On 23 October 2009 Tom Levitt spoke to a conference organised by North Yorkshire Police Authority on ways of improving police accountability. He was invited as a member of the David Blunkett's team which had reviewed the subject at the Home Secretary's request, following the Governent's decision to drop the provision of directly elected policing representatives from the Policing and Crime Bill. Around 100 people representing the police, police authorities, local government and partner organisations were present in Northallerton.


The Blunkett review came about because of a dissatisfaction amongst Labour MPs, the police and local government generally that the proposals in the Policing white paper - for direct elected police commissioners at Basic Command Unit level - was a step too far.

Many aspects of the Bill had received a hearty welcome:

• the ending of central targetsf
• focus on the Policing pledge
• Councillor Calls for Action

Just days before the second reading of the Policing Bill, in December last year, the Government withdrew the proposals for direct elections from the Bill, at least temporarily.

When Jacqui Smith wrote to David Blunkett on 16 December last, the then Home Secretary concluded:

“I would be grateful if you could provide me with a personal assessment of how direct elections could be delivered in a way that strengthens public accountability and supports the work already being done by local government colleagues to improve public confidence across public services.”

Let me say straight away that we failed in that mission. We failed to suggest a way in which direct elections could be delivered to achieve that aim; and we failed because we did not believe that direct elections were the right way to go.

Over the next 15 minutes or so I hope to show that we came up with something more satisfactory; I hope to demonstrate that democracy and accountability are not always best served by direct elections, especially in the operation of individual public services with a relatively narrow remit.

One conclusion I reached was that it may not be necessary to have the same method of accountability in every locality.

David asked me to join him on his working party. My views on this issue were well known, having written an article on this subject in Progress magazine the previous October. There I had said that

“Democracy is about accountability, the degree of ownership the governed have over the process of governance.”

I had previously worked together with David on a Fabian Society pamphlet which made over 50 recommendations for policy changes in respect of the relationship between Government and the third sector, which we published a year ago. I continue to Chair the All Party Parliamentary Group on the Community and Voluntary Sector.

He also invited Alun Michael, a former Home office minister, Baroness Ruth Henig, a former police authority Chair and several other MPs to join us. The All Party Group on Local Government under Clive Betts was looking at the criminal justice system at the same time in a complementary investigation, which was helpful. And we brought in two noted academics in the field, Robert Macfarland and Professor Simon Holloway, as consultants.

Contrary to popular belief, I think policing is one of the most political of our public services, political with a small ‘p’, and it is right that this should be so. Informal scrutiny takes place all the time. It is impossible to say that the police are independent of politics even though the police must be independent of political control at an operational level.

So that’s my first point: where there is direct political control of policing there is a strong correlation with and tendency towards totalitarian politics. When constituents write to me to ask me why no one has been arrested in case A, no one charged in case B, no one sent to prison in case C and too many let out early in case D, I have to remind them that in this country politicians do not have operational control of the police, the Crown Prosecution Service, or the courts.

We cannot turn policing and justice on and off to suit the political whim of the day and we must not try to do so. But that does not mean that we should be complacent or accept the status quo, because quite frankly what we have now – in formal terms, at least – is not good enough.

I am not suggesting that the Policing Bill was itself dangerous or intended to be totalitarian, far from it. It had a lot of very good stuff in it, as I have said. But I do believe that the proposal in the Policing Green Paper to replace councillors with a directly elected Crime and Policing Representative (CPR) for each Basic Command Unit (BCU) was a vote too far and that is why I was motivated to write my article and subsequently accept David’s invitation to join his working party.

Just imagine having a directly elected BCU commander in your area either coming from the ranks of the political cognoscenti or an independent with a populist agenda.

What that does to the career structure within the police is one thing, but how would they be funded? The Bill – and I mean the legislation, not the TV programme – suggested that they would inherit at least some of existing BCU budgets.
 
The plus side of that was that it would cost nothing in real terms. In practice, my experience of BCU budgets is that they start off being 150% committed and if you can get that down to 100% by the year end you are doing well.

To get it down to significantly below that, to give your new Crime and Policing Representative the freedom and flexibility to make their mark, is a challenge indeed. To ‘make their mark’ is of course the reason why they stood for election and got appointed.

If they are to have operational independence then operational action and the funds to go with it are essential; and they aren’t there. It would have been impossible to deliver Crime and Policing Representatives as envisaged by the Bill within existing budgets.

