The Independent Reducing Bureaucracy in Policing Advocate has said that action rather than words is now urgently needed to reduce the admin burden on officers.

In an interview with this website Jan Berry, whose two-year tenure in the role expires in September after the publication of her final report to ministers, said that both the police and wider criminal justice service urgently need the basis of a plan to slash duplication and improve efficiencies.

And Berry, who was the first female chair of the Police Federation before taking on her current role, has called on a Cabinet representative to take the lead in bringing change.

She is adamant that the starting point needs to be an overhaul of the entire criminal justice system – with a common IT platform across the CPS, police, courts, prison and probation services – coupled with new ways to measure success.

With the different components of the criminal justice system having different performance measurement targets, she pointed out that the individual components currently have less of an incentive to cooperate with each other.

Berry added: "The whole administration process could be made a lot slicker and I think the new Coalition government has a tremendous opportunity. Clearly some of what it has to do must be long-term, but it does have a five-year mandate."

She highlighted that the Home Secretary could play a key role, mandating Forces to use specific systems and products as one of her Labour predecessors, Charles Clarke, had done when introducing the Airwave comms suite.

While accepting that there would be pain in the short-term, she believed the long-term benefits of reform would be far-reaching. Berry maintained that vast amounts of paperwork being generated through outmoded practices – such as the CPS reliance on wet signatures – could be overcome.

Berry also insisted that the use of crime detection rates to measure forces also needs reform, although she accepted that this could prove controversial as this new yardstick would mean that the police would appear less effective.

"Forces exercising more professional judgement find that detection rates go down by about five per cent," Berry added. "This is because the system does not recognise that giving words of advice is an appropriate resolution.

"But if you consider a scenario of two 16-year-olds who have caused the same trouble in different parts of the country – one is given some words of advice by the police and the other has a caution, which is recorded as a detection.

"When the teenager with the caution goes on holiday with his parents to the USA, he could be refused entry. He could also be sifted out of the running for a job."

Berry added: "There might be some very good reasons for issuing a caution, but if you are doing it simply to feed a target culture, then my point is that the implications of what you are doing could ultimately be very serious."

Despite coming to the end of her tenure as the advocate, Berry said she was optimistic that the government would press ahead and work to cut bureaucracy.

While undecided about her next job, she said that she hopes to remain working within policing, particularly with the unprecedented challenges currently facing the service.