the Education & Learning (E&L) Business Unit. I was initially tasked with addressing the volume of freedom of Information (FOI) requests received by the business unit and the way in which they were managed. I quickly commenced a period of ‘discovery’ to build a body of evidence upon which to suggest potential solutions together with their associated advantages, disadvantages, risks and benefits.
I then prepared and presented a report for members of the Strategic Leadership Team to allow them to make an informed decision. This subsequently led to a change in the way that such requests were administered and managed by identifying the need to reduce layers of bureaucracy by providing a system where there was a direct line of communication between the Information Management (IM) Team and Education & Learning subject matter experts. The result of this change meant that compliance with FOI deadlines was improved and specialist support services have a better understanding of the identity, role and functions of members of the E&L teams facilitating the ability to remove an administrative layer whereby an E&L support officer was previously receiving the requests from the IM team, forwarding them to the subject matter expert, collating the response before returning it to the IM team.
This also freed up time for the support officer to concentrate on other support functions)
I am committed to maximising the value of every single pound that I have responsibility for and am constantly advocating the needs of front line services by ensuring that they are viewed not only as partners but also importantly as ‘customers’ who must receive the best possible support from ‘enabling’ and ‘support’ services within the authority.
Following the strategic decision to outsource the Education Visits Advice Service I oversaw the procurement exercise by securing the support of the WCC Contracts and Purchasing Team as well as the Technical Design Authority and Information Management team (Privacy Impact Assessments) to ensure that all necessary procedures were followed and corporate requirements in terms of digital and data security were met.
Following the successful procurement process a provider was appointed however adequate stakeholder engagement was prevented due to being in a state of ‘purdah’ following the announcement of the General Election in 2017. Despite this the decision was made to go ahead with the implementation of the new system which led to a short notice period about the change of service to schools. As a result of this I had to manage the difficult communications between the authority and those stakeholders and then became responsible for the budget to retain the service for a 3 year period, the value of which is approximately £120000.
We are now 2 years into the contract and I ensure regular updates from the provider are built in to the process to ensure that the authority continues to meet its statutory duties whilst achieving value for money.
Building upon my experience as Information & Performance Officer, my skills & abilities were recognised and in October 2017 I took on the role of ‘Business Improvement Manager’ (Education & Learning). Having highlighted the need to have a small team of dedicated staff to identify potential opportunities to improve the support provided to front line staff and represent the business unit by working with corporate transformation programs. I quickly identified and put together a team of individuals under the umbrella of Business Improvement.
This team then focussed on identifying new ways and strategies of supporting the Head of Service deliver critical projects such as:
· The Warwickshire Education Strategy 2018-2023
· Management Information System (MIS) implementation
· Digital by Design Business Plans which also directly link to E&L’s ability to support the authority’s vision as outlined in the OOP2020 report
Opportunities were (and continue to be) explored to improve E&Ls integration with the wider authority, challenge inefficiencies and identify opportunities for service change that maximise the potential for officers delivering ‘front’ line services to increase their contact with customers by removing or redistributing administrative demand upon them to more appropriate teams already within the business unit, directorate or authority as a whole.
This role, by building ‘bodies of evidence’, has lead to and continues to identify new processes and opportunities that:
· administer, manage and learn from letters and queries from Members of Parliament and councillors
· improve compliance with corporate policies (complaints policy) in turn improving trust and confidence of the organisation.
· Advocate the work done by all services within Education & Learning (Communities Briefing contributions)
· Communicate with our critical partners (‘Heads Up’)
· Instil accountability and work to redress over spend in terms of spending on legal services
· Raise awareness of the demands on the Business Unit and improve interaction with corporate and directorate support services by challenging inefficiency, duplication and unnecessary bureaucracy
Integrate with wider corporate work streams such as ‘Digital by Design’. Ensuring that all options were considered including the potential to address demand and budgets using innovative approaches and challenging the continued provision of some areas of non-statutory services (Grammar School admissions) Including work to identify the demand, complexity and cost of SEND Home to school transport within the ‘Digital by Design’ work that subsequently supported a Strategic Review of SEND.
Provide a system to record and monitor issues across a wide variety of areas that impact on a schools performance (Schools of Concern Group)
I designed and produced a ‘Service Directory’ for Education & Learning to ensure that all teams are aware of the work done by their colleagues within the business unit including each team’s statutory duties and powers. This has improved cooperation between all E&L teams and is a concept that I would be very keen to mirror across any team within the authority that I work for to help inform strategic decision making and build the best possible business support functions for the authority that maximise the availability of officers that deal directly with our communities, delivering those statutory duties.
