On the morning Police Oracle speaks with Assistant Commissioner Nick Ephgrave, the country is well into lockdown and he is on his way to check in with some of the 20,000 frontline officers that he’s responsible for as head of operations for the Metropolitan Police.  

ACC Ephgrave gives an upbeat assessment of how it’s going. The country has adapted to the lockdown and the Home Office data shows where the real policing issues are.

“It’s a very interesting time for policing. We’ve had our part to play and the crime figures have never been so interesting. There’s lots to be positive about,” he says.

Rethinking how the job gets done is going to be a part of the post-lockdown future. It's exactly the sort of intellectual challenge he thrives on and has been a mark of a career that began with the Met.

He joined the force in 1990 as a PC and began his service in the East End of London. His time as a detective included working for Special Branch at the height of the IRA’s campaign. He then switched back to uniform and CID roles and then set up the national counter-terrorism co-ordination centre. He was former Commissioner Sir Ian Blair’s staff officer for a year before becoming Borough Commander for Lambeth.

But it’s his time as Chief Constable of Surrey Police, which he joined in 2015, that has marked him out. The force was in a tough position with less than flattering Inspectorate reports and had been rapidly changed by the time he rejoined the Met last year.

Surrey has recently been signposted by the National Police Chiefs’ Council for its approach to disclosure and is also attracting interest for its work on sustainability.

Its alumni includes Lynne Owens, now head of the National Crime Agency. There are plenty of other senior officers who have Surrey on their CV. And that's not all. Both the current Chief Constable, Gavin Stephens, and Police and Crime Commissioner David Munro are Cambridge University engineering graduates.

So, despite the odd blip, the force is useful for career prospects and attracts interesting people. Why is that?

ACC Ephgrave’s analysis is that location is a factor: “I think Surrey benefits as a county by sharing its border with London. It grows lots of senior people because it’s so big.”

Transferring to another force is a difficult decision for any officer who has tried it and housing cost is clealry a factor for those with families – which plays in Surrey’s favour, he believes.

He says: “It gives options to those who want to move up but don’t want to move house. If that’s an issue then it’s places like Surrey – or Kent to a lesser extent. Surrey has benefitted more from people who wanted to do something else but didn’t want to go too far away. It isn’t to say that all the good police tend to come from there: I did 23 years with the Met before I transferred.”

It’s then about whether officers can then put their experience to use or pick up learning from dealing with issues that spill over from London and adapt it to another force.

Mr Ephgrave says that can be achieved: “You learn from a city force – it’s a mutually beneficial process. [Surrey is] almost a city and has a boundary with London so it’s had the benefit of the cross-fertilisation. Of course, because it’s right next to the capital, there's the stuff that’s happening in South London that you’re more aware of so you can pick up the best practice that’s happening.

“It’s small enough to be able to do things quite quickly but large enough to be meaningful. If you’ve got bright ideas and got good things you want to test out, you can make them happen quite quickly because it’s more compact. You pull a lever and things happen quite quickly.”

But it’s not just about tackling part of the capital’s problems: “It’s semi-rural, semi-urban. Yes, it borders with South London but it’s also got some rural spots. The result is you’ve got a really good mix of types of policing."

The next part of the puzzle is how someone can get to put their ideas into practice. Having a strategic vision is a good starting point but he also points out that the top team need to be open to persuasion.

He says: “Strategic leadership should be less about control and more about freedoms: creating an environment to free your people to use their expertise to the best of their abilities. There will be a tension between the command and control of officers and being able to do this. Surrey has been quite good at allowing the innovation to flourish.”

There is no doubt that that the force needed to innovate in order to improve its performance. 

He says: “Surrey was deemed inadequate by HM Inspectorate in 2015 for its public protection arrangements. We took that as a challenge: we really changed the force culture on public protection. Within 18 months we’d moved to adequate and improving. That was really significant.

“The second thing was we completely changed our policing style to something called Policing in Our Neighbourhood. It was completely new thinking in our approach to working with PCs and more. That model has been picked up by other forces. That really produced dividends.”

Every local area had a designated policing team with officers who were known to the local community. In a county where the reputation of a town or village matters – but change is frowned upon, that can be tricky.

He says: “It’s not all playing safe; it’s a new way of working. It was really hard to implement initially but we stuck with it and in 18 months it came good.”

Unsurprisingly, that focus on ‘place’ is something he is developing with the Met. Can it really be scaled up?

Mr Ephgrave says: “You always take things with you. The Met obviously isn’t a small force but the model could be investigated and because you’ve done it in somewhere like Surrey, you can then understand some of the stresses and strains.”

Getting community buy-in is critical to making it happen, he says.

“Wherever you try to enact change, you have to engage with the people it affects the most – the public. The Met has always tried to engage with communities when we’ve brought in change. Sometimes it’s not communities, it’s uniform but, of course, you need to take communities with you. You need to have their confidence because that helps to make it happen,” he says.

The buy-in of uniform means the Met’s staff and the 20,000 officers he controls. His reputation certainly helps. Someone who has worked for him describes him as “unpretentious, not a shouter, very intelligent, a decent man and a good cop”. His wife works as a midwife and it’s unsurprising to discover he’s also a school governor.

With the job evolving and the Met adapting to new priorities, what does the future hold for him?

“I didn’t really think about this: I thought I’d peaked when I was a chief inspector so everything after that has been a bonus,” he says. 

“It’s a very important job. What I aim to do is deliver my very best in the role. My job is to ensure that the service we deliver across London is the best it can be. That’s all I’ve ever done and I don’t see myself doing anything else. You just focus on what’s important.”