Why a blank cheque won't solve Britain's policing woes

Yahoo

a day ago

When it emerged last week that Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, had written to the Prime Minister warning that 'stark choices' lay ahead without significant investment in policing it all sounded rather familiar.
The week before, Rowley, along with five other police chiefs, had penned a newspaper article saying that Government pledges on knife crime, violence against women and girls, and neighbourhood policing would be at risk without additional funding.
That itself was an echo of similar statements the Met Commissioner and others had made over the previous six months. Clearly then, ahead of Wednesday's spending review, money is very much on police minds.
Few would argue that forces across England and Wales haven't continued to struggle financially since the 'austerity years' of 2010 to 2019, when the jobs of 20,000 officers and 23,500 civilian staff were cut and hundreds of police stations closed.
But the police can't pin all their woes on a lack of cash. Inefficiency is baked into the structure of the service, which was designed half a century ago, while forces haven't adapted quickly enough to seize on the potential offered up by new technology such as artificial intelligence.
And although there may not be as many officers as chiefs would like, the number has returned to pre-austerity levels, with a near-record headcount of 148,886 last September.
Meanwhile, public confidence in policing has been hit by a succession of self-made scandals, from the rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving Met officer, to police 'selfies' taken at a murder scene.
Less than half of people questioned last year as part of the Office for National Statistics' authoritative Crime Survey said police were doing a good job, down from 63 per cent ten years ago. In fact, it's the lowest figure in two decades.
At the same time, an increasingly common complaint is that officers aren't there when people need them. A staggering 54 per cent said they never see police patrols – double the figure recorded 15 years ago. 'I hear law-abiding citizens saying, 'What's the point of calling the police?'' says Andy Trotter, former chief constable of British Transport Police. 'What police chiefs were saying about not being able to tackle crime without extra funding – most people were saying 'What's new?' It has gone on for years.
'Imagine how many solvable crimes aren't being solved,' he adds.
Trotter says police officers are 'overwhelmed' by the demands on their time and have had to 'prioritise' which crimes to focus on. That has meant offences such as shoplifting, phone theft and car crime are all too often neglected.
The proportion of shoplifting cases resulting in a suspect being charged has fallen to 18 per cent from 28 per cent, in 2016, when a new system of calculating detection rates was introduced. Crimes classed as 'theft from the person', where phones, handbags and wallets are snatched, have meanwhile seen prosecution levels plummet to less than one per cent, and just one in fifty car thefts result in a charge or summons.
'Confidence in policing comes from nicking people – it's something about the everyday laying on of police hands. And it reassures the public – people want to see some action,' says Trotter, who served as an officer for 45 years in three forces, including the Met.
'I used to say, 'Get your hands on them, get cuffs on them, get them in the van'. As a cop in the West End, it would take 30 minutes to process someone. But now, with centralised custody suites and the paperwork involved, you're out of action for hours, so there's a real reluctance in marginal cases to make an arrest and leave colleagues behind,' he says.
The arrest figures provide clear evidence to support Trotter's claim. In the year to the end of March 2024, there were 720,506 arrests across England and Wales, with the number of police officers at the time standing at 142,072. That works out as 5.1 arrests per officer – more than half the arrest rate, 10.5, in 2009, before policing budgets were cut.
The drop in arrest levels may also be partly a result of the changing crime caseload, with a larger number of offences which are more complex to investigate, such as sexual violence and online fraud. In just over a decade, the number of sexual offences recorded by police has more than doubled to 205,000 last year, while police logged nearly 1.3 million offences of fraud and computer misuse, representing one in five of all crimes.
There are growing concerns too that officers have become embroiled in petty squabbles on social media at the expense of more pressing public concerns. The arrest of a couple by Hertfordshire Police, following a bitter row with a local school, highlighted the way in which it appeared police had become deflected from their core mission.
'It's breathtaking that it could be thought to be worthwhile to send six police officers to a couple who were sending WhatsApp messages about a school – they'd be much better off catching prolific burglars and serial sex abusers,' says Sir Tom Winsor, who served for ten years as head of the policing watchdog, HM Inspectorate of Constabulary, Fire and Rescue Services.