So what about the ‘mark’ they would make?

My local BCU, Derbyshire’s ‘B’ Division, covers two constituencies and two district councils. In Birmingham I believe the whole city is one BCU. To give one person that degree of budgetary control – sorry, operational control – of the police could have unforeseen and unfortunate consequences.

• What if they were elected on a small turnout, disproportionately influenced by a very strong vote in a small part of the area and their spending plans favoured that one area, irrespective of its needs relative to others?
  
• What if the CPR was a representative of the BNP who was racially discriminatory in the way he or she allocated funds and supported projects?
  
• Or if they were a politician elected on a seductive platform of cutting public spending ‘on principle’ to keep Council Tax down, irrespective of policing needs, fighting on a programme in direct conflict with that of the Chief Constable?

It doesn’t bear thinking about.

I speculate no more on this, suffice to say that it would have been impossible to deliver CPRs satisfactorily, as envisaged by the Bill, within our existing political framework.

Another Party has suggested that this operational independence by an elected person should be at ‘Commissioner’ level, by which I assume they mean – in effect – what we would recognise today as a directly elected Chair of the Police Authority with teeth, or a post which combined Authority Chair with that of Chief Constable.

Either interpretation would have dire consequences, to my mind: all the problems I mentioned which potentially face a directly elected Crime and Policing Representative would also confront the Commissioner, in spades.

My first point ends with the conclusion that operational control must remain with the police themselves. Short of wholesale boundary changes of the sort that were so comprehensively rejected just a couple of years ago, that means leaving our Chief Constables more or less with the same powers and independence as they have now.

That may sound like a recipe for no change but it is not. With the power of the Chief Constable also goes the responsibility, and it is the discharge of that power and responsibility that is the subject of the accountability which – and the Bill is right on this – does need an overhaul.

So, who is the police service accountable to now and to whom should it be accountable in future? When we have sorted that issue out, we can turn to how accountability can be improved.

One of the nice, simple things about having a single target to aim at, in the Policing Pledge, is that we can see “delivering improved levels of public confidence” as the single point of accountability and measurement. Everything else, everything, would come under the heading of ‘operational decisions’. And operational decisions, by convention and consensus, are matters for the police and not for anyone else.

If only life were that simple.

To whom are the police accountable now? That question is similar to (though not exactly the same as) ‘who thinks the police should be or are accountable to them?’

• The Home Secretary, for a start.
• Number 2, Boris.
• And 3, Police authorities around the country.

The Media (with a capital M) certainly think that the police should be accountable to them and in principle media scrutiny is, of course, a good thing (he says, through gritted teeth).

Media scrutiny is of course very subjective and inconsistent; they have a role to play and I would not dream of being the one who tries to step in and redefine that role for them.

Missing from this list are local authorities and communities, and of course these two are not one and the same thing. Also missing is the regional tier, to which I will return in a moment.

Of course there has to be accountability to Parliament through the Home Secretary. There are national and international policing issues which need to be addressed: terrorism, financial crime, cross-border crime, co-operation between police in different nations, extradition; many other examples exist.

And with a single policing target set down in law – to improve levels of public confidence – the Home Secretary must expect to be held accountable for its achievement or otherwise.

There must also be national co-ordination, the establishment and dissemination of best practice, improving the compatibility of systems for exchanging information, etc, etc. Our constitution provides only for the Home Office and its boss to be responsible for that as we do not have a national police service, so again these are issues for which there must be national accountability.

Many thought that the proposed regionalisation of the police under Charles Clarke was a step too far and indeed it had all the appearance of a stillbirth. In my territory of the East Midlands there was particularly strong opposition to the regional agenda, but you might not think that if you were to ask the question now.

I am not saying that there is a new found enthusiasm for regionalisation; what I am saying is that police authorities and constabularies looked over the precipice in trepidation but were not totally appalled with what they saw.

Lessons have been learned from that process. One of them is that regional co-ordination on serious and organised crime can be enhanced by formalising some elements of cross-border policing in a mutually agreed context.

There is, of course, no appropriate regional body by which a regional police service could be scrutinised in England or to which it could be held accountable but that’s a story for another day. For now, let us take that as another reason why the region is not the optimum level for scrutiny and accountability.

Which brings us to the police authority. Here, and in my home in Derbyshire, the authority is coterminous with a two-tier County Council.

