Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation

A FORCE FIT FOR THE FUTURE
“It seems likely that the
progress towards widespread
private sector involvement in
policing may slow considerably.”
A key change that the PCCs represent
is the election of a single individual
to have direct responsibility for the
strategy, budget and priorities of policing.
Many voters were very clearly not just
unconvinced by this, but also actually
opposed to the idea of politicians
running policing. As such they were
probably as unconvinced as many police
officers by the government’s attempts
to separate operations from political
accountability.
This seems to have contributed to the
strength of the independent brand. The
label ‘independent’ seems to have given
candidates the edge, even where they
had originally contested party selection
processes and been rejected.
Selection process
One of the mysteries of the selection
processes for candidates before
the election was the nature of the
qualifications required for undertaking
the role. Ministers pushed the idea of
business experience, but, in a Policy
Exchange commissioned poll before the
election, potential voters had expressed
a preference for candidates with a strong
policing background.
In the polling booth, many voters seem
to have stuck with the familiar – more
than half of the successful candidates
were either former police officers or
former Chairs or members of Police
Authorities. It may seem surprising that
voters would elect so many former police
officers to hold their former colleagues to
account, but given the palpable distrust of
politicians and the novelty of the role, part
of the reason for this was, no doubt, the
concern that the PCC should have a good
knowledge about policing.
It remains to be seen how the former
police officers are going to convince
some voters that they are distant enough
from the Chief and the force – especially
where they only retired from the force
months before.
The election of so many ex-police
officers and the success of Labour in
the largest forces has created a natural
majority among the PCCs against the
government’s police reform programme
and austerity budget cuts. Labour
campaigned explicitly against cuts beyond
the 12 per cent they judged sustainable.
Moreover, almost all the ex-police
officer candidates and all the Labour
candidates explicitly criticised key
elements of the Home Secretary’s
reforms in their manifestos. It seems
highly likely that the Labour PCCs and
the ex-police independents will find
common cause on these issues, if not
on others.
The results have interesting
consequences for collaboration and
outsourcing. Labour’s 13 victories
included all the larger Metropolitan
forces and suggest that there is scope for
collaboration across the Metropolitans,
regardless of region, but also that the
private sector may find the doors closing
against large scale outsourcing.
Given that, apart from Thames
Valley, only the Labour held forces
have the scale beloved of outsourcers,
it seems likely that the progress towards
widespread private sector involvement in
policing may slow considerably.
Future relationships
Collaboration may also suffer a pause.
With so many independents wanting to
make their mark, collaborations such as
the Eastern region, now divided between
Conservative, Labour and independent
or Wales (two independents, one Labour
and one Conservative) may be much
more challenging. Essex and Kent and
Hampshire and Thames Valley, which
had been so closely paired may find a
Conservative-independent combination
testing for their future relationships.
Furthermore, the coalition itself is
set to have to have a rather lop-sided
relationship with the PCCs. The Liberal
Democrats had their worst electoral
performance in recent years and paid
for a failure to invest in their candidates
with a nil return. It remains to be seen
what impact this will have on the Liberal
Democrats’ attitude to the PCCs, but it
seems likely to mean that the national-
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