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Politicians must show the courage to reform the police service, argues ippr

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26 November 2009

A new ippr report published today argues that after years of investment with little reform, and with public funding set to be cut, now is the time for politicians to stop avoiding fundamental reforms to the way the police service is governed, organised and held to account.

ippr’s report argues that, unlike other public services, the police have escaped major reforms under both Labour and Conservative governments. Much needed change has been thwarted by a combination of the police protecting what they have and politicians being fearful of taking on a service that commands strong public support. This paralysis needs to end.

The report points out that a populist strategy of putting 'more bobbies on the beat' is no longer sustainable - and doesn't deliver results. With public spending set to be cut, ippr argues that improvements can no longer come from increased funding and instead the police must change the way they work.

ippr found that although crime has fallen over the last ten years, most of that fall was due to good economic conditions rather than the impact of police work. In fact, despite a huge increase in spending on the police (up by 21% between 1997 and 2007), on a number of key measures police performance has not improved:

Crime detection rates show little improvement over the last 10 years: 28 per cent of recorded crimes were ‘cleared up’ in 2008/09 – which is little different from the 29 per cent detection rate in 1998/9.
Although detection rates have improved since 2002/03 this is due to a rise in out of court sanctions for relatively 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 performance of 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 per cent in 1996 to 50 per cent in 2005/6, rising more recently to 53 per cent per cent in 2008/09.
Victims of crime who have direct contact with the police are less satisfied with them than the public as a whole: In 2008/09 the public as a whole were more likely to agree that the police were doing an excellent or good job (56 per cent) compared to people who had been a victim of crime in the last twelve months (45 per cent).

ippr argues that we need major reforms to the police service. Most importantly:

Pay must be more closely related to performance and skills.
The ‘single point of entry’ into the service must go to broaden recruitment.
Middle management should be reduced.
Officers should be able to take on more specialist roles.
More civilians should be employed to free up officers to spend more time at the frontline rather than on administrative tasks.
Information systems should be converged across different forces.

However, none of these reforms can be progressed unless we also reform the way the service is governed, organised and held to account. This is because all previous efforts at reform have been blocked by a system of governance that is too fragmented and which gives a veto to too many people in the service.

ippr’s report recommends the following reforms to police governance:

All local crime priorities should be set at the local level, rather than in Whitehall, by strengthening the role of elected local government. Rather than introducing directly elected police commissioners, who would be remote from local communities and would risk politicising policing, local councils should have more power to hold their local police to account. Priorities would be set at three different levels:
- Reformed police authorities made up of senior councillors would set the budgets and priorities for each police force and hold chief constables to account for performance.
- Local authorities would control the police council tax precept and use this to directly purchase key police services from their force.
- Local neighbourhood policing meetings would set the priorities for each neighbourhood policing team.
A National Policing Agency (NPA) should be established by merging the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) with those parts of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) that currently coordinate or deliver national policing services. The NPA would give the police service what it currently lacks: coherent strategic leadership. It would have powers to ensure that complex and serious crimes that cross force borders are effectively tackled through collaboration between forces and to improve the efficiency of service delivery by forces.

Rick Muir, Senior Research Fellow at ippr said:

“After years of investment by successive Governments with little reform, police performance has not significantly improved. Given that spending looks set to be cut, if the police are to effectively tackle crime in the years ahead, they will need to change the way they work.

“Unless the way the police are organised and governed is transformed, any substantive programme of reform will suffer the same fate as those that preceded it: opposition within different parts of the service followed by a government ‘U-turn’ for fear of a politically costly conflict with the police.

“The first reform priority therefore has to be to design a system of governance that is value for money, more coherent and less fragmented and that empowers local and national leaders to deliver change in the public interest.”

Notes to editors

Arrested Development: Unlocking change in the police service by Rick Muir will be published on Thursday 26 November 2009. Embargoed copies of the report are available to journalists upon request from the ippr press office.