The drive to reduce costs whilst maintaining service levels has prompted a growing number of police authorities to consider freeing up police officers from custody duties and replacing them with appropriately trained staff from the private sector.

As a result, Reliance provides custody services to a number of police authorities around the country. The service, with specifically trained staff, relieves experienced police officers from custodial and administrative tasks to focus on front-line operational duties. In some cases, Reliance also includes evidential property and facilities management it its services.

Reliance now employs over 420 custody officers operating in 30 custody centres with over 470 cells across Cleveland, Sussex, Thames Valley, Warwickshire, Gloucestershire and West Mercia police forces. Our staff help process and look after over 230,000 detainees annually, including taking DNA samples and fingerprints, managing electronic ID parades, interpreters and drug testing. The benefits we deliver to our customers include:

• Freeing officers for frontline duties
• Reducing costs
• Reducing operational police time spent on administrative tasks
• Improving performance

We have demonstrated significant improvements in efficiency and effectiveness.
The outsourcing of custody at Thames Valley has released 133 police officers for frontline duties. Reliance responsibilities also extend to providing drugs intervention when officers test ‘trigger offence’ offenders.

With Sussex Police, we have reduced the time from point of arrival at custody to detention being authorised from 30 minutes to an average of nine minutes, quickly releasing officers to continue with their investigations. Independent research has shown that this has saved 34,000 hours a year of operational police time in Sussex – the equivalent of having an extra 20 officers on frontline duties.

In Cleveland, the figures are even more impressive, with times reduced from 58 minutes to 6 minutes.

We have improved the performance of ID parades, with successful identification rising from 34% to 50%, and with fingerprinting success rates average over 96%, up from 85%.