I was responsible for the collation, preparation and publication of the Business Unit’s Business Continuity (BC) Plan. I have previous experience of BC Plans from my roles within the police service, including work with the Local Resilience Forum (CSW) and use this experience, together with the ‘Service Directory’ and knowledge to coordinate all of the teams within Education Services to meet our collective responsibility towards this critical area of business.
I have been responsible for the management of the Education Services Management Information System (MIS) Budget and the integration & implementation of the system across all areas of the business unit. I took on this responsibility following the departure of the consultant Project Manager. As a team, we were left with a project implementation plan and budget that nobody understood and was at risk of significantly exceeding its £630,000 budget.
I quickly prioritised actions and assigned responsibilities to review all documentation, liaise with the system provider and relevant teams whilst also engaging the support of the Finance Team who were equally confused by the financial situation. I ensured that all decisions required to bring the project back on track were documented, rationalised and presented to the appropriate decision maker (Head of Service) which allowed me to bring the budget back under control and on track to come in on budget and potentially with a surplus to help offset deficits in other areas of the business. I attribute this success to my ability to empower and lead my staff and my ability to analyse, review and interpret complex data sets and financial records.
I continue to manage this budget and challenge the provider to ensure that we receive ‘value for money’ against the authorities significant investment in a system designed to improve our ability to deliver critical safeguarding functions for children. This is such a critical system for the organisation as a whole that now look forward to negotiating the merging of this system to the corporate support services and transformation programs such as business intelligence/data and business support, allowing my staff to refocus their time on identifying even more opportunities to identify, design and provide leaner and more agile front line services.
As a final piece of recent evidence of my suitability to fulfil the responsibilities of the role of Delivery Lead (Communities & Resources) I would like to share with you the nomination I received from my Head of Service that led me to proudly winning the 2018 ‘Warwickshire Star Award’ for being solution focused:
“Nick’s relentless focus on establishing SMART solutions to complicated historical practices has meant that Education & Learning SLT has been able to focus on making a difference through leadership rather than wasting time trying to wade through the morass of disconnected information.
Nicks approach is always to empower staff to take control of their information. He quickly develops the right systems and somehow manages to make the complicated simple. For example, Nick has established a new system to enable slicker response to letters from MPs. He has taken control of the compliments and complaints in the business unit, removing frustrations. He has created a directory of services which was requested at the extended SLT meeting, so we know what each other do.
The positive impact on customers, internal and external, is demonstrated by lack of repeat letters from MPs, because the right answers are given first time around. Another example of positive impact is the development of the Management Information System for child records. Nick made sense of a project that had gone ‘off track’, brought it back in to line and enabled his team to create clear well-reasoned business cases for purchase of certain modules.
The free school meals module has been implemented and will mean that all Warwickshire Schools will benefit from the higher uptake of free school meals and therefore gain additional income from Government. This will ultimately mean that many disadvantaged children will be able to benefit from bespoke support in their schools.
We now turn to Nick when we need a solution to a problem. He has recently streamlined the Business Unit’s system to paying internal legal costs, meaning that those who incur the costs through their work now see those costs rather than them being settled centrally. This incentivises more efficient use of limited resources.
The reason that I have nominated Nick is that he goes above and beyond his day job to find solutions to issues that have previously seemed insurmountable. He always focusses on making a difference and reducing waste of precious time. He has a clear vision of the desired impact and perseveres until this is achieved.”
2014-2016
As Operations Support Supervisor I identified inconsistencies in the approach of both forces (Warwickshire Police and West Mercia Police) to the administration and management of Abnormal Indivisible Loads. To support the requirements of the Strategic Alliance between the forces I began to analyse the demand across both forces whilst identifying the legislative requirements and organisational risks. By doing so I identified that approximately 70% of all notifications to West Mercia Police were replicated in Warwickshire Police due to the fact that the same load travelled through both force areas.
By doing this I was able to streamline the approach and deliver a Standard Operating Procedure to administer and manage movement notifications in the interests of Best Value. This again included the use of tools and systems within readily available, familiar but underused software programs (Excel, Outlook). To facilitate the implementation of this process I also developed a ‘User Guide’ for new team members.
I also worked together with the Human Resources Team to write and submit for ratification a new role profile for the post of Operations Support Administrator to deliver this function.
2012
Member of small team of specialist officers to analyse the delivery of Specialist Uniform Policing across Warwickshire Police and West Mercia Police (Road Policing, Firearms, Public Order, Dogs, Search etc.) Establishing business need and officer establishment to propose new methods of delivering an appropriate level of service in light of Comprehensive Spending Review requirements and the strategic alliance between the two forces based on legal responsibilities and local/national policies.
Findings presented to Chief Officers in the form of a comprehensive report demonstrating demand and providing options for future implementation.