What’s wrong with Police Authorities? In some ways, not a lot. Police authorities include indirectly elected members from elected bodies as well as Home Secretary appointees. Members of the authority are regulated to ensure that they have diverse and appropriate backgrounds. And the councillors bring accountability to the table – arguably – though not a mandate.

In Derbyshire, and I am sure the same is true in North Yorkshire, they can and do consult until the cows come home and the thin blue line has gone blue in the face.

In Derbyshire’s case, the level of consultation and stakeholder involvement is very good – to the extent that when the authority went to the Government earlier this year to argue for better funding for policing in our county, they were able to show that not only did every MP in the county, of every political party, support their bid to raise their Council Tax precept by a relatively high amount – but that the public did too.

It didn’t remove from us the threat of capping for next year, but it did win us an extra £400,000 for this one.

But isn’t it the case that the only issue on which the Police Authority is obliged – or was obliged until recently – to consult upon is their budget?

Let me put ten questions to the Police Authority! You can treat them as rhetorical if you like, you don’t have to answer, you’re not accountable to me.

1. How deep and wide is the relationship between the Authority and other members of the Local Strategic Partnership (LSP)?
2. Has policing changed as a result of membership of the LSP?
3. Who are the Police Authority’s key partners and allies on the LSP and what does partnership working look like?
4. According to what principle does the police authority constitution exclude representatives of lower tier local authorities as of right?
5. What are the arguments for including other members of the Family of Justice, the magistrates, Crown Prosecution Service, Probation Service – on a body like this which must be able to inspire public confidence?
6. What mechanism do the councillor members of the Authority have for reporting back to their Council on issues relating to policing, especially insofar as they overlap the Council’s own duties and responsibilities?
7. Here’s another – and I have to be very careful how I phrase this one – how can we be absolutely sure that the councillor members of the Police Authority sincerely want to sit on it and play an active role? Or is it the case that the brightest, most effective and most ambitious Councillors see their future as portfolio holders and not as also-rans on bodies like this?
8. To whom is the Police Authority accountable and by whom is it scrutinised?
9. Why not just have a directly elected stand-alone police authority?
10. And finally, is the Police Authority the right place to be looking to for optimising accountability and scrutiny?

Let me dwell only on those last three questions, not least because that avoids us discussing or me answering numbers 6 and 7, the deliberately provocative ones about councillors… except to say that I used to be a County Councillor, so I do have some idea about that of which I talk.

Every existing democratic election should rank somewhere on a spectrum which includes ‘essential’, ‘necessary’ and ‘valuable’. My concern is that bringing direct elections into the delivery and operation of individual public services with a very narrow remit, such as a Police Authority, is neither necessary nor always helpful in the process of making them accountable.

Councils, on the other hand, are designed – or have evolved – to be multipurpose, cross-cutting, general providers of services to their communities, led by members of those communities. Health and policing have always been seen as more professionally driven, outside the local authority fold.

But let’s look at health for a moment, to see if there is something we can learn. There is no strong call for directly elected health authorities – though there may be a philosophical case for it.

What there is, though, is a very definite blurring at the edge of what is health and what is social care. The blurring is covering a wider and wider field as time goes by and there are elements now which are impossible to define: are they health? Are they social care?

So how has health responded on the accountability and scrutiny front?

Once upon a time, there were Community Health Councils. They were composed of well meaning individuals, without the mandate that comes with election, who had certain powers of inspection and the right to be heard when they reported back to the health authorities.

A poor Community Health Council report was not a good thing to have – but some CHCs were better than others. In fact, I don’t believe those who insist that there was a halcyon day when CHCs were all perfect, they held health authorities to account and took them to task, and that these giant-slayers were abolished because they were too successful, because that isn’t the case. At best, they were patchy!

I do however have some sympathy for those who say that their successors, Patient Involvement Partnerships, didn’t work as well as they should. This was partly because the best but most disgruntled elements of the former CHCs didn’t want to co-operate with them, partly because they were a half way house and who wants to live in a half way house when the endgame hasn’t been defined? And partly because, well, they just didn’t work.

But as one who lives and breathes the third sector, the voluntary sector, I do like LINKs. Because LINKs, the current and still maturing machine for scrutinising health and holding it accountable, whilst having head and heart in health have one foot in the voluntary sector and one in my other spiritual home, local government.