Central to concerns about the effective deployment of police officers is the recording of non-hate crime incidents (NCHIs). Analysis by The Telegraph shows that almost 100,000 NCHIs were logged by forces over the last decade, with last year's figure still around 75 per cent of the total in 2021 – when police were urged to scale back on their use.
NCHIs are not criminal offences, but incidents perceived by the complainant to be motivated by hostility or prejudice, based on their 'protected characteristics', which includes their race or religion. They are defended by police as a means of gathering intelligence and monitoring community tensions, in order to forestall criminal behaviour.
But should officers spend their valuable hours noting social media posts that are merely insulting or offensive? Winsor is doubtful. 'It's the online version of the 'broken windows' theory – nip it in the bud and it won't get worse,' says the 67-year-old lawyer. 'But there is a degree of proportionality that is necessary because you can't do everything.'
Police officers could certainly do a lot more if forces made the most of advances in technology, to free them from mundane jobs, such as redacting sensitive documents, typing up crime reports and transferring information onto separate databases.
Winsor recalls a visit to Lancashire Police in his early days as Chief Inspector of Constabulary. 'An officer told me that in order to find out what the force knew about a person, an address, a vehicle or a weapon he had to interrogate 12 different systems. Things are better now but probably not as good as the public would expect,' he says.
In 2023, a productivity review led by two former chief constables identified 26 ways of freeing-up 38 million hours of police time. That would equate to 20,000 extra police officers. The recommendations included cutting red tape, reducing sickness absence and using computer technology for clerical tasks. A second report from the productivity panel, in 2024, said a further 23 million hours could be saved – including through the expansion of AI. 'Modern technology is the golden key to police efficiency and effectiveness,' says Winsor.
Yet, progress on technology has been painfully slow – and not helped by a failure to manage large-scale projects, such as ESN (Emergency Services Network), an upgrade on the ageing emergency services communications network Airwave, which is a decade behind schedule and £3.1 billion over budget.
'You have to lay much of it at the door of the Home Office,' says Trotter. 'The replacement of Airwave has gone on for years – it's an area that has not been a success, it's wasted a lot of money and is still not resolved. It needs an inquiry,' he adds.
There are glaring inefficiencies in other areas, too. Across England and Wales, each of the 43 forces, no matter how large or small, has its own leadership team, civilian support set-up and administrative functions, such as payroll, legal affairs and human resources. Pooling some of that work would make financial sense, says Winsor.
'The back office stuff could and should be done either regionally or nationally, in the way it's done in the NHS or the military,' he says.
In 2022, a report from the independent think-tank, the Police Foundation, estimated that forces in England and Wales could save 'hundreds of millions' of pounds annually by combining support teams – as well as purchasing police uniform, equipment, vehicles, forensic services and computers centrally, rather than negotiating individual contracts with suppliers, as many constabularies do. But it seems the introduction of police and crime commissioners, a decade earlier, cemented a 'localist' approach, hindering prospects for developing a more cohesive and less fragmented system of policing, with the economies of scale that would result.
'The police and crime commissioner model has some strengths but it can hold things back, because in my time there were far too many who could not see beyond their force boundaries – and crime doesn't stop at force boundaries,' says Winsor, who left the watchdog three years ago.
The author of the Police Foundation report, its former director Rick Muir, is now working as a Home Office adviser, developing plans for a white paper, based around the establishment of a new National Centre of Policing.
It is long overdue. Rowley and other police leaders support the case for a reorganisation. Although their immediate concern is whether they'll have enough resources over the next three years, they are aware that it is not just about the money – radical structural reform is needed to put forces on a long-term sustainable financial footing and ensure the public get the police service they deserve. As Peter Kyle, the Science and Technology Secretary, put it at the weekend, the police must 'do their bit' and 'embrace change'.
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