The police are almost unique in having avoided major public service reform under governments of both main parties. The police fought off Tory proposals to introduce greater contracting out of police functions to the private sector. Similarly Labour’s plans to merge police forces were successfully resisted. However, as police funding looks set to be cut, it has become increasingly apparent that the police will need to change the way they work if they are to reduce crime further in the years ahead.
Despite a 21% real terms funding increase between 1997 and 2007, police performance on a range of indicators has not significantly improved and on some measures has got worse. There has of course been a major fall in crime – down 45% 1995 to 2009. But most of that fall was due to the benign economic conditions of the period, rather than the impact of police work.
Because the crime rate is affected by so many different factors, we need to look at other more direct indicators to measure police performance. Crime detection rates have shown little improvement over the last 10 years: 28% of recorded crimes were ‘cleared up’ in 2008/09 – which is little different from the 29% detection rate in 1998/9. Although there has been a rise since 2002/03, most of this is due to the increased use of summary penalties for minor offences.
Detection rates vary enormously from force to force, showing that performance in tackling different types of crimes is patchy across the country. Detections per officer have fallen: whereas in 2003/04 each officer was detecting 10.2 offences a year, this has now fallen to 9.4 offences per officer.
Public satisfaction with the police service is lower than it was in the mid-1990s: the proportion of the public saying that the police do a ‘good or excellent job’ fell from 64% in 1996 to 53% in 2008/09 (although it has started to rise again since the roll out of neighbourhood policing).
A new ippr report ‘Arrested Development: unlocking change in the police service’ identifies a range of areas where changing the way the police currently work could make a difference. Reform to the way police are trained, paid, recruited and managed is essential. As things stand there is too much middle management, insufficient attention to personal development, too few opportunities for specialisation and too many tasks are carried out by warranted officers at high cost that could be just as effectively done, at lower cost, by civilian staff. Information systems are insufficiently integrated: the recent Flanagan inquiry found that around 70% of police data has to be entered at least twice because of the use of different systems by different forces. This not only duplicates work but also means that vital data can fall between the cracks.
We need changes to the way the police service is governed, organised and held to account. The police service is made up of 43 forces, most of which are too large to provide responsive local policing and too small to effectively deal with serious and organised crime which travels across force borders. This fragmented system also means that each force does its own procurement of uniform, air support and equipment, while running its own IT, finance and HR systems. This is hugely inefficient.
The system of police accountability does not work: police authorities are largely invisible to the public, cover areas that are too large and do not have a strong record in holding their chief constables to account. This weak leg of local accountability tempts central government to try to manage local policing from Whitehall, which introduces far too much rigidity into the system and has resulted in all sorts of perverse incentives on the ground (hence stories of officers handing out cautions for cannabis possession just to meet their targets).
Crucially this fragmented and weak system of governance means that there is a lack of leadership in the police service. At the local level chief constables are not sufficiently accountable for poor performance, and there is no one at the national level who can take decisions ‘for the good of the service’. Rather than go down the route of directly electing police commissioners as the Conservatives propose, we should reform police authorities so that they are made up of senior members of the local authorities within a force’s area (either leaders or cabinet members). Policing should also be shaped much more than it is currently around towns, boroughs and rural areas by allowing local authorities to keep the police precept element of the council tax and use that to directly commission local policing from their force.
At the national level a National Policing Agency, formed by merging the National Policing Improvement Agency and the operational parts of ACPO, should have responsibility to ensuring that serious and organised crime is being effectively tackled and that forces are delivering value for money. As a last resort it would have some clearly specified powers to ensure that forces are delivering services efficiently, such as by requiring greater shared services and collaboration across force boundaries.
Police reform in the past has tended to be blocked because politicians are less popular than the police, and so fear they would lose a major battle for public support. In the recent past the government has bought improvement by investing more money in the service, especially in recruiting more officers. But with funding set to fall and performance questionable, this is no longer an option. If we are to avoid cuts in the numbers of officers on the frontline, we will need to make the police service as a whole operate more effectively. No change is not an option.