They are predicated upon the capacity of the voluntary sector to adapt, to find time, to take up problems and issues. And they are built equally upon a process of local authority scrutiny, based on select committee lines, which is more sophisticated, capable and authoritative than it has ever been before.

Put these elements together and in LINKs you have a working blend of local authority accountability and operational independence.

The lesson for policing from this is: health has done the work for you.

We never did have Community Policing Councils in that way.

We have never had Victim and Potential Victim Involvement Partnerships, at least not at Police Authority level.

And we have never had the ears, eyes and probing fingers of local authority scrutiny panels looking in depth at policing issues.

If you have never been probed, you ought to try it, at least once. A couple of Chief Constables I have discussed it with both told me that their first appearances before such panels were scary but exciting, fulfilling and worthwhile. ‘Valuable’ was another word they used.

So why not use an established and increasingly confident mechanism of accountability, the local authority scrutiny panel, in those places like North Yorkshire and Derbyshire, where upper tier authorities share police borders, to scrutinise the work of the police and the police authority?

But that still doesn’t answer the question: is the police authority the right place to be looking for better scrutiny and accountability?

In Derbyshire we have eight district councils, lower tier authorities, and 4 police BCUs; in North Yorkshire I think you have 8 plus 3, with a similar population size.

Those local authorities have scrutiny committees too. Like select committees in Parliament, they can produce reports even though the Council of which they are a part may not be responsible for delivering the service under scrutiny.

It is precisely the process of scrutiny, the call for and collection of evidence, the questioning of witnesses in public, the independent advice and assessment and the publication of the objective findings of the committee, that makes these bodies so potentially powerful a tool.

I sit on a scrutiny committee in Parliament. We scrutinise the Department for Work and Pensions, so I know that these committees work.

Why not open up the working of the BCU to scrutiny by lower tier authority scrutiny committees? After all, they are partners in the LSP and Local Area Agreements, aren’t they? And as with health, are there not an increasing number of areas where policing and local authority interests overlap, with increasing depth?

Let me give you an example.

It does not matter to the Home Secretary whether Acacia Avenue in Northallerton has three street lights on it or four. Yorkshire Forward are responsible for developing the regional economic strategy around here but they don’t give a monkeys about street lighting either.
 
Hambleton District Council might say it isn’t really in their brief but North Yorkshire County Council say it’s right up their street, and ultimately they will decide whether Acacia Avenue gets three street lights or four.

Probably three.

The residents of Acacia Avenue say

“We would like four but we understand why we can only have three. But at least, if we can only have three, let’s not have one there but let’s have one here instead; that way it will illuminate the ginnel, cut down on pickpocketing and under age drinking down there, not to mention the smoking of you know what, and so overall it will make the pensioners in the bungalows feel that much safer and will increase public confidence in policing.”

Aha! By increasing public confidence in policing, the one and only purpose of the police – according to the Policing Bill – we hit our target. 

“And if you can send us a bobby down there for a stroll once a fortnight too, so much the better.”

But please note – this is not the voice of the police authority speaking, nor even of the local authority or its scrutiny committee. It is the voice of the community, a community which in this case might be half a dozen houses and the same number of old folks’ bungalows.

A community is a place in which people live where they have issues in common.

A community is like a car: if it’s not working properly you are as well to get underneath it and look up to find out what is going wrong and see how to put it right.

And it is the voice of the community which should direct – as far as possible – the nature of day to day policing.

Safer Neighbourhood Teams have been, to my mind, revolutionary. That team of police officers and the PCSOs are as close as you will get to the ‘old time coppers’ of the song. You can see who your local ones are on the internet. You can send them emails, or phone calls on a dedicated non-emergency number, and you can even text them in some areas if you want them to visit.

They are seen around the shops, schools, even nurseries where children learn at an early age to recognise and trust the uniform and learn to talk to them. They have a liaison officer working with the local council on precisely those cross-cutting grey areas where police and local authority responsibilities overlap.

Gone are the days when the BCU Commander reluctantly had to summon the members of the Police Consultative Committee to its quarterly meeting in a room that could double as a cell, attended by the same five people as ever, those grey old men with more chips on their shoulder than Harry Ramsden, apart from the one who never spoke, and together wade through the agenda of minutes, matters arising and the councillors’ apologies for absence.

