Baroness Hamwee
Main Page: Baroness Hamwee (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Mackenzie, for giving us an opportunity to discuss policing. I am sorry not to be able to follow the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Wills. I was going to ask him whether he had left any notes for my noble friend Lord McNally, who succeeded him in his post at the Ministry of Justice, because my noble friend has not found them yet.
The expectations of the police among the public are very high. For one thing, the public expect to see a lot of them and to see almost instant results and success. In this television age we have become accustomed to seeing cases solved within an hour, minus seven minutes for commercials, and often using cutting-edge forensic techniques—would that life were quite so simple. Whenever I have raised this issue directly with senior officers, they have been keen to acknowledge the public’s wish for highly visible police on the streets and have played down the problems of competing calls on the funds of expensive forensics, but I cannot help thinking—the noble Lord, Lord Birt, touched on this—that there is a major tension here of which we will see more in the next few months.
Public trust and confidence are among the building blocks of successful policing. Without them it must be difficult to achieve policing by consensus. I am afraid that it is inevitable that statistics will be bandied about regarding police numbers, crime rates, detection rates and so on. I was interested to see in the report published a few days ago from the Audit Commission and HMIC, to which several noble Lords have referred, that the forces that achieved the highest cashable efficiencies do not have lower levels of public confidence, which may be something to take on board.
The British Crime Survey tells us that there is a disparity between perceptions about crime rates nationally, which are thought to be constantly on the rise, and people’s perceptions in local areas, which are closer to reality. The issue of public trust in crime statistics behoves us all to use them responsibly. If the figures are to give a realistic picture, it is important to understand that in the case of some crimes an apparent increase in the rate may be a sign of success because the victim has been able to report the crime.
I had expected the noble Lord, Lord Mackenzie, to talk about prevention—he is nodding and I think that he has anticipated what I am going to say—which is an important role of the police.
Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate
I thought that I touched on it when I talked about the numbers of police officers on the streets increasing by some 16,000. That in itself is a preventive measure.
Baroness Hamwee
Indeed. The rollout of Safer Neighbourhoods teams has been welcome in that connection, as well as in others, which is why local authorities have invested heavily in them. It will not be easy for local authorities buying that service or for the police to weigh up the competing calls on money. Policing is a particularly people-heavy activity. I understand that it accounts for about 80 per cent of the budget. There are not the same powers to make employees redundant as in other areas of employment. I am not trying to encourage noble Lords to leap up and say that we are predicting massive redundancies. I am pointing out that there is an issue.
A number of ways of working are perhaps a bit out of date, to which the noble Lord, Lord Birt, referred. There will be outcomes from cutting down on recruitment, and not just in the numbers. It is still a struggle to get our police forces to look like the public they serve. Recruiting from BME communities and promoting those officers to higher ranks has long been an issue and has an impact on the trust of the different communities.
The numbers game has meant that, over a long period, there has been something of a misrepresentation about the numbers in operational roles, at any rate as I have seen them. It does not seem necessarily to be better to have a warranted officer dealing with, for instance, human resources problems. I suspect that this is likely to become more of an issue because of the matters to which I have referred. Police officers cost considerably more on average than police staff members. I understand that not only have the headline figures for spending on the police increased, but within those, overtime payments have increased by over 90 per cent. It has long seemed to me that overtime needs to be addressed. Furthermore, officer numbers have increased over the past 10 years by 12 per cent while civilian staff numbers have risen by 46 per cent. That in itself has been a move in the right direction and I hope it does not row back.
Although I hate the term, I was interested to see that a new key performance indicator has been introduced in London regarding the front line: to maximise the use of warranted officers deployed into operational policing in order to produce an annual 2 per cent improvement. This is not wholly new. Something similar has been used in the Met for eight or nine years, with an operational policing measure to accurately reflect the number of police officers and police staff who provide a visible uniform presence, but it has become a performance indicator.
If I may say so, the noble Lord, Lord Mackenzie, did not serve his cause well by rejecting wholesale, as I heard it, the lessons that might be learnt from the private sector. I do not support transferring every private sector approach into the public sector, but some can work well. Indeed, the private sector can also sometimes learn from the public sector. One of the findings of Sir Ronnie Flanagan’s review of policing was the negative impact of risk aversion on decision-making, something which the private sector is better at tackling. I was interested to read Jan Berry’s comments, in her recent report, that:
“Over-reliance on compliance with set rules and targets has reduced the ability of many officers to use their professional judgement”.
She said also that there are,
“strong links between a predisposition to avoid taking risks and levels of professional knowledge, skills and experience in the use of discretion”.
Those are important points.
Just before the election, the CBI published a paper on what in its view the private sector has to offer the police by way of smarter working and different working in order to increase productivity and reduce costs. It talks about the need for,
“the right people with the right skills doing the right things at the right times—the fundamentals of a modern workplace. But too often the debate about crime at a national and local level has tended to focus on overall officer numbers and has avoided questions about how these officers are deployed and their overall effectiveness”.
It also makes the point that:
“Success has frequently been measured by inputs—the overall number of officers—rather than outcomes—reducing crime and dealing with the consequences of crime”.
I share the focus on practical measures contained in the report, and while I do not support everything it says, there is a lot that is sensible. There is also a focus on practical measures, which characterises much of the coalition’s programme for government on crime and policing. They range from the use of technology to make policing more effective at lower cost and with fewer time-consuming activities that give bureaucracy a bad name—bureaucracy does have a place—to requiring hospitals to share non-confidential information so that the police can target work on gun and knife crime hot spots.
In the short time that we have today, and without the consultation paper, one can only scratch the surface of what is to be said about crime and policing. There will be plenty of opportunity to extend our discussions to the issues of structure and accountability later in the Session and I, for one, am sure that I will find myself expressing quite firm views about accountability and how to achieve it.