Some thoughts on Directly elected Commissioners
The idea of Directly elected Commissioners has been on the Prime Minister's agenda ever since he observed them functioning whilst visiting New York a few years ago. The specifics have yet to be developed in the light of limited guidance from the speeches by the Home Secretary and the policing minister at the ACPO conference last week.
Having lived for over six years in the USA and had the honour to chair The Surrey Police Authority here in the UK in recent years, I am convinced that several inherent structural problems will need to be addressed if the introduction of Directly elected Commissioners is to be successful.
It is important to recognise that policing in the USA operates in a very different way to that in the UK. This is fairly obvious when you bear in mind that the FBI deals with federal crime and State Pollce are distinct from local community police. I well remember a meeting with an elected Police Chief in Massachusetts shortly after 9/11, bemoaning the lack of effective coordination between the policing agencies in the USA at that time.
- The first question which therefore arises,based upon the roles and conduct of Directly elected Commissioners in the USA, is how much priority will they give to covert policing activities,which is not very high on public awareness, compared with neighbourhead policing which is very visible. We should not be surprised if Directly elected Commissioners concentrate on the latter rather than the former, as there will be more votes in it for them.
- The second area for concern are the statutorially defined relationships between the Directly elected Commissioners on the one hand, and the Chief Constables, HMIC and Partners at local and national levels on the other hand. At the heart of these relationships, the open question is how the Directly elected Commissioners set the budget for policing activities. Will they need to take account of the current arrangements whereby the vast majority of funding from the business community in one authority may be transferred from the one which raises it to another which will spend it?
- A further key concern will be about the degree to which Police Forces (chef constables) are inter dependent upon each other and upon the Directly elected Commissioners. If it is perceived by the public that they are too close in relation to operational issues, this will lead to confusion about accountability and the lack of transparency. In any event,the Directly elected Commissioners will need to have independent access to good quality Accounting/Financial advice, HR expertise and Political advice, to at least start to meet the public demand for ever greater transparency. A particular example is the role of the Directly elected Commissioners in the task of investigating and holding Police Forces to account when complaints are made against members of the force.
It is not too surprising that the coalition government is seeking improvements in policing,with reductions in unnecessary bureaucracy and duplication. Recent developments in mobile communications technology should be a great help to achieve them in terms of better value for money. However, these initiatives, whilst presenting new opportunities, also introduce serious operational consequences with which a Directly elected Commissioner will need to be familiar and capable of dealing with.
These challenges will be both technical and cultural in nature and are already arising.
This then raises the question of the support that a Directly elected Commissioner will need in relation to the current Police Authority capabilities. It is not too difficult to accept arguments to reduce the number of members, as opposed to officers, from their current size of 17. However monitoring performance is increasingly difficult in terms of metrics for determining value for money. This task becomes ever more complex with the arrival of new tools to exploit new technology becoming available.
When assessing the probability of successful introduction of Directly elected Commissioners, one can confidently expect that the devil will be in the detail. A number of the apparent irreconcilables need to be addressed in the forthcoming detailed government proposals, and Multizone have a number of key unanswered questions:
- Will the role specification and responsibilities for each Directly elected Commissioner and the relationship with the associated force be standardised nationally?
- Will they be tailored to the local circumstances to allow for local accountability in it's true sense? This could raise some difficult local political issues where effective local policing depends heavily on local partnership.
- Arising from the electoral process itself, how and when will will the elections be held and what is the period of office?
- Will political parties be able to fund candidates for Directly elected Commissioners?
- How big will constituencies be and will this have a bearing on the question of force mergers to get some of the added efficiencies of scale which could help to improve cost effectiveness?
Multizone await with interest to see how this Directly elected Commissioners agenda copes with the simultaneous emergence of the impact of Social Networking upon policing services brought into sharp relief again this week by the apparently completely unappreciated forewarning of intent to cause harm published on Facebook in relation to the Tyneside shootings.
James E Smith OBE