Lincolnshire Police Launches Lincs 2030 Transformation Plan

An editorial from Chief Constable Paul Gibson: Every day, our officers, staff and volunteers deliver an exceptional service in increasingly complex circumstances. Demand continues to grow, expectations continue to rise, and like policing across the country, we face the challenge of doing more with finite resources.

We know these pressures are felt by our workforce and, at times, by the communities we serve. It is important to acknowledge that reality.

We cannot pretend the challenges do not exist, nor should we underestimate the commitment and resilience our people demonstrate every day in meeting them. That is precisely why we have launched Lincs 2030 - our three-year transformation and investment plan for changing, improving, and modernising policing in Lincolnshire.

I have spent time this week explaining it to our senior leaders, who are now ready to talk in detail to their teams about what we need to do and how. Lincs 2030 sets the blueprint for what we want to achieve in three years, focusing on how we police and what we stand for.

It provides the plan for our investment in people, technology, and tools, delivering a fast and efficient service that delivers an exceptional standard of policing to communities in Lincolnshire. It is an evolution of the progress and transformation we have so far made, bringing together key components into a clear and coherent plan for the next three years, and beyond.

The foundations of what we do – preventing crime and attacking criminality, caring for victims, protecting children and vulnerable people, and building confidence in policing – will be reaffirmed and strengthened as part of the Lincs 2030 initiative. We deliver this with clear leadership – genuinely supporting one another, providing clarity of direction, and setting high expectations.

This is underpinned by our values – courage, respect and empathy, public service – which sit at the very heart of what we do daily. Our ambition is to be the best rural force in the country and by delivering Lincs 2030 together, as a team, it is an ambition we can make a reality.

There is more to say on this because we know that meaningful change takes time and, right now, we are working on getting our numbers up. We are recruiting police officers so that we go back to our established and budgeted levels of officers, and actually slightly over.

We are also recruiting into our Protecting Vulnerable Persons (PVP) department, so that our teams are increased who are delivering complex, sensitive investigations into crimes that disproportionately affect at-risk individuals, including domestic abuse, sexual offences, child abuse, and crimes against vulnerable adults.We are investing into our digital and data capability, so essentially our tech and equipment, to make sure our people have the best possible tools to do their jobs in a modern technological age, and police officers can spend as much time in communities without needing to return to stations to access software and systems.

Increasing numbers in our Enhanced Video response (EVR) team, which allows victims and witnesses to report non-emergency crimes and provide statements via live digital video links, rather than waiting for in-person officer visits, delivers a better service to the public while also freeing up the time of other officers and staff who would have previously been tasked with this. Several other areas of Lincolnshire Police have also seen investment as a result of the £12m annual stability funding, recurrent for three years, that we received earlier this year from the Home Office.

All areas of recruitment have been decided based on a new and thorough assessment of our demand data and the development of a new operating model, which has clearly shown us where we need to invest now and into the future in order to keep people in Lincolnshire safe. Emergency response depends on a chain of capabilities.

Frontline staff are the visible part of that chain, but they rely on a whole host of services that allow them to mobilise and deploy in the most productive way possible to keep people safe. Investment in enabling services is investment in frontline delivery.

We are also about to embark on public consultation with some members of our communities so we can ask questions about what people understand about our current position, our Lincs 2030 strategy, how they want to get information, and can of course ask information of us. I will be proud to share details of our plans with them, as I am to share them here, with our broader communities.

There will continue to be challenges along the way, and we will not solve every issue overnight. We have improvements to make and are determined to deliver long-term positive change where it is needed.

But this plan provides clear direction, underpinned by investment in people, informed by the experiences of our workforce, and focused on delivering a stronger, more resilient service for the future. We are Lincolnshire Police and this is Lincs 2030 – proud to lead, ready to serve, committed to safer communities.

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