Labour quietly abolishes local policing

I’m just perusing the policing White Paper published yesterday by the Home Office - billed as the “most significant modernisation in nearly 200 years”. Over on Turbulent Times, t’other North says “To my mind, if we had a grown-up media industry, this would easily qualify as the lead item on every front page, with multiple explanatory and comment articles, together with full coverage of the political treatment including a report on the parliamentary statement by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood and the subsequent debate”.

Instead, he remarks, a venal press concentrates mainly on personalities, with the Suella Braverman defection to Reform taking a lion’s share of the coverage, along with some tedious trivia about some people called Beckham and a continuation of the Burnham soap opera. The BBC, at the time of writing, devoted its lead website coverage to developments in Minneapolis.

The reason for this, I suppose, is that the people in news rooms assume that because something is not of interest to them, that it’s not important at all. Moreover, to give the subject an proper airing, you would need to examine this paper in much greater detail, and not from a standing start, but the news agenda has already moved on and newspapers no longer employ specialist correspondents any more. The people writing the news don’t really know what they’re looking at. I think I do, though.

My first thoughts on the paper is that it’s not actually police reform at all. Instead the police are being restructured in order to be fold them into the regionalisation process. The report states:

While individual Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs)5 have made an important contribution to serving their communities, the model has not lived up to expectations. Having a system of police governance that is separate from the existing structures of local government has created unnecessary silos. Mayors and local government leaders are better placed to promote joined-up working to cut crime. We will therefore abolish PCCs, replacing them with directly elected mayors, and where mayors do not yet exist, with Policing and Crime Boards made up of local council leaders. This new system of police governance will reintegrate policing back into the system of local government in England and Wales, enabling greater collaboration across local services.

That there is the smoking gun. For some years now we’ve been in the process of regionalisation. My own local authority was abolished a while back, bringing about a new amalgamated North Yorkshire Council, effectively abolishing local democracy. Police amalgamation is just part of the process and it has no bearing on what is best for policing or whether people actually want it.

The government argues that the current structure is highly inefficient, with each of the 43 forces having its own headquarters, management teams, operational and business support functions and many specialist capabilities. These costs are particularly high in smaller forces, some of whom are struggling to maintain financial resilience.

This, to me, suggestions even more centralisation - (which has been disastrous for Scotland). We have already seen how this plays out, where police services are moved into larger, more remote headquarters so when they nab you for a spicy tweet they have to drive you halfway across the county to book you in, and police officers are left covering a patch spanning hundreds of square miles. However they dress it up, they’re abolishing local policing, and will have a much diminished insight into the local crime landscape.

Cutting to the chase, I don’t think this is going to help matters at all. The police are already overly bureaucratic and this isn’t going to improve things. Whatever reduction in operation overheads you get from centralisation are rapidly offset by the growth of middle tier non-jobs and administration. Nor will it do anything for local accountability.

More to the point, it won’t really fix anything. One can’t help but notice that the average plod is getting thicker - because nobody serious would want to do a dangerous job for crap remuneration, that ultimately amounts to sweeping leaves on a windy day. If the government were actually interested in reforming the police, they’d be looking at the system as a whole, encompassing justice reforms and repairing the prison service.

Part of the reason policing is a dangerous job nobody wants to do is because sentencing doesn’t act as a deterrent to attacking police officers, and police themselves face draconian scrutiny whenever they defend themselves. As to the prisons themselves, it is not at all hyperbole to say that the system is fundamentally broken.

This white paper, is more concerned with bending the police to the broader agenda of regionalisation and centralisation, following on from Tory austerity - which saw hundreds of police stations and local magistrates courts shuttered. On that basis, it’s hard to see this as a programme of reforms, when it’s really just a continuation of the retreat from localism.