‘The service to the public is better and that’s what matters’
‘I HOPE I LEAVE HUMBERSIDE POLICE IN A BETTER PLACE’: Assistant Chief Officer Nancie Shackleton. Picture by Tom Arran Commercial Photography
Humberside Police was last month named UK Police Service of the Year, and plans to further improve its effectiveness and response to the public with the forthcoming launch of a purpose-built £20m operational support centre in Melton. But it will make the move without the woman who played a leading role in delivering it; Assistant Chief Officer Nancie Shackleton, who is leaving after five influential years with the force. She spoke to Simon Bristow
As a farmer’s daughter, Nancie Shackleton has a good sense of when it is time to seek pastures new.
She has called time on her career at Humberside Police, with the force in a much different place to when she joined in 2017.
As Assistant Chief Officer (Resources), the most senior member of staff at the force, she has been one of the most significant drivers of the transformational change it has undergone in recent years under the senior leadership team led by Chief Constable Lee Freeman.
When Nancie joined, the same year Mr Freeman was appointed, the force had yet to emerge from the policing equivalent of ‘special measures’ after a damning report by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary.
The vast overhaul and improvement on nearly every indicator since then was formally recognised in April when Humberside was named UK Police Service of the Year at this year’s Public Sector Transformation Awards, run by the Improvement and Efficiencies Social Enterprise (iESE). It had been runner up in 2021.
Nancie’s part in that success began when she took on what was effectively a new overarching ‘civilian’ role at the force as part of the reforms Mr Freeman was making.
She brought with her the plain-speaking charm of her background, having grown up in farming on the border between Yorkshire and Lancashire, as well as an insightful and analytical mind that had already delivered improvements to police forces across the North, Midlands, and Lincolnshire.
Explaining how she joined, she said: “Here they previously had an Assistant Chief Officer for HR which was shared with South Yorkshire, and there was an Assistant Chief Officer for finance, Phil Goatley.
“They both were either leaving or retiring, and the chief [Mr Freeman] wanted to put the two roles together and create an Assistant Chief Officer (Resources). It brought together finance, HR, IT, Fleet and Estates.
“The first time it was advertised I didn’t apply. I was going to stay with my own business. On the day of the interviews, as people went to their interviews, I found myself growling because I just thought ‘That’s my job and today’s not a good day to realise that’.
‘YOU NEED RESILIENCE AND OPTIMISM’: ACO Nancie Shackleton. Picture by Tom Arran Commercial Photography
“They didn’t appoint on that occasion. They re-advertised and I applied and became an employee.”
Nancie has made the role her own, acting as a behind-the-scenes troubleshooter, the go-to person for big projects who has turned aspirations into reality, from the bespoke new 107,000 sq ft, three-storey facility in Melton, to a big increase in officer numbers, all with the aim of improving the service to the public.
The new facility, dubbed Melton 2 as it sits next to the force’s existing building at Melton West Business Park, is a good example.
It follows a review of the current emergency control room centre in Hessle, which it replaces, and is also designed to allow the force to better accommodate major incident responses, which in part comes from the difficulties encountered by another force when dealing with a tragic incident in Wales.
Melton 2 will be home to more than 500 staff, handle all telephone calls and public contact, and also house operations teams, and specialist units such as major crime investigation, the marine unit, search capability, the dog section, roads policing, and armed response.
Nancie said: “I went to the existing emergency control room at Hessle and I was quite surprised at what I saw; it wasn’t what I expected. I’m used to being in one open-plan room. I walked round and after I’d been in the eleventh support office…
“The test I always do – is this what my mum expects when calling treble-nine? And it wasn’t what I expected for a force of this size, so I set out making the business case for building Melton 2.”
Asked how close it is to being fully operational, Nancie said: “They are just loading the Ark.”
She added: “The people who will work in it helped design it, how the furniture should be placed.
“If you imagine, a call centre is quite busy, and when you ring you can hear other conversations. In an emergency you well understand the criticality of that, so there were lots of conversations about how we did sound reductions.
‘I ALWAYS ASK, IS THIS THE SERVICE MY MUM WOULD EXPECT?’ ACO Nancie Shackleton, being interviewed by The Hull Story. Picture by Tom Arran Commercial Photography
“We took the decision the roof had to be higher to deal with the noise and to allow some natural light in. Working shifts, you can come in in the dark and go out in the dark so that’s important.
“As a result of everything we’ve put in there the service to the public is better, and ultimately that’s what matters.
“I do feel proud about it, but it’s a massive team that made that come to life. I just hope when something horrible happens to a family, the worst time of their life, having a facility like that allows us to become a much better police force.
“I always remember I was listening to a briefing of a child who’d gone missing in Wales [April Jones] and because the media had descended on the force they didn’t have anywhere large enough to brief everyone, so the police couldn’t do their job when they needed to do their job to get somebody’s child back.
“So for me I wanted Humberside to have that capacity, so in the worst case it would be able to do the right thing for people at the worst time in their lives.”
