The Home Secretary’s White Paper ‘From Local to National: A New Model for Policing’ promises a complete revamp of policing in England and Wales.  The Northamptonshire Police Federation website provides a fairly good synopsis of what the white paper contains.  Although one does hope that they didn’t resort to the use of AI to produce it otherwise they may find themselves going the same way as the beleaguered former chief constable of the West Midlands Police.

When listening to the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’ address to parliament regarding these reforms, I am reminded of a timeless quote from Robert Reiner regarding a former Home Secretary, Michael Howard’s address to parliament regarding another Home Office police reform White Paper back in the early 1990s.  Michael Howard had stated that ‘the job of the police was to catch criminals’ and Robert Reiner, if I remember the quote correctly, stated that this statement was ‘breathtaking in its audacious simple mindedness’.   

My bookshelf used to be full of Home Office White papers regarding police reform.  If I went through every one of them, I would find almost all the suggestions, in one form or another, being put forward by this Home Secretary.  It is like revisiting my former reality, change for change’s sake to detract from a poor performing government.  Although no one could have guessed that Lord Mandelson would quickly hog the news and railroad the political landscape.

The police don’t do themselves any favours, you’ve only got to look at the headlines over the decades to know that.  But of course, policing is not easy and sometimes hitting the headlines for the wrong reasons is inevitable.  Rarely do the police hit the headlines for the right reasons, not because there aren’t plenty of right reasons, they simply aren’t newsworthy.  However, every failure or perceived failure is ammunition for the ambitious politician and police reform is always a headline grabbing option and a distraction from other politically difficult and damning matters.

Let’s be clear, policing doesn’t happen in a vacuum.  Policing relies on the public; it relies on other institutions within the criminal justice system and outside of it and it relies on good governance.  If the police are underfunded, then the service they deliver to the public is substandard and this then dents confidence in the police which in turn impacts public co-operation.  If the other institutions within the criminal justice system are poorly funded such as the courts, then it doesn’t matter what the police do, cases do not get to court in a timely manner, the public withdraw their support and cases collapse. If prisons are overcrowded due to lack of funding and other issues, the courts can’t function correctly and the public lose confidence.  As an aside remember the furore around the wrong prisoners being released and the number of prisoners wrongly released over a year.  Funny how that seems to have disappeared from the news.

But the problems for policing and the rest of the judicial system pale into insignificance when compared to the issues with underfunding in areas of social services, welfare, the NHS, education and so much more.  It is easy to point to policing when the key areas that impact the public the most are decimated.  People don’t just commit crime because they are greedy, they don’t resort to violence for absolutely no reason.  And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that if you stop supporting young people, stop giving them hope for a future, stop keeping them engaged in meaningful activities when they are out of school then you will see crime and anti-social behaviour spiral out of control.  And of course, its not just young people that feel the impact.  Not so long ago there was a movement towards defunding the police.  The ideas behind the movement were sound but I think perhaps a little naïve.  But what was right was the idea of pouring more money into welfare and youth services.  Crime is so much more than just policing, and the police have very little control over it, despite all the rhetoric.

As for policing, the white paper is just a rehash of the same old ideas and another way of wasting public money, not dissimilar to that in 2006 when another Home Secretary decided on police mergers which saw millions spent before the idea was shelved as too expensive. The police have adapted to issues identified by HMIC prior to the proposed mergers in 2006.  Collaboration between forces works well, saves money and enables smaller forces to deal with large scale issues.  There is no evidence anywhere that big is better. In fact there is plenty of evidence to suggest that it may not be.

If the police have retracted from neighbourhood policing it is because of underfunding. Austerity measures introduced in 2010/11 decimated police forces and their ability to deliver both neighbourhood and response policing.  Neighbourhood policing became a luxury and coincidentally was also the area where instant savings could be made.  Police Community Support Officers could be shed because unlike police officers, they can be made redundant.   As for vetting, something that has grabbed the headlines, well what did you expect?  Cut the budgets and those important but less immediate functions are also decimated.  Add to this the political pressure to recruit 20,000 officers in a short space of time and you have a recipe for disaster.

I do wonder whether those chief officers that support the latest police reform agenda do so because they really understand policing and its history or because they are naïve or ambitious or perhaps a bit of both.   To return to Robert Reiner, the reforms are quite simply ‘breathtaking in their audacious simple mindedness’ and the sooner they are shelved the better.