Public Services: Workforce (Public Services Committee Report)

Lord Hogan-Howe Excerpts

Friday 16th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, for her chairing of our committee, her patience and her common sense in building our at times passionate arguments into an excellent report that we all supported. I thank her. I declare my interest as stated in the register.

The report highlights the significant challenge faced by any Government in planning the human resource needs of our public services, particularly at the moment. We have an ageing population and are still suffering the consequences of Covid, the Ukraine war, energy price rises and the constant inflationary pressure on our economy, particularly wage inflation—all this, ironically, at a time of high employment.

The report argues that, first, we must therefore act imaginatively about how public services are deployed and that, secondly, traditional routes into public service are limiting and that action needs to be taken to make them more accessible. I shall concentrate on those two points particularly in relation to the police service—of which I have some experience—where they occur not quite in the same context as in some of the other public services that we have talked about, for reasons that I hope I will be able to explain if I have time, such as health and social services.

The police service has been challenged about its ability to adapt to society and, frankly, some appalling behaviour by a number of officers, particularly in the Metropolitan Police. I would argue that the causes of the present cultural challenges are to some extent structural, and radical reforms will be needed to produce significant change. I hope to make suggestions as well as identifying problems.

The police remains a male-dominated culture, with two-thirds of them men and one-third women, though half of the recruits now are female, who consistently perform better than men in the recruit selection process. The challenge is that the police, contrary to the rest of the public services, has a very low turnover. A healthy turnover in any organisation is accepted as being between 8% and 12%. That allows new talent to join and the people who are unsuitable to leave. In the police service the turnover is around 5%, and even in London it is only around 6%. In my view, that is too low, trapping people who are unsuitable but too comfortable with the terms and conditions or, as Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has argued, who cannot be removed by the organisation because of the independent chairing of misconduct panels and other protections that apply.

I propose three major changes that could make a real difference. The first comes under the category of “boring but true”. Police pensions need to become more flexible to be transferable. At the moment, officers pay around 15% of their salary for a good scheme. However, they get the best benefits by remaining in service. The system does certainly not encourage them to leave, even when they are unsuitable, because they cannot take the pension with them and maintain their benefits in other pension funds.

The second is that the time has come to seriously consider whether the office of constable would be better protected as an employee. The office of constable is there to provide two broad protections. First, politicians and senior police officers cannot direct a constable how to use their discretionary powers to arrest and detain, although they can of course be held to account in the courts. Secondly, it is intended to provide a protection against malicious allegations by criminals under investigation. Therefore, the terms and conditions, including misconduct rules, are found in secondary legislation—police regulations. This means an officer can be represented legally at a misconduct hearing which is chaired by a legally qualified person, because in theory they have no access to an employment tribunal. However, should they allege that the misconduct process involves illegal discrimination, they can access an employment tribunal—essentially having two bites of the cherry—and many do.

The office of constable also means that it is impossible for an officer to easily become a police staff member or vice versa. This is particularly inflexible should an officer be physically unable to carry out their role as a constable, for which the principal remedy is a medical pension, when they could easily have transferred to become a police staff member should they have the appropriate skills. I ask the Government to consider the New Zealand model, which protects the office of constable in a contract of employment. I see no evidence that New Zealand’s police are being directed by politicians. It also happens to be a national police force, not 43 forces—but that is probably for another day.

My third point is about the routes of entry into the service, which could be improved. The service is properly proud that every officer, including myself, served on the streets before becoming a chief or commissioner. However, I believe that a diversity of recruitment routes for constables and senior officers produces more diversity of ideas and better representation. The turnover of 5%, followed by 20 to 25 years to reach the highest rank, does not assist that in any way.

During my period as commissioner, we introduced Police Now, which mimicked Teach First. Hundreds of graduates who had not initially thought about becoming a police officer were employed for two years with 85% remaining after those two years. We introduced direct entry for detectives, where people who had never been an officer were recruited only to be a detective, and accelerated promotions for graduates which led to them usually becoming a chief inspector within five years. Those three schemes continue today.

We also introduced direct entry for superintendents. Hospital chief executives, merchant bankers, military officers and directors of counterterrorism for the Home Office were recruited to lead and, after two years of training and mentoring, were given full leadership responsibilities. We had direct entry for inspectors who, within two years of training, were given that role. We also changed the recruitment rules so that people who had lived in London for three of the last six years got priority, as well as those who spoke one of 19 languages which were prevalent in the communities of London. These latter three ideas were abandoned by a service that truly never wanted or believed in them.

My final point is on one thing that we have to guard against with surges in recruitment. The police service lost 20,000 officers as an inevitable consequence of public service cuts. There was then a surge in recruitment, which has led to that 20,000 being pushed back in. About 50,000 will probably be pushed back in within five years. Inevitably, the vetting will be poor. There will be a push against recruiting standards. Numbers will be delivered, but I worry about the standards. We will see the consequences of that over the next 10 years. It is difficult to remedy a gap of 20,000 without rapidly recruiting, but it is an obvious danger we all suffer from.

I not only support the measures I have mentioned, but I support the Home Office strategy on accrediting police training to university standard. This is not saying that all officers who join should be graduates, although half of them are. It means that their training is accredited to an independent standard and that they can use those skills in other employment, should it be accredited to that level. Unless we think more radically and broadly about police training and selection, sadly we will inevitably see some of the challenges of the past in the future.