As well as her consultancy work, Nancie has held a variety of roles at Humberside and Lincolnshire Police, including Intelligence Analyst, Research Manager, Performance Manager, Head of Strategic Development, Assistant Director for Safer Communities (Lincolnshire County Council), and Head of the Commercial Partnership Team.
As Assistant Chief Officer (Resources) for Lincolnshire, she led a major IT programme involving five of the East Midlands forces. The programme was expanded to also include the City Of London Police.
This saw the introduction of shared computer systems to combat the problem of offenders being able to avoid detection by moving between force areas, so now, as Nancie puts it, “if you’ve been naughty in Skegness they know about it in Northampton”.
Always the intention is to deliver better outcomes for frontline policing, and to help keep the public safe.
Nancie’s work as a divisional intelligence analyst is another example.
‘OFFICER RECRUITMENT HAS HELPED TURN THE FORCE AROUND’: ACO Nancie Shackleton. Picture by Tom Arran Commercial Photography
She said of that role: “What you are trying to do is look at data and get some crime patterns from it. It might be based on a series of burglaries when you can see someone is out in a certain area for a particular type of house, has a particular way of entering a property, and what you do is the analysis and say I think we need to put resources into this area.
“If you’re playing cat and mouse you try to put the cat out early.
“It could be behavioural. If you’ve got someone who has a particular method of attacking people, from their behaviour and descriptions you can work out certain data about the individual.
“So, for instance, if it’s a man grabbing a woman, the way he grabs hold of her, whether it’s the right or left hand, you put that together to create a series or linked incidents. They could be historical issues and you think they are linked.
“It was really rewarding. In terms of what motivates you, it’s seeing bad people who will harm other people put behind bars. It can be very satisfying when your piece of work was used to achieve that. It doesn’t make you think the best of humanity, which is an occupational hazard.”
One of Nancie’s other achievements at Humberside was helping to orchestrate a massive recruitment drive for officers.
She said: “In 2017 we needed to recruit 110 officers just to stand still; people retire and transfer every year. The chief and Keith Hunter [then Police and Crime Commissioner] wanted to bring police officer numbers back up so they set about taking the force from having 1,500 officers to 2,150 in a very short period.
“Under the old process, for every ten that started the process only one would get on, so for 250 you need 2,500 applications. I’ve never seen that many officers parade at one time. We didn’t even have classrooms that big to get everyone in.”
She added: “I think that’s a big part of what’s helped to turn the force around. It’s very hard if you’ve got people ringing you and you can’t get there.”
Nancie’s personal contribution to policing was recognised with the award of the British Empire Medal in the 2018 New Year’s Honours List.
‘IT’S TIME TO PASS THE BATON ON’: ACO Nancie Shackleton, pictured in the Memorial Garden at Humberside Police HQ in Priory Road. Picture by Tom Arran Commercial Photography
She said her role was also about being “the guardian of tax payers’ money”, adding: “People don’t realise the police has a business structure and needs to be financed like any other business to make it work.”
She describes herself as a “generalist” rather than a specialist in a particular area, and said her successor will need to be able to ask the right questions of colleagues and others.
“One of the things is to be questioning because there’s lots of things you won’t understand,” she said.
“I remember I was asking one of my colleagues in the Estates Department what is a swale. I think he was talking about the water flow away from Melton 2. Equally, you might be talking about the oil content of an engine, or what kind of firewalls and security you have in IT.
“The other things you need are resilience and optimism, because something is always going wrong - people don’t ring up [the police] with good news.”
The role does come, however, with an attractive salary. “It pays more than my parents as farmers would expect to earn,” Nancie said.
She said if ever she was stuck she could always call her predecessor, who delivered Melton 1. “If I didn’t know anything I would ring Phil Goatley and he’d tell me, so I felt like he’d passed me the baton,” she said.
Although Nancie is now passing the baton to someone else - to take up the role of ACO Resources at Cumbria Constabulary - she will leave with great fondness for her colleagues and the communities they serve.
She said: “I think there’s something quite gritty about this force, because if you ask someone ‘How are you?’ there’s kind of a polite response, but I think if you ask someone in Humberside you get a very direct answer, that’s down to earth, and that’s one of those things that tells you about the force area.
“I just don’t think there’s airs and graces. It’s not trying to be something it’s not.”
This undoubtedly fitted with Nancie’s own background. “There’s something very grounding about spending lots of time at the wrong end of a cow with a shovel,” she said.
She added: “I think now I sense that people have got more pride back in the organisation, and I don’t mean in an arrogant way but in a positive way that they want to succeed, do well, and do a good job.
“I remember when I came to Humberside in 2017 when we had central government engagement and the force was seen to be requiring improvement, so working with the new chief officer team to make all those changes, which probably have culminated in the award, is great.
“Clearly no one person did that – that was the whole organisation.
“So I just hope I leave Humberside in a better place. It’s time for someone with a fresh eye who will bring fresh ideas because I think the time is right. I’ve shovelled. There’s an empty barn and it’s up to somebody else what they do now it’s swept clean.”
Details on how to apply for the ACO role at Humberside Police can be found here. Applications close on April 28.