If opposition to the cuts turns into mass protest, the government will need the police at its side – but as things stand, panicking ministers dialling 999 are likely to receive quite a grumpy response. Matt Ross reports
If there’s one set of unions that are normally sympathetic to the Tories, it’s the police associations. But the combined pressure of phone hacking, riots and spending cuts have badly weakened the relationship between the police and the government, and shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper is shrewdly stepping into the widening schism.
Like other public servants, the police are facing big budget cuts: officially, spending is to fall 20 per cent over the spending review period, but Police Federation chairman Paul McKeever – who represents frontline coppers – pointed out that those calculations assume that inflation stands at two per cent. The real cut, he said, is more like 30 per cent.
According to Police Superintendents’ Association president Derek Barnett, who speaks for senior officers, forces in England and Wales are set to lose 16,000 police officers and 18,000 civilian staff. “It’s naïve to believe that you can lose that many people without having an impact on the service we provide,” he said. His comments were supported by Sir Hugh Orde, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, who said: “Something is going to give, and nobody has yet been able to tell me what we should stop doing.”
Orde has a reputation for being outspoken: he recently loudly defended the police against government criticisms over the riots, after which home secretary Theresa May ignored civil servants’ advice that he should be appointed as Metropolitan Police chief and instead handed the job to Merseyside chief Bernard Hogan-Howe. On this occasion Orde was careful not to get too controversial, but nonetheless made clear his concerns over the government’s introduction of elected police commissioners.
In seeking election, he argued, prospective commissioners will have to focus on local issues – yet national crises often require different forces to work closely together, pulling resources away from local beats. During the riots the Met had to call in forces from around the country: “Without the Scots, we’d have been struggling on occasion,” he said. “National threats have to be addressed, and there are tensions in the new model.”
Cooper raised similar concerns, adding that under the government’s plans commissioners will have far-reaching powers without sufficient controls – and here too Orde attacked the reform plans, arguing that they contain “an unrestrained power to hire and fire chief constables without any checks and balances”.
The government also came under fire for a lack of strategic oversight in its policing reforms. Cooper could be expected to criticise the “chaos” emerging from what she said are uncoordinated moves to cut spending, introduce commissioners and establish a National Crime Agency – but McKeever sounded just as critical. “We have a real fear that government doesn’t know what it’s doing,” he said. “We fear that it’s basing its reforms on ideology and theory.”
He cited as an example the suggestion by Tory-aligned think tank Policy Exchange that the police should travel to work in uniform, increasing their visibility. The idea was poorly thought-out, and put forward by people who never experience risk in their working lives, he thundered: “We have some very real concerns about that kind of idiotic policy that’s being promulgated in government and elsewhere.”
Above all, though, the police feel ignored and very publicly criticised after a series of bruising encounters with the government. “There is a sense in which the police are not feeling loved,” said Barnett. “Don’t underestimate how important support is; we want the sense that the government is behind us.”
These clashes reached a peak over the riots. Some Tories have argued they were exacerbated by poor policing decisions, but McKeever said that the government had ignored repeated warnings that there might be unrest. “We pointed out last year that there could be disorder on the streets, and the response was not to engage with us; it was to rubbish us. We were accused of scaremongering,” he fulminated. The Federation repeated its warnings in May, he said, in a presentation set to the Kaiser Chiefs’ song ‘I Predict a Riot’: “You can’t get much clearer than that.”
The clear message from all three police associations was that the government’s dramatic policing reforms have not been built around detailed research and a strong evidence base – and this frustration explains why Cooper’s proposal for an independent review of policing has gone down so well. “If we can’t have a Royal Commission, then this is the next best thing,” commented Barnett.
Finally, the chair asked for questions. Recalling Hogan-Howe’s vow to wage a “war on crime”, CSW asked whether the panel thought that – following the ‘wars’ on drugs and on terrorism – it was a useful concept. Cooper danced expertly around the question: the gist of her answer was that policing is more complicated than that. But Orde was more direct: wars are for “invading armies”, he said. “I get a bit tired of talk of wars on anything. We need an approach that builds confidence in the wider community.” And Barnett held similar views: “Personally, I’ve had enough of wars, thank you, and I’d like to move away from using that terminology.”
Policing, as these officers made very clear, is not about fighting wars; it’s about working with communities to tackle problems that are complex and multi-faceted. The same is true of governance – yet since the election, Theresa May has sometimes sounded like she’s fighting a war rather than managing an organisational change process. The result is a thoroughly bolshy set of police associations, and a feeling among officers – as in many other parts of the public sector – that they’re getting a kicking for other people’s mistakes. For a Tory government pushing through an ambitious cuts programme that hasn’t yet reached its punishing peak, that’s probably not a great way to kick off the 2011-12 Parliament.