Police and Crime Commissioners

Lord Wasserman Excerpts

Monday 29th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wasserman (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Lexden on securing this debate on police and crime commissioners, a subject with which I have been directly concerned for longer than I care to remember and about which, as many noble Lords know, I have remained passionately supportive despite the rough ride they have had in the media and, from time to time, even in your Lordships’ House. As my noble friend has just said, the next set of national PCC elections is due to take place in May 2020. This, therefore, is probably as good a time as any to review the performance of PCCs and to consider any ideas for making them even more effective in keeping their communities safe.

Before we think about changing the way in which PCCs operate, it is worth reminding ourselves why PCCs were introduced in the first place. Before PCCs, local policing—that is, policing aimed at keeping local communities safe by preventing crime and anti-social behaviour—was seen as one of the principal responsibilities of the Secretary of State for the Home Department. The policies and procedures for local policing were therefore set largely by Home Office officials, including myself in the 1980s and 1990s, collaborating with ACPO—the Association of Chief Police Officers—and, to a lesser extent, the Association of Police Authorities. This was seen as the most effective way of providing local policing, because policing was seen not as a local service to be overseen by local people but as a national service to be provided to local people by professionals; that is, by police officers and Home Office bureaucrats under direction from London.

The extent to which local policing was seen as a national responsibility to be managed from London was brought home to me most forcefully in 2010 when ACPO published a response to the new Home Secretary’s proposals for PCCs. In that document, it argued that local PCCs were inappropriate because local policing was,

“a national service locally delivered”.

In other words, chief constables collectively regarded policing as a national organisation like Boots delivering local service through local branches managed centrally from corporate headquarters. The idea of PCCs was to turn this arrangement on its head.

The Act made local policing—that is, keeping local communities safe—the direct responsibility of local people. It empowered them to exercise this responsibility by enabling them to elect a local police and crime commissioner, whom they held accountable through the ballot box for keeping them safe. It became the responsibility of this directly elected PCC to maintain an efficient and effective police force and to hold accountable the local professional head of this force, the chief constable, for meeting the policing needs of the community as identified by the PCC.

I will expand for a moment on the concept of holding the chief constable to account. There is much talk about PCCs holding their chief constable to account. It is interpreted as meaning that the PCC has to act as a sort of auditor, ensuring that the force provides good value for money. Of course value for money is important, but the essential idea underlying PCCs was not to improve value for money but to improve the links between a local community and the police force by holding the chief constable to account for meeting the policing needs of the community, as identified by the PCC. This was a radical idea and it was often lost in discussions about PCCs.

Briefly, the demands on local policing are more or less infinite. They extend from preventing murders to reducing graffiti, from dealing with domestic abuse to ensuring that traffic moves smoothly. At the same time, the resources available to forces to meet these needs are severely limited. The key issue therefore is who decides on the allocation of the scarce policing resources between the more or less infinite number of competing policing needs.

As I have said, in the days before PCCs, these decisions were taken primarily by professionals in London—Home Office officials and chief constables, neither of whom had any real skin in the game because they were unlikely to be members of the communities directly affected. Under PCCs, it is the members of local communities who call the tune. They determine community safety priorities or policing needs and, through their PCCs, it is they who hold their local forces accountable for meeting these needs.

I have made much of this point because I feel that it is not fully appreciated by those who comment on the work of PCCs and who are full of ideas for how to make them more effective. I fear that some of these suggestions, however, run the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater and taking us back to central control of local policing.

I have no doubt that there are many ways of modifying the powers and responsibilities of PCCs to make them more responsive to their local communities and more effective in keeping these communities safe. I have made many such suggestions, both in your Lordships’ House through the Select Committee and elsewhere. For example, on the question of responsiveness I recommended the introduction of a power of recall for PCCs. This would give local communities the opportunity to change their PCC if enough local electors felt that this would make things better in one way or another. But recall is an expensive and disruptive procedure, and must be handled very carefully.

I also believe that the present electoral arrangements for PCCs would benefit from review. If the aim of electoral arrangements is to maximise the percentage of the electorate who vote for their local PCCs, might there not at least be a case for using the familiar first past the post system for PCC elections, rather than the present supplementary vote, which many people found confusing in the last two PCC elections and which led to hundreds of thousands of spoilt ballots in the 2016 election?

As for increasing the effectiveness of PCCs in keeping their communities safe, I have always believed strongly in extending the influence of PCCs beyond policing to other parts of the criminal justice system such as the courts and probation service, and even to health, housing and the local environment, each of which plays a key role in preventing crime and anti-social behaviour.

There is also an urgent need to review the relationship between PCCs and the rest of the policing landscape, including the inspectorate, the College of Policing, the National Crime Agency, the Independent Office for Police Conduct, the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners itself. Each has its own mission statement and governance arrangements, and each is understandably trying to extend its influence, reputation and power. Only the Home Secretary can bring these organisations together in one room to decide that they are all moving in the same direction in the most effective way.

Finally, there is an urgent need to review the availability of scientific and technological support services for local forces—particularly ICT services, which have been significantly affected by the abolition of the National Policing Improvement Agency, which occurred when PCCs were introduced. The Home Office, having abandoned the business of providing this service, set up the new Police ICT Company, owned by PCCs collectively, to fill the gap. The Police ICT Company has welcomed this challenge and is up for it, but it needs the political support of the Home Secretary and additional national resources if it is to succeed in meeting its very ambitious and critical mission.

All our institutions can do with a review from time to time. PCCs are probably due for some sort of review about now. My plea is that such a review must be wide ranging and look at the environment within which PCCs operate, rather than simply at the work of PCCs themselves. Most importantly, such a review must not forget the fundamental premise of PCCs: namely, that local policing, if it is to be effective, must meet local needs. This in turn means that PCCs must be responsible primarily to local people through the ballot box.