Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation

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OVERVIEW The latest reforms Peter Neyroud examines the UK coalition government’s police reforms Peter Neyroud is former Chief Constable of Thames Valley; former CEO of the National Policing Improvement Agency; and Editor, Policing UK 2013 When she launched the coalition’s police reform programme with the Green Paper in 2010, the Home Secretary, Theresa May, stated that the government’s aim was to cut crime and protect the public, and make the police directly accountable and better value for money. She argued that this would be achieved “through greater collaboration, the introduction of police and crime commissioners (PCCs), less government intervention and bureaucracy and more professional responsibility and judgment and a new policing and partnership landscape”. Reforming the police is not easy. Even Margaret Thatcher’s radical instincts stopped short of venturing into police reform. By the very nature of the police mission – to maintain order and stability, guarding the line between rule breaking and law keeping – there are inherent risks in such reform to the process of government and the relationship between the state and the citizen. In this article I will examine each of the elements of the latest reforms, the progress so far and the prospects and challenges ahead. The Home Secretary started with proposing collaboration, which is not a new theme. The National Policing Improvement Agency put considerable effort into fostering collaboration on procurement, forensic delivery and information technology. There were some successes – cars, tyres, uniforms, radios, firearms and the IMPACT Police National Database – but the challenge has changed, because of the huge financial pressures on forces. Prior to the Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) the target of collaboration was efficiency savings. After the CSR, collaboration has to deliver major cash savings. There are signs in the East Midlands, where the collaboration journey started more than five years ago following the failure of force mergers, that such savings can be made. However, the range and extent of future collaboration will be hugely dependent on the attitude of the new PCCs. The second element of May’s approach, the creation of PCCs, had been a project of the right since Policy Exchange proposed it in a report in 2001. Arguing that the existing Police Authorities were invisible and ineffective, Policy Exchange proposed a model loosely based on the USA, in which a single, directly elected individual would have responsibility for setting policing priorities, determining budgets and hiring and firing the Chief Constable. The politics of coalition have since added a distinctively British twist in the form of a ‘Police and Crime Panel’, a committee of local councillors, who, from November 2012, are responsible for holding the PCC to account, with powers to overturn budgets and appointments where a 75 per cent majority prevails. There was considerable opposition to the introduction of PCCs from the police service, concerned about the politicisation of policing and the potential loss of operational independence. The government has responded with a protocol setting out the respective duties 14 | POLICING UK
OVERVIEW of the PCC, Chief Constable and Home Secretary and the requirement for the newly elected PCC to swear an oath of office. Reduced government intervention The initial success of the PCC project will rely heavily on the quality of the new commissioners. Given that this is a new public office, there has been no obvious benchmark for the parties or candidates as what qualities an effective PCC should have. Given that they are effectively the executive chairman of a large organisation, an argument could be made for significant senior management skills, but another look at the role profile in the Act and protocol suggests a much greater need for political skills in negotiation and influencing to achieve effective partnerships to tackle crime and anti-social behaviour. Despite a desire from the government to have high-profile independent candidates, a £5,000 deposit, the lack of financial support to run a campaign in a huge constituency and significant public ignorance of the post, the campaign produced a surprisingly large independent vote. The public were not yet persuaded of the wisdom of the model. Yet at the same time, the Home Secretary has committed herself to reduced intervention from national government. She has restricted her engagement with forces to the provision of budget and the strategic policing requirement (SPR). The latter, embedded in the legislation, is the Home Secretary’s opportunity to tell forces and their PCCs what they must do to meet national requirements to tackle, among other things, serious and organised crime and terrorism. She will have to work hard to prevent the SPR becoming, like many Home Office bills, a Christmas tree, on which all sorts of wishes and promises are hung. She has tried hard to restrict herself to one formal target – cutting crime – but even here it is obvious that others exist such as tackling the fiscal deficit. In reducing bureaucracy, the government has made some positive moves to reduce the number of cases where charge decisions need to be made by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). Although CPS oversight may have reduced the number of poor quality cases reaching the courts, there has been a heavy price in paperwork for routine cases. Promises to go further and to encourage magistrates to simplify their approach may yet turn out to be one of the most significant aspects of the whole reform programme, encouraging sensible discretion and enabling imagination to return to the way low-harm offenders are dealt with and encouraged to desist. Civilian oversight May has already signalled one further significant departure from the past, by appointing Tom Winsor, the former ail egulator, as the first civilian Chief Inspector of Constabulary. Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) will have a crucial role judging whether forces remain efficient and effective once the PCCs take over and during the continuing years of budgetary famine. Winsor was also responsible for another critical element of the reforms – radical changes to the pay and conditions of police officers – which have been strongly resisted by the front line. The civilianisation of the HMIC role comes at a time when the Home Secretary has also given the go-ahead to the creation of the world’s first police professional body as a result of the recommendations of the Neyroud Review of Police Leadership and Training. The ‘College of Policing’, which started at the end of 2012, draws in the standards, training and leadership functions from the “This very ambitious programme of reform comes against a backdrop of the most severe cuts in police budgets for at least a generation.” National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA). The College will also take over the policy and standards development work of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), with a new Council of Chief Constables taking up the task of providing the collective professional view and coordinating future cross-border mutual aide requirements. The College’s most important early challenge is to ensure that it will be owned by all ranks and roles in the police service, changing a century of rank-based representation. National policing Alongside the abolition of the NPIA, two new organisations are intended to emerge at a national level in 2013; a ‘Newco’ to provide the police service with a national ICT function; and a National Crime Agency (NCA). While the former has precedents (and not promising ones) in the Police Information Technology Organisation, the latter is a radical departure. Not only does its title signal a new and clear recognition of a national role in tackling crime, but its legislative framework is due to provide a power to direct local forces. The Home Secretary has already indicated that, once established, the NCA may well take on national fraud responsibilities and counter-terrorism. Such a model would be interestingly close to Scandinavian models such as the Swedish National Police Agency. It would also be a model clearly based around the police, rather than the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) agent model or the Federal FBI model, with which it has been associated. There are good reasons to keep a strong continuity between local policing and national and international policing and to keep national policing bodies running to the same rules of accountability and transparency as their local counterparts. This is a very, very ambitious programme of reform and it comes against a backdrop of the most severe cuts in police budgets for at least a generation. It is not clear that the Home Office, which is itself cutting hard, has the capability and capacity to keep all the balls in the air. As ever, in the world of policing, there is also a real danger that events – riots, rises in crime, a major terrorist event – will blow politicians off course. POLICING UK | 15
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Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation

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