Today consultation is proactive with meetings in the community, targeted at different subgroups, different times of the day and in conjunction with different agencies.

The Neighbourhood Watch is still there but then so today are the KINs – Key Individual Networks. These are people who are chosen or invited, or apply, to be representative members of advisory bodies, both real or virtual in cyberspace, working with police to ensure a permanent, effective and personal approach to proactive community policing and crime.

The invitation is important: that Consultative Committee meeting I described a moment ago was not entirely fictional and you know it. Choosing representatives is not the same as appointing delegates; by choosing representatives it is possible to make sure that all local communities, including minorities, are properly represented in the KIN.

We know that minorities have more to lose from crime than others: and more to gain from inclusive policing.

Claims to be able to police some mixed race communities without the consent and involvement of a sizeable young Muslim population, for example, are doomed to failure. Racial minorities, religious minorities and, in some places, gay minorities, even people with disabilities are targeted for crime.

Young people, so often the hoody bogeymen of the press, are statistically more likely to be the victims of crime than its perpetrators and in too many areas women suffer from disproportionately high risks of domestic or sexual violence.

We are all members of minorities; communities are made up of minorities; it is possible to balance the policing need of the collective and its minorities and I am pleased that so many police services have recognised this, often ahead of their politicians.

But whereas I accept that everyone is in a minority, I neither like nor advocate what some people call ‘the culture of the victim’. No one is born to be a victim. But people, men, women and children, members of communities and communities themselves do fall victim to crime or antisocial behaviour every hour of every day.

In building communities, building confidence, building – yes – for common contentment, those three ‘C’s, we need to have the four ‘P’s that David Blunkett identified in his pamphlet in place too: protect against crime, prevent crime, pursue the perpetrators of crime and work with other partners in that cause.

All of these points populate the purposes of the police!

I want to summarise what I have said about accountability and scrutiny as follows:

• The most important level to get right is the community. Policing must be user-friendly, flexible and fair; Safer Neighbourhood Teams and their community support networks, which reflect those being policed, are where the public judge the effectiveness of policing most and where confidence in policing is made or lost.
• At the Basic Command Unit I want to see engagement with other appropriate partners and especially lower tier local authorities, with meaningful mechanisms for democratic scrutiny in place.
• At police authority level I want to see better consultations with the public and strategic partners on the police budget and strategic priorities for policing, peer scrutiny by top or single tier authorities and greater involvement of better supported Police Authority members in hands-on activity outside formal meetings.
• At regional level the interchange and accountability will essentially be peer to peer, with Police authorities sharing intelligence, good practice and super-strategic working on serious and organised crime and on terrorism.
• And at Government level I expect the Home Secretary to continue to carry the can for all of that, plus the international element as well.

I am aware that the priorities I have outlined today may not be the same in every dot, line and detail as those outlined in David’s booklet. I didn’t come here to read it to you, after all, and it does reflect the work of a committee – you know what they say about committees and camels.

Seriously, these are the views I fed into David’s working party process, as amended by the process of working on the team for six months, attending every meeting and others besides, talking to the Local Government Association and others involved in local government, sitting down with the Association of Police Authorities and my own Police Authority chatting with police officers, at every level from special constable to Chief Constable and also to community representatives.

They are the views of a Member of Parliament who has had the pleasure and the privilege of taking part in the Police Service Parliamentary Scheme, an internship in which MPs spend 25 days with the police, six days on patrol, both night and day shifts, sixteen looking at different aspects of our local Constabulary’s work and three looking at contrasting aspects of another police force’s work, in my case the Met.

They are the view of an MP who, when invited by the Prime Minister to bring to a Downing Street garden party the person who had contributed most to a local community in High Peak over the last year, chose to invite a PCSO.

They are views that are completely consistent with the published outcome of our deliberations after what was a very rewarding and engaging few months of work.

And they are also the views of a conscientious constituency MP representing a low crime area.

One of the drawbacks of representing a low crime area – and North Yorkshire is another – is that the fear of crime seems disproportionately high! That’s because every bit of crime there is makes the local news whilst everybody else’s crime dominates the national news media. When the same crime is reported on Sky or News 24 a dozen times each day it does feel as though crime is 12 times worse than it really is!

I hope that this has been helpful and I hope that you find the questions I have posed and left unanswered are at least as interesting and useful as those which I have attempted to address this morning.

Thank you.