Commissioner Katarina Carroll’s signature project scrapped after police union pressure

Commissioner Katarina Carroll’s signature project to streamline frontline workers, has been scrapped after heavy pressure from the police union. READ HER FULL STATEMENT

Commissioner Katarina Carroll is under pressure to scrap her controversial “streamlining project”. Picture: Shae Beplate

Commissioner Katarina Carroll has tonight scrapped her signature SDP project that was aimed at streamlining frontline jobs.

The union today said it had major flaws.

It’s understood the service did it’s own internal review which also found major issues.

The Service Delivery Redesign Project (SDRP), aimed to reduce pressure on frontline workers, remove duplication and improve efficiencies, was introduced as a trial in the Moreton district in February 2021.

It came after an extensive review into the service in 2019 by Neil Greenfield, of GSA Management Consulting, which was commissioned by Ms Carroll.

“As a result of concerns raised by staff and the QPUE’s Ian Leavers and Shane Prior, combined with the QPUE’s own independent review, I brought forward an intended review and placed Ipswich and Capricornia Districts on hold, pending the outcome,” Ms Carroll wrote on Wednesday evening.

“Ernst & Young (EY) were commissioned to conduct an independent review into the Service Delivery Program to understand if the model was achieving its intended objectives.”

Ms Carroll said the EY review found that the model was delivering “many of the important benefits I set out to achieve”.

She said this included greater capability for QPS to keep victims and the community informed by improving processes to facilitate “closing the loop”; better oversight of risk and an ability to shift risk from an individual to the organisation; ability to recognise true frontline demand, and identifying previously unrecorded demand pressures.

“Despite these benefits, the EY review also found the impact of other external factors outside of the program’s control that are impacting the model’s success,” she wrote.

“This includes strain on our recruiting pipeline, and implementing multiple transformation projects, including more than 600 recommendations from multiple reviews and the DFV Commission of Inquiry.

“The change required from those recommendations alone is taking its toll on our workforce. To continue all of our current reform and change is unsustainable and in fact in my four decades I have not seen demand and reform on such a scale.

“Additionally, the requirement to deliver the recommendations is within such an extraordinarily tight time frame, which must be met.”

Ms Carroll said she had concerns that if police did not “stop doing some things” there would be an even more fatigued workforce and the deadlines to meet recommendations from the reviews and FV inquiry would not be met.

“Therefore, I have decided to cease implementation of the Service Delivery Model,” she wrote.

“This decision was not made lightly, particularly given the benefits that are being realised by the model.

“Having said that there are benefits, I acknowledge the implementation has taken its toll on the members of Moreton and Logan districts.

“It is evident that the organisation does not have a sophisticated rostering scheduling system, impacting heavily on people’s work-life balance.

“We know that work-life balance is further inhibited if there is not an abundance of staff to provide greater flexibility, thus having more people having to work during difficult demand periods.”

Ms Carroll said transformational change was extraordinarily difficult and the SDP was the first real attempt in changing how the QPS delivered front line services in over 150 years. “When we commenced in Moreton there were aspects of demand that had never been measured before and accordingly ‘hidden demand’ was unable to be measured at that time, which further impacted the service delivery model,” she said.

Ms Carroll said the EY review had found people working in the model were “feeling the negative impacts of changes on our frontline”. “Immediate remediation assistance will be provided to the Moreton and Logan Districts,” she wrote.

“For those working in Ipswich and Capricornia, you will no longer be going live with the model.”

Queensland Police Union president Ian Leavers. Photo Steve Pohlner

Earlier, the union said the program, which has renamed to SDP, was flawed and repeatedly called for it to be scrapped.

It used its own consultants to review and evaluate the program in the Moreton district in a further blow to the project.

“Essentially our consultants confirmed what we already know, SDP does not work and is a flawed model,” the union said to its members today.

“While some elements may be OK, SDP only makes policing worse where it has been “implemented”.

“Our report makes it clear. SDP should not be rolled out to any new districts such as Ipswich and Capricornia. In fact so bad is SDP for districts, it should be not only NOT be further rolled out, it should be wound back in Logan and most definitely scrapped in Moreton.

“The QPU’s position is clear. SDP should be immediately scrapped and the SDP Implementation Team should be immediately disbanded and those resources that have been assigned to SDP and SDP Implementation in the districts as well as centrally should be returned to the frontline to bolster our first response capabilities.”

The union previously told The Courier-Mail the statewide rollout of the project had been paused three times due to “ongoing deficiencies”.

Staff were being placed into non-frontline work on “alternate duties” and the union deemed the project a failure.

Investigators were being ‘deskilled’ by having to issue paperwork. Some were diverted to “alternate response team”, in which they told people to come into the station for statements, while others were in a “volume crime team” which got copies of crime reports and organised paperwork.

The note to members on Wednesday said there were better alternatives.

“While it is agreed a better service delivery model to the way the QPS currently delivers policing services could be undertaken, it is now seen with the rollout in Moreton and Logan that SDP is not it,” the message said.

“With the burden of implementing reforms out of the (domestic violence) Commission of Inquiry, combined with the lack of staff wanting to join the QPS, SDP is flawed failing dismally.

“Now there is SDP rolling out in two further districts of Ipswich and Capricornia which will further ruin policing in these districts with a deeply flawed model implemented by an SDP implementation team that has neither the capability nor capacity to implement change in the QPS.

“This is why SDP should be scrapped and the SDP Implementation Team permanently disbanded.”

The message said the police service was suffering a labour shortage

“We all agree that there has to be a better way to deliver policing to Queensland however we all agree even more that SDP is not that way!” the message said.

“The Commissioner knows the QPU’s views. The Commissioner knows that the QPU will fight SDP as it cannot be rolled out to Capricornia and Ipswich Districts and the Commissioner knows the QPU will fight to remediate the damage caused to Logan District and particularly Moreton District by SDP that has ruined Moreton.

“The only decision to be made is to scrap the flawed experiment that is SDP and immediately disband the SDP Implementation Team.”
It’s understood GSA Management Consulting is also working on other police-related projects.