Law and disorder?

The new coalition government agreement said little about police reform but two months in, driven partly by the need to find substantial savings and partly by the commitments in the Conservative election manifesto, the likely shape of the immediate future is beginning to emerge. The headlines include confirmation that the police will not be treated as a special case when it comes to budget cuts, and the abandonment of the previous government's commitment to maintain the number of police officers and of both the public confidence target and the policing pledge. Changes to stop and search and charging procedures to reduce bureaucracy have also been trailed. These measures will yield but a fraction of the Chancellor's looked for savings, and so far plans to find the balance are far from convincing. 43 police fiefdoms Nick Herbert, the police minister says inefficiency can't be tolerated and that the days of 43 police fiefdoms are over, but the initiatives so far announced; more collaboration between forces, the development of shared services, and centralised procurement, produced insignificant results under the last government. And anyway such initiatives are at odds with the traditional Conservative doctrine, restated last week in a speech given by Theresa May to the National Policing Conference , that policing is primarily a local and not a national matter. The home secretary made clear that it is not greater effectiveness or efficiency that should drive police reform but the need to build strong local communities and give them 'a major role in the planning and delivery of the public services they use'. Thus 'police force mergers will not be allowed to happen unless they are voluntary and … have the support of local communities'. In earnest of this the government wants to 'swap the top-down bureaucratic accountability for local, democratic accountability by abolishing police authorities and replacing them with 'a directly-elected individual at force level'. A national dimension This denial of a national dimension to policing effectively turns the clock back nearly 200 years to before Sir Robert Peel's Metropolitan Police Act. It is also unsustainable as it is inevitable that on both national security, legislative, and economic grounds most police policies and procedures will continue to be driven from the centre. The key as a former police minister, Tony McNulty, said is to find a way 'to separate the national from the local in policing' opening the way for both national and local accountability. The police themselves have come to understand this. Even before the financial crisis many, including the current president of ACPO Sir Hugh Orde, were suggesting the need for an independent inquiry into policing, including examining again the case for major structural reforms, but the idea has so far failed to find resonance with the politicians of any party. It seems inconceivable that within the next two years there will be 43 freshly elected police commissioners from 43 newly drawn constituencies, overseeing 43 different responses from 43 chief constables to arbitrary reductions in the local precepts and central grants. Perhaps the cuts won't be that severe. Perhaps the police commissioner idea will be significantly modified by the time the Police Reform & Social Responsibility Bill, promised for the autumn, is published. One can only hope so. Robert McFarland is was formerly a chief executive with the BOC Group. More recently he has been involved in government reviews, all associated with aspects of the criminal justice process and is author of Police Reform – thoughts of radical change