On the whole, the role of police and crime commissioner has been a bit of a disaster, driven by a Tory agenda, where they thought that the public would select Tory candidates and that they would control the police force. The public however had a different view as not many really cared to leave their home for a November poll to vote and those that did selected a lot of independent candidates as well as other parties so the Tories were left in a bit of a mess from the off. When talking to residents now, very few can identify their PCC, nevermind identify distinct changes in policing that they have brought about.

I have been involved with the role of PCC from nearly the beginning as I was the agent for the Labour candidate in Gloucestershire, Rupi Dhanda, to my current position, where I am a member of the Gloucestershire police and crime panel. From my experience it is apparent that while the motives of each PCC may be honourable, the lack of real scrutiny and oversight is a great failure of a newly established and democratically elected position.

Now, after over a year, the impact of the PCC has not exactly been a dramatic step change in modern policing. More headlines have been generated over controversy rather than great works. With the lack of positive fireworks and a growing desire to see more out of its police force I believe that the Labour party should bring an end to the PCC role in 2016 and couple that with a pledge to reinvigorate one of our policies that worked really well, that is the ‘tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime’, and use that as a basis for the future of the police force.

It is vital that the roles that the PCC undertook continue to be carried out, including: police scrutiny; critical friend; spending oversight and strategy direction but really needs to have more democracy and accountability involved. The PCC has done some important things that have not been done before around citizen engagement, as well as looking at channeling funding into preventative projects. However, these have been seen as a function of the PCC and not the police, which to me is a lost opportunity of engagement for the police force (though obviously good for the PCC). Therefore we need to make sure we do not ‘throw the baby out with the bath water’ when it comes to developing the next steps.

The current two tiers of PCC and Police and Crime Panel should be reduced back to one tier and be called the Police and Crime Authority. As a starting point, it should consist of a similar make up as the current PCP in that it has representation from the local authorities, county and district but this is also a tremendous opportunity to bring together other justice and community elements. I believe serious consideration should be given to membership from: victim support charities; magistrates; crown court judges and to get closer to community policing some representation form parish councils, but all of these roles need to be balanced with the understanding that the bigger a committee gets, then the more unwieldy it becomes.

The PCA should also have at least two subcommittees to facilitate wider joint working. The first is a tri-service committee to bring together all the blue light services to determine broad areas of joint working. The second is to bring together other police forces that work on a national basis such as the transport police, the nuclear police and the military police in the authority area.

This would be an opportune time to look at the joint working and potential mergers of services and authorities. A lot can be learned from the military model of joint working between the army, navy and air force, including joint staff training and joint force headquarters. Many would say we do some of this already, but just putting people in the same building is not the same as joint training and joint working at its full potential.

Another subcommittee, focused on community engagement, would exist to develop the role that PCCs have started to do well, and would be responsible for public consultation, grant funding and other public focused activities. This would be an important function for really engaging with the residents about what they want to see out of their police force in a qualitative way, rather than just a statistical review and to put this information high on the agenda of the PCA.

Policing has suffered through the cuts with less police on the beat and visible in communities and while the argument has been laid that bobbies on the beat do not reflect reduction in crime for communities in numerical terms, it is obvious that people do feel safer with a physical policing presence. When I trained to be a magistrate it was impressed upon us that it was not only important for justice to be done, but for justice to be seen to be done, and I think the same can be said for policing.

The PCA would exist to ensure that democratic accountability exists above the police force, as the old police authority used to do and the PCC should currently do, but the PCA would also: seek to increase joint working; looking at policing as a whole and making residents views much more prevalent.

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Barry Kirby is a councillor on Gloucesterhire county council and a candidate for the Progress strategy board

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Photo: Megan Trace