Scottish Police Services Authority podcast transcript
1.	What is this report about?
The report is about the Scottish Police Services Authority (SPSA) which was a new organisation set up in 2007.  It was set up to provide support services to the police and the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Office and to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of services such as forensics; ICT, which are computer services; training and criminal justice.  The report looks at how the organisation was set up, what it’s achieved to date and the challenges facing it.  We believed by doing this that other organisations going down the shared service route might learn from SPSA’s experience.
2.	What did you find?
We found that SPSA has made progress in improving the services it is delivering for forensics, for training and for criminal justice but things have been much more difficult on the computer side and it’s not yet meeting the needs of its ICT customers.  There are significant challenges facing SPSA and it’s going to have to make progress quickly to deal with these, but we do think there is potential for the organisation to deliver more savings if it can work with its partners in the police and other criminal justice bodies.
3.	Can you tell me more about the improvements it’s made to some of the services it’s responsible for?
SPSA has made a number of improvements.  In forensics there have been improvements in the time it takes to analyse evidence; the police college has improved its quality and its training, it’s dealt with a substantial increase in the number of probationer trainees as part of the Scottish Government’s policy of recruiting a thousand extra police offices and IT has established a 24 hour helpdesk facility.  This is for all forces to use and deals with around 3,000 service requests a week.
4.	The SPSA has had trouble meeting some of its customers’ ICT needs.  Can you tell me why ICT has been so challenging?
ICT services transferred a year later than everything else, so it’s had less time to realise some of the benefits and efficiencies that have been seen elsewhere.  Also, what had to be transferred was very large and complex, there wasn’t an accurate record of what assets they had and there were different IT systems in place across all the different police forces.  But the main problem has been that the demand for IT services has been increasing. This is in terms of providing day-to-day support and maintenance and also dealing with the growing list of force specific and national projects.  So, it’s been difficult for SPSA to prioritise between local and national IT work because there’s been no effective way of prioritising this work.  As a result, SPSA doesn’t know what projects to prioritise from the many requests made by customers.
5.	You say that lessons can be learned from the set-up of the SPSA for future shared services initiatives – can you expand on this?
We know that shared services are one of the ways that organisations can go about trying to deliver efficiencies but we also know from other work that progress on this has been slow and it’s quite difficult, but of course there can be benefits.  In our report we’ve developed a checklist which is for other organisations to use and sets out the steps they should consider if going down the shared services route.  So for example we ask them to consider if they have enough time to talk to their staff and their customers; to develop new systems and test them and check they they’re working and test them again.  
6.	The SPSA’s main objective is to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the services it provides.  You’ve explained how some of the services have become more effective but can you tell me if there have been any efficiencies?
In the three years the organisation has been in operation it has made savings of £5m.  This has been roughly in line with targets, but it doesn’t give the full picture because investments made by SPSA have a wider benefit across criminal justice bodies.  In the report we use the example of the crime scene animation software that can generate savings by reducing the time spent on trials and saving time during a trial benefits many other criminal justice bodies such as the Scottish Courts Service and even the Scottish Legal Aid Board. This is why in the report we have a recommendation for the Scottish Government to review the system used to measure savings across the sector to encourage criminal justice bodies to work together to achieve sector-wide savings,