The Police Foundation has completed research on the governance of specialist policing capabilities delivered above the level of individual police forces, with a particular emphasis on collaboration.

This work was commissioned by the governance working group of the Specialist Capabilities Board, which is chaired by Nottinghamshire Police and Crime Commissioner Paddy Tipping and which sits under the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) and Association of Police and Crime Commissioners (APCC) Police Reform and Transformation Board.

It comes at a time when the police service is seeking to identify the changes necessary to respond to new threats and deliver an improved service for the public, against a background of on-going austerity and fundamental changes to the nature of crime and police demand.

The objectives of the research are three-fold:

1. To review the existing secondary literature on collaboration.
2. To give all PCCs and chief constables the opportunity to feed in their views about the governance of collaboration arrangements, which we did by way of a questionnaire and the offer of follow-up telephone interviews.
3. To apply the learning from (1) and (2) to the Networked Policing Model recently proposed in the Specialist Capabilities Programme Phase One Report, in the form of a governance proposition to form the basis for further discussion.