The great policing hole

The government's policing green paper is a hopelessly inadequate response to the challenges facing Britain's police services
August 30, 2008

The police have been called "the last great unreformed public service." And now, trapped between public dissatisfaction and tightening budgets, Britain's police service is in crisis. Ian Blair, head of the Metropolitan Police, has argued that the police need "A new structure and a new energy for public connection with policing." Unfortunately, the government's policing green paper, published on 17th July, conspicuously fails to provide long-term answers.

It is three years since Her Majesty's Inspector of Constabulary (HMIC) argued that Britain's 43-force structure was "no longer fit for purpose" and called for some smaller forces to be merged. The then home secretary, Charles Clarke, set about reducing the number of British forces from 43 to 20, but this restructuring attempt failed in 2006. The government's subsequent attempt to promote voluntary collaboration between forces has met with limited success. The restructuring issue is thus unresolved, and yet a radical overhaul of policing structures remains a precondition of delivering on three imperatives: improved police capabilities, better professional leadership and greater efficiency.

The argument about the place of the police in a free society has two related strands. In the first, a centrally directed police service is regarded as a potential threat to liberty and, in extremis, an instrument of tyranny. This view emphasises the need for the police to operate with the consent and trust of local communities. The second strand plays the government's ultimate responsibility for the protection of society against the desire of local communities to control how they are policed.

These contradictions have never been resolved, and so for the last 80 years formal responsibility for policing has been shared in the so-called "tripartite relationship" between the home secretary, the chief officers and the police authorities (the groups that represent local communities in holding chief officers accountable). But even after the tripartite relationship was formalised in the 1964 Police Act, it remained unclear how it was meant to work, and in particular who was accountable to whom for what.

At a national level, "tripartitism" means merely a presumption that the home secretary will consult with the national representative bodies of the chief officers and police authorities, who, even when in agreement with the government, are constitutionally unable to impose decisions on their members. The result is that none of the three parties can be called to account, either separately or collectively. There is a great hole at the centre of policing.

In an attempt to make the police more accountable to local communities, the new green paper proposes to make a majority of police authority positions elected. These "crime and policing representatives" (CRPs) would chair one of the 370 local crime and disorder reduction partnerships, which at the moment are loosely structured local consultative bodies with few formal powers and negligible resources. But the new proposals leave all sorts of questions unanswered. How would the CRPs hold their local police to account? And what would be the nature of the relationship between elected CRPs and local councillors?

The green paper reaffirms the government's faith in the ability of the tripartite relationship to deliver effective reform. But the reality is that tripartitism is the principal stumbling block to reform, with the self-interest of each party coming before the collective will to solve problems. It is time to change the terms of the debate.

Such a change is to be found in a dissenting minority report to the 1962 Royal Commission on the Police. The commission itself was dismissive of the argument that a nationally co-ordinated police service posed a threat to liberty: "British liberty does not depend, and never has depended, upon the dispersal of police power… We do not accept that the criterion for a police state is whether a country's police force is national rather than local—if that were the test, Belgium, Denmark and Sweden should be described as police states." But the commission's actual recommendations were overly cautious, and it was left to AL Goodhart—an American lawyer, Oxford don and grandfather of Prospect's editor—to argue in a memorandum of dissent that, "It is essential to establish a centrally controlled police force, administered on a regional basis," if the twin problems of police efficiency and accountability were to be tackled.

Today, Goodhart's vision might be realised by setting up a Unified Police Service (UPS) led by a chief police commissioner. A central directorate would be developed along the lines of the National Policing Improvement Agency, a police-led government agency set up last year to provide a range of police support services. The chief commissioner would be accountable to an independent board, which in turn would be accountable to ministers and, separately, to parliament.

In its 2005 report, HMIC suggested that the creation of ten regional operational forces would offer "the best potential… of improving protective services and providing better value for money." The present 43 forces could be reconfigured into these ten under a regional police commissioner, who would be ultimately responsible to the chief commissioner. The existing local policing capability, the Basic Command Units (BCUs)—the smallest command unit into which forces are divided—would be integrated into this new regional command structure, and otherwise be largely unaffected. The police authorities would be abolished or, more likely, morph into regional management boards. Funding, down to regional level, would come from the home office.

The third and most radical step would realise the separation of the local from the national dimension in policing. Control over local police funding would be devolved to revived local authority police committees—local authorities already cover over half the total policing budget—a just alignment of representation, taxation and accountability. The next stage would be to link local police committees with the 340 BCUs, which are already geographically aligned with one or more local authorities. Armed with the power of the purse, local police committees would commission local policing services from their local BCU.

Admittedly, given the diversity of local government structures, there can be no one-size-fits-all solution. The mayoral model in London and other large metropolitan areas will work differently from unitary authorities, and two-tier authorities would be different again. Whatever the model, what is important is that the BCUs, and through them the UPS, become accountable through elected councillors to local communities for the delivery of local policing.

Sadly, the chances of such a radical restructuring are slim. While the plan outlined here is eminently do-able, it is doubtful whether our flailing government possesses the political courage to start breaking a few eggs.