The worst performing police forces in England and Wales are Humberside and Northamptonshire.
The two counties came bottom of a league table compiled from official Home Office statistics.
They came joint bottom with three points out of a possible 21, followed by Nottinghamshire with four points.
All three forces were also the worst performers in last year's figures, although Humberside and Nottinghamshire have pulled their score up from minus figures.
The best performing force was Staffordshire with 18 points, followed by Northumbria with 17.
The Metropolitan Police - by far Britain's largest police force - improved significantly from four points last year to 12.
The league table was calculated by the Press Association from the Home Office's Police Performance Assessments, which rate forces either excellent, good, fair or poor in seven categories.
The Home Office has previously insisted that compiling a league table from its data would be "unhelpful and inaccurate".
The figures for 2005/06 included new targets for forces to improve the amounts of resources spent on front line policing.
The report showed only a "slight improvement" of less than 1% in the latest figures compared with the previous 12 months.
