He added: “The absolute critical challenge for me is about public confidence.

“We’ve got to a point where the public are distrustful of statistics. They want to feel and experience good levels of service rather than simply getting proxy numbers in its place.”

An Oxford graduate and married father of three, Mr Sims said local neighbourhood policing was core to boosting the public’s confidence in policing.

“The thing that will transform the service is our willingness to trust the judgment of our frontline staff,” he said. “People join the police service for vocational reasons, they want to serve the public and do a good job. It is about creating a climate that allows them to do that.”

Last year a report by Sir Ronnie Flanagan, the Chief Inspector of Constabulary, warned that officers were “encouraged to criminalise people” because of “poor professional judgment, combined with performance management arrangements” and warned that the modern police service had become a “slave to doctrine and straitjacketed by process”.

In his time at Staffordshire, Mr Sims led a purge on form-filling to keep his officers out on patrol and changed the focus from crime targets to victim satisfaction.

It allowed police officers to spend more time on the beat and visit more victims.

At the same time, West Midlands Police piloted a bureaucracy-busting scheme allowing police to deal with minor crimes informally with so-called “community resolutions” without the need to arrest people.

Mr Sims said the approach would help to deal with issues of antisocial behaviour. He admitted that it might not always have figured “as high on the police radar as it should”.

“It’s about doing everything we can to meet people’s expectations,” he added.

With experience working in two of the region’s forces and having led the team which looked at mergers four years ago, Mr Sims said he now believed formal amalgamations were now “off the political agenda” but said there was a strong understanding between police chiefs in the region for increased cooperation.

As the Association of Chief Police Officers’ lead on forensics, Mr Sims also helped draw up plans for the future of the DNA database following a European Court of Human Rights ruling that holding the profiles of those not charged with crimes was unlawful.

“The more people captured on the database within reason, the more protection there is for the public,” he said

“It’s about trying to ensure we get the balance between meeting that protective ability and recognising the interests of personal liberty.”