2011-2014
As Operations Planning Supervisor I was responsible for a team of Operational Planners who designed policing operations for events and incidents within Warwickshire by working with Event Managers, specialist departments, other forces and Local Authorities based on national policy and relevant legislation.
I was a tactical advisor to Senior Officers and oversaw the collation and production of the policing operational order for the Olympic Torch Relay (2012) which included working with Local Authorities to deliver a high profile event with the minimum of police intrusion whilst maintaining a vigilant policing capability.
I also worked with the district council and local police officers as a tactical advisor to support manage the Kenilworth Horse Fair which had caused disruption and distress to the local community. I was able to advise on the legislation regarding such public events and the responsibilities of the police service based on national guidance. This also included the production of a formal letter to the event organisers outlining their responsibilities and liabilities.
During this period I identified inconsistencies in the approach of local policing officers and local authorities towards public events. To manage this I arranged regular meetings with members of local authorities, including Mayors and Councillors and other stakeholders such as ‘The British Legion’ to discuss their needs and attempt to deliver a uniform approach. The regular meetings allowed us to appreciate the requirements of each organisation and agree some areas of commonality.
The policing approach was standardised by engaging with local officers across all areas and a ‘Public Event Process’ and Policy produced to facilitate this and provide a point of reference to officers and commanders to support the decision making process.
I Designed and implemented an alliance wide diary of policing/public events to support officers and senior managers and enable clarity in the decision making process in terms of policing demand maximising the potential of tools within readily available, familiar but underused software programs (Excel, Outlook).
2010
During a 4 month period (2010) of Acting Inspector (Chief Firearms Officer) I took on responsibility for delivering a Strategic Firearms Risk Assessment (STRA). This included the production of a statistical analysis of Threat Harm and Risk in relation to Firearms incidents, Operations and training within the Warwickshire Police Force Area. By working with expert statistical analysts, the document was delivered to meet the national requirement as laid down by the National Policing Improvement Agency (now College of Policing).
Without the approval of this document the force would not have been ‘licenced’ to deliver a capability for Firearms policing.
Member of small team to deliver a report for Chief Constables to explore the potential of a regional (Police) Firearms capability based on demand analysis.
2005-2010
I have led complex, sensitive and large scale operations and investigations where my ability to empathise with customers/victims and empower staff to achieve important and high profile successes within continually changing parameters has been repeatedly evidenced.
As a Sergeant (supervisor) for a team of specialist officers I was responsible for ensuring performance targets were met in relation to requirements set by senior officers whilst also maintaining a 24 hour response capability in terms of Serious/Fatal Collisions and Spontaneous Firearms incidents. As a team leader I was responsible for the Personal Development Review of all officers under my supervision and took this responsibility seriously to ensure balance between the often diverse needs of the individual and the needs of the organisation to maximise effectiveness and efficiency. I also fulfilled the role of Firearms Tactical Advisor which required me to work with Senior Officers (‘Gold’-(Strategic) and ‘Silver’-(Tactical) Commanders) to deliver a response to spontaneous and planned firearms operations in Warwickshire based on legislation, powers and policy.
This also required work with the uniformed officers tasked to deal with the incident by way of briefings. As a Close Protection Officer I was responsible for planning and delivering firearms operations to protect those members of the Royal Family and other Dignitaries that were afforded the status of being ‘Protected Principals’ during public and/or private visits to Warwickshire. This required me to work with local policing colleagues, local authorities and businesses to deliver an overall plan cognisant of legislation and national/local policies.
B.Ed.(Hons.) Outdoor and Science Education, Liverpool John Moore’s University (1991-1995)
As a police officer with over 20 years experience I built on the skills and abilities learnt during my training as a teacher, including: communication and organisation, developing and enhancing them by including leadership, strategic awareness, decision making, partnership working and customer liaison.
Early retirement from the police due to injury provided me with the opportunity to offer the skills and abilities developed during more than 20 years of challenging yet rewarding public service to Warwickshire County Council (WCC).
As evident in both my policing career and my current career with WCC, I strive to develop myself wherever possible, learning from experience and acknowledging my strengths and weaknesses to fulfil my chosen and assigned roles and responsibilities to the best of my abilities.
I am a conscientious, solution focussed, hard-working and trustworthy person with a proven ability to deliver successful projects on time and in the interests of best value by leading teams of subject matter experts.
The extensive diversity of experience within my working life has developed a strong strategic perspective and drives a personal commitment to maximise the potential of WCCs capability to deliver quality services by maximising the support provided through appropriate corporate and/or directorate teams whilst minimising administrative demand.
B.Ed (Hons) Outdoor and Science Education
