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I spoke at the Police Superintendents’ Association conference about what we can expect from the new administration. In many ways, the Labour Party took a fairly minimal approach to setting out in its manifesto what they were going to do in government. I think that was partly because they were expecting not to have lots of money to spend.
I want to try to pick out some of the things I think we can expect for policing over the next four to five years.
Before I do that, I want to talk about the inheritance for this Labour government.
The first thing to say is that crime has fallen, but the types of crimes the police are now dealing with are vastly more complex to investigate and that complexity makes the job harder. And of course, we see this massive shift towards crime in the online arena.
Second, the police role as the public service of last resort has been stretched by austerity and this relates to all the work that police forces are doing every single day as they respond to the needs of vulnerable people, those in mental health crises, missing person incidents, and all the safeguarding issues which the police have to deal with.
The criminal justice system is in crisis. We are now having to release people from prison to make space so that when the police are arresting people and they’re being charged, convicted and sentenced, there’s somewhere for them to go.
Another significant part of the legacy is Police and Crime Commissioners, which didn’t exist the last time that Labour was in power. I think they have yet to work through what their relationship with Police and Crime Commissioners is going to be. What is going to be the relationship between the centre and the local in relation to who is setting policing priorities? That I think is yet undetermined, but it’s clear that there will be more central direction.
The centre of policing is weak and fragmented. The previous government abolished the National Police Improvement Agency and scattered its responsibilities to different places including the College of Policing and what is now the Police Digital Service. The NPCC cannot employ people or host major enabling or operational services because it is a result of a collaboration agreement between chief constables, and that is a very fragile basis on which to build national capabilities.
The new Labour government will find that the Home Office has been gutted of its capability to set objectives for policing and to monitor performance. A lot of that capability is gone, and I think one of its first tasks is to rebuild the capability of the Home Office to play a role in policing policy.
The Safer Streets Mission is one of the five missions which Labour leader and now Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer set out in the set out in the Labour Manifesto. This includes a 10-year mission to halve violence against women; halve the incidence of night crime; raise confidence in every police force to its highest levels; and reverse the collapse and the proportion of crimes solved. And to do some of that, there will be the recruitment of 13,000 police officers, PCSOs and specials to fill neighbourhood policing roles.
What is a mission led approach and how is it different? The first thing about a mission led approach is to set long-term, ambitious and stretching goals. There is going to be an emphasis on prevention rather than cure and it will be a whole system approach with the mission hosted centrally, chaired by the Prime Minister but drawing on expertise across government departments. The Safer Streets Mission is going to be much wider than policing.
And then the final piece of the puzzle is how to strengthen the centre of policing.
You have different organisations at the national level, none of whom have powers to really make anyone do anything. You have national portfolio leads, chief officers spending maybe one day a week volunteering their time for the National Police Chiefs’ Council, trying to persuade all their colleagues in forces, to adopt common approaches and common standards. It doesn’t work. It hasn’t worked for years.
One area where this approach has failed is technology. It is a complete mess the way in which the police service tries to deploy technology at the national level. What you really need is one single source of governance, one strategy to deliver what needs to be achieved in terms of digital, data and technology; and to take the national police databases out of the Home Office, where they have been badly managed, and put them back into policing.
I think a National Police Headquarters could provide the basis for this work. These matters are still under discussion, and we will have to see whether the government in the end supports such an approach.
I expect the government’s police reform plans to be packaged up in a White Paper, published before the end of the year, which will set out a reform agenda around the key enablers, potentially leading to legislation next year.
This is an edited version of the speech that Dr Muir gave to the Police Superintendents’ Association conference on 10 September 2024.
