Police Authority Papers

There are 51 Police Authorities or Boards in England, Scotland and Wales, plus Northern Ireland, British Transport Police and others. They hold over 1,400 meetings each year, with over 20,000 agenda items and over 14,000 supporting papers. Together these papers form a powerful, current and timely database of information on UK policing.

Responding to the need for more timely information and research facilities, we have now introduced a web based service in addition to our CD and papers services. Every police force, Authority and many other organisations undertake research and monitors what is going on in forces. We estimate that using our services, there is an overall efficiency savings of over £4m to be made.

We take each meeting's papers, convert to a common format, and split it into separate agenda items. These are then entered on a database, together with a précis of the paper. We also assign key words at this stage - for example ICT, Coalition Government Effects, Policing the 21st Century and Budget monitoring. We have also grouped them into categories, for example Finance, Human Resources and Policing Futures.

Using the papers

You have the option to view all or an individual Police Authority. You can select individual committees for each Authority. The selection can be between particular dates. You can also select agenda items using the key words or categories. For example, you can select all Authorities that have discussed the 'Coalition Government Effects', and only the agenda items which have been marked with that key word will be returned. Then simply click on a button to download the full paper.

We have also developed other useful facilities. 'My page' lets you record your individual areas of interest, and quickly see what is new since your last visit, or meetings over a number of days. There are also some predetermined selections as well 

With over 33m words a year, keywords cover everything, so we have built in two further layers of search. One is a simple search on the précis added, or there is a deep search on all indexed words in all papers.

The service is powerful, and the ability to use Police Authority Papers in this way has never been possible before.

If you would like to see how useful this service is, we can give you a free trial code. Questions, or to discuss pricing and payment, please email me adrian@ukpolicing.info