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Move along now, officer
Local Government Chronicle -
24 November 2005
A huge change in the way a key public service is organised is galloping towards us- and virtually no-body has noticed. We are heading at breakneck speed towards the creation of regional Police forces.
Chief Constables have fanned out across the “stakeholder” landscape to explain what is happening. They were ordered to deliver to the Home Office a short list of options by the end of October, then to refine them into preliminary recommendation by the November. These must be further refined ready to be incorporated into a final report before Christmas. This report has to set out the full cost-benefit analysis of each of the options, the preferred option, the rationale for it and the initial implementation plans.
Charles Clarke is in a hurry. He aims to bring the new “strategic forces” into existence “over the next 18 to 30 months.” Meanwhile vacancies for chief constables will most likely remain unfilled.
This frantic action is thanks to the report by Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary Denis O’Connor on the “fitness for purpose” of the current policing structure of 43 forces in England and Wales. That was only published on September 16. In a nutshell the report found that the Police was not fit for purpose.
More precisely, it said that only the Metropolitan Police and the Greater Manchester Police had the capacity to deliver effectively the seven key “protective services.” These were spelled out as serious, organised and cross-border crime; major crime; civil contingencies and emergency planning; critical incident management (difficult to define but in practice seems to mean effective housekeeping- like dealing with a death in custody); counter-terrorism; public order; and strategic roads policing.
In terms of numbers the report said that a force size of 4,000 officers and 6,000 on the payroll all-in was the minimum necessary to address the key critical tasks.
Although the Home Office has produced a menu of options –collaboration, lead specialist force, lead regional force, federation of forces and strategic forces – there is no doubt that the Government is driving towards regional policing. Charles Clarke describes this as “the best long-term business solution.” Other options would have to demonstrate clearly superiority in terms of capacity and provision of protective services, economies and scale and efficiency savings, and clarity of responsibilities and governance.
The search for size is a feature of this government. The danger is that when the key criteria for change is capacity or capability any system of scoring will almost inevitably be biased towards size. The bigger the force the greater its capacity – almost as a matter of logic. The problem is that responsiveness, efficiency and, above all, accountability do not increase with the same exponential certainty.
The first question, therefore, is how convincing is the Government’s assertion that its objectives could not be delivered through effective co-operation or federation rather than by the creation of a strategic force that would inevitably involve some loss of local accountability.
The second question is whether the Government has made any read-across between Police re-organisation and the eternal saga of the local government funding review. Regional forces will be coterminous with Government office territories but they will certainly march across local council boundaries. And, if they are to follow the logic of regionalism, whatever sub-units come into existence will not necessarily reflect sub-regional council boundaries. This will be a particularly important question where amalgamations bring together metropolitan and rural forces.
What will happen where forces have dealt more or less effectively with their huge pension overhangs? Will Police officers be entitled to work within the areas of their “parent” forces? Precepts and Police Grant differ hugely metropolitan and rural areas: how would they be harmonised?
Above all, what happens to accountability? I am no great fan of Police Authorities. They tend to be too easily in the pockets of the Chief Constables. But how accountable in practice will a regional authority be and can local Police command units really offer anything other than a courteous ear to individual communities? Chief Constables are already pretty remote figures, but the Chief Inspector in the local Police station is a crucial player.
Many citizens judge the Police not by their responsiveness to the big tasks, but by their experience of the speed and enthusiasm of response to what are real concerns to them but may be relatively hum-drum matters to the Police. The response may sometimes be measured in days rather than hours.
There is a real danger that the citizen many get a more effective Police service on all the challenges except those he or she encounters in everyday life. Charles Clarke might just add a new criteria when it comes to the final evaluation of the proposals: let’s make sure we are getting the Police the citizen wants as well as the Police the state needs.
© Local Government Chronicle
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