Police Federation Reform (Normington Report)

Mark Reckless Excerpts

Thursday 13th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (Con)]

As my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton North (Michael Ellis) said, it is a shocking statistic that 91% of members of the Police Federation demand change. But another shocking statistic from a poll is that only 1% of police officers believe that politicians support the police. It is important that it is understood by police officers in particular that this debate is not Members of Parliament having a go at the police, still less the constables, sergeants and inspectors who do the vast amount of policing work. In terms of even-handedness I would add that last month I was fortunate enough to have a debate in Westminster Hall when we examined the Association of Chief Police Officers, and Members were as excoriating of that organisation as hon. Members have been today of the Police Federation.

The background to the Police Federation is important. We had four police strikes between 1872 and 1919, and the federation was a resolution of the labour discontent involving John Syme and Tommy Thiel, the people who set up the initial police unions, and what was seen in the first world war.

Of my various books on the history of the police, the one that I think contains the best summary of the setting up of the Police Federation is Richard Cowley’s “A History of the British Police.” He writes:

“The Police Federation was established in 1919 for the ‘purpose of enabling members of the police forces in England and Wales to consider and to bring to the notice of police authorities and the Secretary of State, all matters affecting their welfare and efficiency, other than questions of discipline and promotion affecting individuals’. At long last, for the first time in ninety years, the Police Federation gave the police what they had been agitating for—the right to confer; a representative, negotiating body.

But in granting this, constraints were placed upon it. The right of the police to take strike action was specifically withdrawn, and it was made a criminal offence for any police officer to strike or for anyone to induce him to do so. Thus it was called the Police Federation rather than a police union”.

That is really important in informing what we say today.

We also need to understand that the structures of the Police Federation date all the way back to 1919 and that much of its internal organisation relies upon statute. Those structures have changed significantly less, to put it mildly, than have most organisations and institutions over the past 95 years. That might require Parliament to change some measures in respect of the Police Federation, but I think that ideally any such changes should be led by the federation.

When Stephen Williams gave evidence to the Home Affairs Committee, in contrast to the three officers who appeared before us in our previous inquiry, whom we did not see as representative of the Police Federation—he was elected—we felt that our concerns were being listened to and that he was dealing with the federation’s affairs as openly as he could, subject to some serious constraints. We wish him well in changing that organisation, having commissioned the Normington report. We want to see it pushed through, so it is really important that we do not just have this debate today and then let the issue go off the boil. That is why the Committee is having the inquiry. We have followed up on a number of our inquiries, which I hope will be one mechanism by which we can keep accountability and public reporting of these changes.

Recent reforms to the police have contained so many detailed changes that it can be difficult to keep track. The Police Federation is almost unique in not having unionisation—there are also the armed forces, of course—as the police do not have the right to strike and do not have a union as such. Some of the recent changes for the police have been different from what has happened elsewhere in the public services. To give just one example, the police had their pay increments frozen for two years. That might sound like a small thing, but I do not believe that it is, because across much of the rest of the public sector, despite the vaunted public sector pay freeze and now the 1% maximum increase, public servants have been receiving rises almost automatically year on year as they serve in a post. Those increments push them up pay scales in a way that the police have been specifically excluded from. That is one source of discontent among the police.

Another thing that stands out about the police is that, uniquely in the public services, they cannot be sacked, except for gross misconduct. There is no mechanism by which one can insist that a police officer is made redundant. I thought that we were going to change that. Tom Winsor rightly drew attention to it. The idea that after two years of probation someone has a job for life, or at least for 30 years, has been done away with in every other sector, if indeed it was ever there.

I will enjoy hearing the Home Secretary when she strays beyond her brief and sets out some of the principles that we, as Conservatives, should seek to apply in future. It is difficult to reconcile those principles with leaving that “jobs for life” specific legislative exemption for the police while every other employee is potentially subject to that type of dismissal. Once a police officer has a job and has been in probation for two years, irrespective of the level of the crime or the amount of money in the public sector, they have that job and nothing can be done about it. That sets the police apart, and I was looking forward to seeing that changed. I will be disappointed if the Home Secretary does not take that forward.

Another area that we need to look at, in relation to the straitened financial circumstances, is facility time, meaning the number of police officers working on Police Federation business and the amount of their working time that is taken up by it. There have been reductions in police officer numbers overall, as the shadow Minister, the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson), vigorously emphasises, although they have not been as great as they might have been, as a result of the efficiencies and changes that we have made, for which the Minister deserves much support. However, when we have had those changes, have we seen similar, and indeed appropriate, reductions in the amount of time spent on Police Federation duties?

Although it is good to have wider consultation, I think that some of the structures of the Police Federation lead to a use of time that is perhaps not the most productive. We need to look carefully at the extent to which police officers could be spending more time on front-line duties and less on that part of federation business that might not be delivering directly the representative benefits that its members need. I hope we will consider that in addition to whether some of the police officers could get back the £500 that it is said is being held on their behalf.

