The Home Office has published its long awaited Policing Green Paper, and the result has been a mix of warm appreciation and howls of protest. And it is not that some people are keen and others not, but that the proposals themselves are an uneven bunch.
On the warm appreciation side, the Home Office has drawn admiration from all quarters by slicing into the existing pile of performance indicators and top down control. In the place of all the current measures and targets, they are proposing only one: measuring the confidence that local people have that police are making a difference to the crime and disorder issues that matter locally. The only other targets for police will be the ones that they agree together with all the other public services locally in the Local Area Agreement.
There can be no argument that this is the right direction of travel and a great leap forward for responsive local policing. The Green Paper also contains a collection of proposals for reducing bureaucracy and protecting neighbourhood policing as it develops and beds in.
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So where do the howls of protest emerge? There is one key proposal which is causing heated debate: the creation of Crime and Policing Representatives. The Government has long promised to make policing more accountable to local people, and this is the Big Idea. Each council area (at district level in two tier areas) will get a new politician. Elected directly by the public in the same way as elected mayors are, these representatives will chair the Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership and sit on the Police Authority.
New models for police accountability have been debated for months, even years, before the Home Office fixed on this option. To cut through the complexities of the debate, the LGiU published four tests for any new model.
The first test is whether it will deliver stronger democracy. We live in an age where participation in elections is on a seemingly endless slide downwards, and where the popularity of politicians rests somewhere above estate agents but far below teachers. Democracy is important: to protect our freedoms, to ensure public services deliver, and to maintain the kind of inclusive society we want to live in. A new model needs to inject more democratic accountability into the police – this is an argument that has basically been won. But it must do this in a way that strengthens the system.
These new politicians will be more democratic than our current system, which is a big step forward. But at what cost? Won’t the public simply be confused by a politician whose only role is to chair two bodies that no one has ever heard of? I think we can say it passes the test, but only just.
The second test is that the model provides a more joined-up, partnership approach. Anyone who has worked at a local level in recent years knows that all the most challenging problems need to be tackled in a holistic way. Crime is a perfect example – every document published on policing in recent times has hammered home that the police will get nowhere without the help of partners and the public.
Which makes the new proposals even more mystifying. A politicians elected on a single issue mandate will only have the connections, knowledge and resources to join up the dots if they happen to have the right background. Having a politician who is unconnected to any organisation actually delivering locally promotes political debate about crime that is held back by tunnel vision. The proposals clearly fail this test.
Getting local is the third issue. We call councils local, but one thing that Neighbourhood Policing has shown is that some services need to be even closer to the ground. Where neighbourhood working has been most successful it has brought staff and politicians together so that ward councillors have sat with police officers and street sweepers to collaborate on improvements.
Will the new representatives help or hinder this work on the ground? At this stage, there is no way to say. On the one hand, they will be elected at council level (except for very large councils) so will be one person across a lot of neighbourhoods. On the other hand, they will be a politician potentially with a lot of time on their hands, which might mean that they can dedicate support to working with neighbourhoods and taking their issues up to the strategic level. A question mark, then, for the third test.
The final test, though, must be a definite fail. Even before the credit crunch and the threat of recession, local areas were preparing for tighter economic times. All public services must deliver more for less and so the fourth test is that the proposal delivers efficiency.
These new representatives are not a slick option. Elections cost money and so do politicians. A new representative will need a salary, and support to do the job. Being outside of both the police and the council, the two key organisations who deliver community safety, the representative will need to spend additional time with people in both bodies just to keep abreast of what is happening, and time is money. At the same time, this new politician won’t have any real powers to make things happen, so this will be investment without return.
The Government is right to turn the spotlight on the accountability of the police. Politics matters, and crime is at the top of the agenda. But these proposals do not deliver.
The twist is, however, is that there is an exception. Where there is an elected mayor, the mayor will fill the job. Now this makes sense – using someone we already have, who is linked in to the widest understanding of what is happening locally, and who the public will understand and expect to do the job. Why not scrap the Crime and Policing Representative and use the council leadership whether it’s a mayor or not?
