Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation

OVERVIEW
of the PCC, Chief Constable and Home
Secretary and the requirement for the
newly elected PCC to swear an oath
of office.
Reduced government intervention
The initial success of the PCC project
will rely heavily on the quality of the
new commissioners. Given that this is
a new public office, there has been no
obvious benchmark for the parties or
candidates as what qualities an effective
PCC should have. Given that they are
effectively the executive chairman of a
large organisation, an argument could be
made for significant senior management
skills, but another look at the role profile
in the Act and protocol suggests a
much greater need for political skills in
negotiation and influencing to achieve
effective partnerships to tackle crime and
anti-social behaviour.
Despite a desire from the government
to have high-profile independent
candidates, a £5,000 deposit, the lack of
financial support to run a campaign in a
huge constituency and significant public
ignorance of the post, the campaign
produced a surprisingly large independent
vote. The public were not yet persuaded
of the wisdom of the model.
Yet at the same time, the Home
Secretary has committed herself to
reduced intervention from national
government. She has restricted her
engagement with forces to the provision
of budget and the strategic policing
requirement (SPR). The latter, embedded
in the legislation, is the Home Secretary’s
opportunity to tell forces and their PCCs
what they must do to meet national
requirements to tackle, among other
things, serious and organised crime
and terrorism.
She will have to work hard to prevent
the SPR becoming, like many Home
Office bills, a Christmas tree, on which all
sorts of wishes and promises are hung. She
has tried hard to restrict herself to one
formal target – cutting crime – but even
here it is obvious that others exist such as
tackling the fiscal deficit.
In reducing bureaucracy, the
government has made some positive
moves to reduce the number of cases
where charge decisions need to be made
by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).
Although CPS oversight may have
reduced the number of poor quality
cases reaching the courts, there has been
a heavy price in paperwork for routine
cases. Promises to go further and to
encourage magistrates to simplify their
approach may yet turn out to be one of
the most significant aspects of the whole
reform programme, encouraging sensible
discretion and enabling imagination to
return to the way low-harm offenders are
dealt with and encouraged to desist.
Civilian oversight
May has already signalled one further
significant departure from the past, by
appointing Tom Winsor, the former
ail egulator, as the first civilian Chief
Inspector of Constabulary. Her Majesty’s
Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) will
have a crucial role judging whether forces
remain efficient and effective once the
PCCs take over and during the continuing
years of budgetary famine. Winsor was
also responsible for another critical
element of the reforms – radical changes
to the pay and conditions of police officers
– which have been strongly resisted by the
front line.
The civilianisation of the HMIC role
comes at a time when the Home Secretary
has also given the go-ahead to the creation
of the world’s first police professional body
as a result of the recommendations of the
Neyroud Review of Police Leadership and
Training.
The ‘College of Policing’, which started
at the end of 2012, draws in the standards,
training and leadership functions from the
“This very ambitious programme of
reform comes against a backdrop
of the most severe cuts in police
budgets for at least a generation.”
National Policing Improvement Agency
(NPIA). The College will also take over the
policy and standards development work
of the Association of Chief Police Officers
(ACPO), with a new Council of Chief
Constables taking up the task of providing
the collective professional view and coordinating
future cross-border mutual
aide requirements. The College’s most
important early challenge is to ensure that
it will be owned by all ranks and roles in
the police service, changing a century of
rank-based representation.
National policing
Alongside the abolition of the NPIA,
two new organisations are intended to
emerge at a national level in 2013; a
‘Newco’ to provide the police service with
a national ICT function; and a National
Crime Agency (NCA). While the former
has precedents (and not promising ones)
in the Police Information Technology
Organisation, the latter is a radical
departure.
Not only does its title signal a new and
clear recognition of a national role in
tackling crime, but its legislative framework
is due to provide a power to direct local
forces. The Home Secretary has already
indicated that, once established, the
NCA may well take on national fraud
responsibilities and counter-terrorism.
Such a model would be interestingly
close to Scandinavian models such as the
Swedish National Police Agency. It would
also be a model clearly based around the
police, rather than the Serious Organised
Crime Agency (SOCA) agent model or
the Federal FBI model, with which it has
been associated.
There are good reasons to keep a strong
continuity between local policing and
national and international policing and
to keep national policing bodies running
to the same rules of accountability and
transparency as their local counterparts.
This is a very, very ambitious
programme of reform and it comes
against a backdrop of the most severe cuts
in police budgets for at least a generation.
It is not clear that the Home Office, which
is itself cutting hard, has the capability
and capacity to keep all the balls in the air.
As ever, in the world of policing, there is
also a real danger that events – riots, rises
in crime, a major terrorist event – will
blow politicians off course.
POLICING UK | 15