I would like briefly to discuss the No. 2 accounts. I have not seen evidence that anything has been going on within the accounts that should not have been, and still less that there has been any misappropriation of funds—I would like to make it clear that I am not suggesting that there is. However, the very fact that they are known as No. 2 accounts raises, for many people, the idea that money might not be properly accounted for. We hear of people running a second book of accounts in a business: one that is real and one that is for the tax authorities. When people hear of the Police Federation No. 2 accounts, they wonder whether something like that is going on. I have no evidence that it is, but I am concerned that people will draw conclusions that may not be justified until such a time as that money is properly accounted for, the chairman of the Police Federation knows what is going on with those accounts and they are put properly into the public domain. As a body, the Police Federation should not operate only for its members, but act in the public interest.

In talking about the public interest, I think that legal action is an incredibly important area for us to examine. The Chair of the Select Committee, the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), spoke earlier about our terms of reference. I strongly questioned the officers who appeared before the Committee on what they were doing with regard to the legal actions. I think that is an area for us to include in our terms of reference and in our report. I do not think that should mean delving into the details of current legal actions, but we should look back and get some baseline about what actions the money has been spent on, how often the police defend a member and how often they proactively go out with a sword, as my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton North said, rather than simply defending their officers, making members of the public subject to a legal attack from the Police Federation and funded by it. That is an area of huge concern. We need first to understand how much of that is going on and what the baseline is before we can say what should be done about it.

I worry about how much the law firms involved are earning and on what basis they are given fees and are being commissioned. It is simply not good enough for the federation to say that it looks at the merits of each case and then decides on the basis of the prospects for success. Simply because a case might have a better than even chance of succeeding is not a sufficient reason for engaging in legal action. The federation also needs to take into account its reputation as an organisation, that of the police, the interests of its members, of course, and the public interest. I think that area of legal spending by the federation should be very closely examined.

Ultimately, I wish the chair of the Police Federation, all its elected officers and its members the very best in getting the organisation back into the sort of shape that will mean that both officers and the public can take pride in it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg). I pay tribute to many of my colleagues for their comments. The words “change” and “reform” have been used a lot in this debate and I want to focus not on specific events, but on how the force needs to evolve. The Police Federation is made up of different levels, including constables, sergeants and inspectors, who make up the majority of the police force. If change is to come about, they must embrace it.

In a fast-changing world, I think we would all call ourselves reformers, but there are, perhaps, two kinds: those who want reform and those who want reform but not now. I wonder which category the Police Federation falls into. If we observe any major traffic incident, we will see that the efficiency and ease with which all three of our blue-light services work together—the gold-silver-bronze command structure—is extremely impressive. However, if the incident is more complex and involves other agencies or wider geographical areas—such as the tragedies at King’s Cross, the events at Buncefield, the 2007 floods and the 7/7 terrorist attacks—an altogether more complicated wiring diagram is relied upon, which attempts to link together organisations, agencies and Government Departments by using complex processes and protocols that have been built over decades, but that urgently need to be updated. They are so embedded that successive Governments have been reluctant to address them.

The Police Federation must appreciate that there are cultural and technical shortcomings that affect the ability of different constabularies to work together and with other agencies. Even today, different voice procedures are used in the 43 constabularies in different parts of the country. When Cobra sits, decision making is swift, as we have seen over the past few days, but when it breaks there are 43 separate police forces, 46 separate fire services and hundreds of local authorities running separate independent local resilience forums without any formal co-ordination from above.

We can all be very proud of the London 2012 Olympics. It was the largest and most complex event the nation has ever hosted and it was incident free, thanks to the years of preparation for a time-limited event and the additional resources and structures that have now largely been dismantled. The federation needs to appreciate that. I hope it will start to appreciate that there are strategic, operational and financial efficiencies to be gained from not only simpler and stronger ministerial leadership, but the streamlining of policy formulation and unambiguous inter-agency operational command at both national and local levels.

The federation recognises and is in fact involved in the Joint Emergency Services Interoperability Programme, designed to improve joint doctrine. The federation must appreciate that if a forum such as JESIP needed to be created, there is something wrong with the way in which our emergency services work together. Given the types of natural and man-made threats we now face, it is time to overhaul our resilience capability, from the local resilience forums—the basic emergency decision-making units found in every county—all the way to Cobra at the top.

[Mark Reckless]

Will my hon. Friend explain what specific role he sees the Police Federation playing in assisting that process?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. Before the hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) answers that, may I say to him that this debate is about the Normington report on reform of the Police Federation and that the debate on the police was yesterday? He needs to focus on the Normington report and not every so often in a sentence say, “Police Federation,” to make himself in order.