Date: Tuesday 17 March 2015

Dear KIN member

You will be aware that six months ago we embarked on a major programme of work with our partner,
Accenture, to help us transform how we deliver policing across the West Midlands.
With the help of colleagues, partners and the wider public, we have now jointly developed a vision for
how policing in the West Midlands will operate in 2020 called the WMP2020 Blueprint. Some of you
attended a local event in November and the feedback you provided contributed to this Blueprint.
Put simply, this Blueprint sets out our future direction of travel and will form the basis for the
construction of a complex five year programme of work which will shape how West Midlands Police
will look and feel in 2020.
It has been designed to operate taking account of our best forecast of resources in 2020, which is
likely to reflect a much smaller budget. In practice, this means that as well as making a range of
non-staff savings, we will need to operate with a further reduction of some 2,500 officer and staff
posts.
As a consequence, if we want to improve our service while reducing costs we will have to make
significant changes to the way policing is delivered across the West Midlands.
Central to the Blueprint, will be how we engage with the public. We are going to significantly change
the way we listen and involve the public in policing to reflect our increasingly diverse and digitally
savvy audiences embracing modern, digital technology on a larger scale.
We will also adopt a more proactive role to preventing crime. This will mean dedicating more
resources to preventing crime and re-offending and expanding our successful Offender Management
approach to new groups of offenders. We will also look at how we can integrate what we do more
directly with other agencies as we have done with the mental health triage scheme, which has
attracted widespread national interest.
Neighbourhood policing is key to our relationships with communities but again this will need to
change to be fit for the 21st century. One of the critical elements of the Blueprint will be to protect the
future of neighbourhood policing by changing how it is run in the face of continued financial pressures
with resources focused on areas of most need.
To achieve this and to ensure service delivery is not compromised, the force will look to develop a
neighbourhood policing model which is not constrained by geographical boundaries.
By 2020 the aim will be to move to mission-led teams who possess the best local intelligence on
areas and can quickly access solutions to be able to help neighbourhoods. We hope these teams
can be integrated with partners to offer more effective problem solving.

Serving our communities, protecting them from harm

www.west-midlands.police.uk

Find us on:

An obvious consequence of how we will need to change may be our visibility. As we develop a new
neighbourhood policing model, uniform patrol will also need to alter to become a more tightly focused
activity taking place in the most demanding places.
Hopefully this provides you with an initial broad brush view of what we intend to do but there will be
a lot of targeted communication in the forthcoming weeks and months providing you with much more
detail about the various projects.
We will also look to hold another local event early on in the summer where we will be able to talk to
you in more detail about the Blueprint and some of the early projects that we will run as a result.
For me the most important element of the Blueprint is that we get the best for the communities
we serve.
I hope you find this useful and if you have any questions please do contact me or your local policing
unit commander.

Chris Sims
Chief Constable

Serving our communities, protecting them from harm

www.west-midlands.police.uk

Find us on: