Lord Birt
Main Page: Lord Birt (Crossbench - Life peer)
Lord Birt
My Lords, this debate addresses an issue of rising salience, not least with the White Paper on the presses, so I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Mackenzie, on his superb timing. It is also a pleasure to participate on what we should term “Mackenzie” day in your Lordships’ House, with two successive debates—albeit with slightly different spellings—inspired by a Lord Mackenzie. I, too, regret that the noble Lord, Lord Wills, is not able to make his maiden speech in today’s debate. A long time ago, when he was a young man and I was a slightly less young man, we worked together in broadcasting. It was clear even then that he was a figure of exceptional authority and real ability. He will, as your Lordships will see, adorn this House.
No one who has had experience of the police in recent years, at any level, could fail to be impressed by their thoughtfulness and by their sensitivity to the public in general, and—dare I say?—to victims in particular, although the noble Baroness, Lady Harris, powerfully reminds us that there is still, and always will be, scope for improvement. Individual officers deal routinely with bad or extreme behaviour, and we have just heard some vivid examples of that. They come face to face daily with the consequences of social malaise or policy failure. They do so with courage and without complaint.
There are many agencies in the criminal justice system, and all have made a contribution to the long-term decline in offending—and there can be no doubt that there has been a long-term decline. However, no one can doubt that the police, alongside those other agencies, have played their part in these important advances too. Yet there can be no room whatever for complacency. Offending in the UK is still high by global standards. Crime is still responsible for enormous individual harms and for massive social and economic costs. Therefore, we need new policies and ever more effective agencies that can bear down on crime, and can reduce it yet more substantially. This needs to happen now against the grim backdrop of deficit reduction, from which no public sector organisation can be immune. This is, then, an opportune moment for a fresh and fundamental look at policing in the UK—a good moment to scrutinise the model that in all its essentials is now 50 years old, a model which was left relatively untouched by the previous Government.
The first challenge is to create a structure that focuses on different categories of crime. It is not self-evident that 43 forces structured around metropolitan areas and old county lines is an appropriate model for dealing with crime and disorder today. SOCA is a real advance, as is the regional focus on counterterrorism. However, many policing functions in the 43 forces may be better provided at local, regional or national level.
At grassroots level, in the immediate locality with which we can all identify, we need an intense and accountable focus on anti-social behaviour and locally generated volume crime. There are issues, too, at regional level. I recently saw an excellent programme on television about a truly impressive and innovative specialist police unit for rape set up by Hampshire police. At the end of the programme, the rape unit was closed down. That was because serious sexual crime in Hampshire was infrequent and its incidence unpredictable, so the utilisation of officers was uneven. The obvious answer, perhaps, was that this very real centre of excellence should have extended its geographic focus to a more appropriate regional level, but structural impediments stood in the way. On the other hand, some crime has a more national or global focus. Cyber crime costs our economy literally billions of pounds, but the police's focus on online fraud is simply lamentable. Here I declare an interest as chairman of PayPal Europe.
At all those different levels, not just at the most local level, the police need to be more accountable for the outcomes that we want them to deliver. At national level, we should also re-evaluate the architecture of the oversight institutions, including ACPO, to ensure that there is a challenging, strategic and performance-enhancing centre at the very heart of British policing.
Secondly, the police need to bring their workforce practices into line with the world around them, which has changed massively over recent decades. Frankly, Governments have, for perfectly understandable reasons, dodged that issue for too long. As with MI5 and SOCA, policing at every level needs to focus more on the offender and less on cleaning up after the offence. That points to more intelligence-based policing, greater analysis and a smarter use of technology. Modern policing needs greater flexibility and a wider range of capabilities than a single point of entry currently allows, with different kinds of specialists and front-line officers focusing on different kinds of crime. Moreover, police pay should relate to achievement, not to tenure. Weak performance should also be addressed, as in other organisations, and pensions should be portable, offering greater workforce mobility.
There are operational issues as well. Shift patterns should be more flexible, allowing commanders more easily to match resource to operational need. There is more crime and disorder on a Saturday night than on a Monday morning. Police productivity can be increased in other ways. Procurement of helicopters and the like should be centralised, not localised. Back-office services inefficiently duplicated across multiple forces can be outsourced, and all core policing processes should be re-examined and made fit for purpose and cost-effective—a common call.
I note, as did a previous speaker, the joint report released this week by the Audit Commission and HMIC suggesting that only 12 per cent of police costs could be saved through greater efficiency. From my experience, I would say that, for a mature bureaucracy, that is a very modest target indeed.
The third challenge is one for Ministers, not for the police. Much public and, indeed, political rhetoric connects the notion of reducing crime exclusively with uniformed front-line policing. In truth, we will not bear down on crime as we could and should unless and until policymakers, and all the multiple agencies in and around the criminal justice system, work harmoniously together with matching and complementary objectives and focus hard on the offender. Together, they must aim to prevent individuals entering the pathway to offending and to address the causes of the offending behaviour in those who do, particularly in relation to drugs. Finally, they must strive at all costs to prevent repeat offending.
Only when we have effective multiagency working in democratically accountable structures with high-quality information and performance reporting have we any hope of achieving the massive further reduction in crime which I am sure is possible, and which I am also sure all here desire.