Theresa May scraps Labour police beat pledge

Home secretary warns attempt to set national minimum policing standard is unsustainable in face of big budget cuts


* Alan Travis, home affairs editor
* guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 29 June 2010 13.21 BST

Labour's policing promise to ensure that neighbourhood officers spend at least 80% of their time on the beat is being dropped with immediate effect, the home secretary, Theresa May, announced today.

The 10-point pledge was the first attempt to lay down a national minimum standard for policing. The decision to scrap it comes as senior officers warn that the current record number of police is not sustainable in the face of looming budget cuts.

The home secretary told senior officers at the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) annual conference in Manchester today that the police could not be exempted from deep spending cuts.

"The spending review has not begun yet, so we don't know the exact figures, but I must be clear," she warned. "We are not talking about a spending freeze, or a reduction of 1% or 2%. The cuts will be big; they will be tough to achieve; and cuts will fall on the police as they will on other public services."

Police pay – particulary overtime – would not be exempt either from public sector pay restraint, although the existing three-year deal would be honoured, she said.

May said her decision to abandon the policing pledge had been taken in order to free forces from "top-down" central control. Police accountability would instead be provided through politically contentious plans for directly elected local police commissioners, she said.

"I know that some officers like the policing pledge. And some, I'm sure, like the comfort of knowing they have ticked boxes. But targets don't fight crime; targets hinder the fight against crime. In scrapping the confidence target and the policing pledge, I couldn't be any clearer about your mission. It isn't a 30-point plan; it is to cut crime: no more, and no less."

The wide range of Whitehall targets for the police was scrapped when Jacqui Smith was home secretary. She replaced them with the single overall target of increasing public confidence, which is now also to be scrapped.

Instead, all 43 police forces in England and Wales signed up to the policing pledge in December 2008. It laid down a minimum standard of performance for the 3,600 neighbourhood policing teams, including holding monthly "beat" meetings with the public, and abiding by target response times, such as getting to somebody within 15 minutes of a 999 call.

Despite the fact that all chief constables signed up to the pledge, a recent report by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) found four out of every five forces was falling short of the promise.

The decision to drop the remaining targets reflects official recognition that the coming squeeze on the record numbers of 143,770 uniformed officers means forces are unlikely to be able to maintain current levels of neighbourhood policing.

Acpo's president, Sir Hugh Orde, said it was "alarmist" to make predictions that up to 28,000 officers could be replaced by civilian staff, but he conceded it would be "misleading in the extreme" to claim that current police numbers could be maintained.

"With 83% of the police budget being people, sadly we will lose people in my prediction over the next few years," he said. "Some services will have to be reduced. I think I am very clear on that. Our role is to make sure they are the less critical ones: the nice-to-do things rather than the essential-to-do things."

Sir Hugh said a balance had to be struck between the understandable demand for more officers on the streets and "less visible but equally critical" duties they performed.

He also raised the prospect of greater collaboration between forces and even voluntary mergers, but indicated that more progress would be made if this process were centrally led in a more strategic way rather than left to individual chief constables.

Theresa May scraps Labour police beat pledge | UK news | The Guardian

Operationally and organisationally, this is going to be interesting.

For example, "The wide range of Whitehall targets for the police was scrapped when Jacqui Smith was home secretary. She replaced them with the single overall target of increasing public confidence, which is now also to be scrapped"... can be interpreted in many ways. Yay! the police was free to do its job with less red tape. But you could also fire lots of cops, hire some good PR, pay Murdoch to stop printing articles about crimes and, hey presto, public confidence would have risen... Or, at least, it's a defensible strategy, given the objective...

Same thing with the new policy: "I know that some officers like the policing pledge. And some, I'm sure, like the comfort of knowing they have ticked boxes. But targets don't fight crime; targets hinder the fight against crime. In scrapping the confidence target and the policing pledge, I couldn't be any clearer about your mission. It isn't a 30-point plan; it is to cut crime: no more, and no less."

How do you measure cutting crime? By a drop in the amount of crime being registered and reported? Less cops might mean less reporting being possible (underreporting being an old technique for police forces, the world over, it seems). Or would you consider the number of arrests being made? The number of people being charged? Or convictions only?

I love statistics. But there is no denying that, if an organisation is determined to fuck its score card up, it's going to succeed. Look at Greece and the reporting of its debt... It lied and that was unseen for a good decade...

__________________
Unless otherwise specified, I am posting as a regular poster. When I will act as a mod, I'll make sure you're in no doubt.

Quote:

How do you measure cutting crime? By a drop in the amount of crime being registered and reported?

Reports here involve both police-sourced statistics and opinion surveys as to the public's perceptions. They are not always well aligned and the tabloid media have a lot to answer for in that respect. (You could argue though that a truly intelligent electorate would mostly realise that the Murdoch broadsheets that infest this country are mainly a pack of rubbish - curculation figures indicate sadly that that is not the case.)