Reform's crime tsar Colin Sutton: ‘I'll never forgive the Tories for what they did to policing'

Telegraph

3 days ago

Colin Sutton has policing in the blood and politics on the brain. He is one of four generations of his family who became coppers, but even before Sutton walked his first beat in uniform he was knocking on doors campaigning for Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party.
He went on to become arguably Britain's most famous detective by putting away serial killer Levi Bellfield and 'night stalker' rapist Delroy Grant, before retiring to Norfolk where he re-engaged with politics as the deputy chairman of his local Reform UK branch.
Little wonder, then, that Nigel Farage beat a path to his door when he decided Reform needed a policing and crime adviser who could come up with a strategy for halving crime in five years in a country that Farage has declared to be 'lawless'.
At the age of 64, Sutton was settling nicely into what for many people would seem the perfect retirement on his police pension: living in a 16th-century farmhouse with his wife and their five curly-coated retrievers, travelling to dog shows, tinkering with cars and helping to raise three young grandchildren.
It is not in his nature to sit on his hands when he can be useful though, and so it never occurred to him to say no when Reform made its approach.
'I suppose I tend to get involved, be it at the golf club or cricket club or, you know, anything I've been involved in I've ended up with a role,' he smiles as we chat in a living room dominated by a large stone fireplace and heavy oak beams.
Organising sports club socials, though, is a rather different prospect from effectively writing the law-and-order section of what could be the next government's manifesto.
There is a reason why Farage has decided to dedicate this entire summer to a PR blitz on crime and punishment: it is one of the public's top priorities, and he can see that a promise to slash crime, together with his long-standing pledge to cut immigration (two issues that are inextricably linked in Farage's mind), is an essential part of the offering to the British public that he hopes will make him prime minister.
Whether he realises it yet or not, Sutton may well be one of the most important people in the whole Reform project right now. And there is no questioning his commitment.
Before he had even been offered a formal role, he sat down and wrote a 6,000-word thesis on the future of policing, with a 10-point action plan for cutting crime.
'I'm never one to do things by halves,' he muses. 'I sent that up to them, and the next thing I know, they're saying, 'Would you like to be our police and crime adviser?' So I said, 'Well, yeah, OK, yeah, of course. You know, if I can make a difference, or I can help.''
The quietly-spoken Sutton is about as far removed from the stereotypical image of a hard-boiled murder cop as you can get. If you had to guess, you might place him as a retired head teacher.
Rather than reaching for soundbites, he is a deep thinker, a grammar-school boy with a law degree to go alongside his high-profile collars during 30 years of service across three police forces.
Anyone who hopes he and Reform will return Britain to the days of bobbies on every beat and police houses in every village is going to be disappointed. In truth, he is unsure whether the 'evenin' all' image of 1950s policing ever existed in reality.
'I don't think we're ever going to recapture it now,' he says. 'If it did exist, it's gone forever.
'We should look forward, not backwards, but in doing that, we have to say there were things that were done in the past that we need to start doing again.
'It's not saying we're trying to go back to Dixon of Dock Green, where nobody had a phone or a camera in their pocket and kids got a thick ear. We've gone past that, in many ways for the better.
'But that doesn't mean that the concepts of engagement with the community, policing the community, for the community, should be discounted. There are lessons to be drawn from the past that can influence how we can make the police service fit to do the things it needs to do in the 21st century.'
Several of Sutton's 10 recommendations for halving crime do involve winding back the clock. He wants to reopen 300 local police stations (700 have been closed), focus resources on real-world crimes like burglary and away from online spats, and reduce police involvement in non-criminal matters. He also wants an extra 30,000 officers, though that is already Reform policy and so not one of his 10 points.
Other recommendations are more political, such as: recruiting based on merit alone rather than quotas; scrapping diversity, equality and inclusion posts; making the police more independent from interest groups and rewarding strong leadership rather than rewarding compliance with liberal ideologies.
He would also like to free up police time by potentially decriminalising online abuse (leaving people to pursue grievances through the civil courts) and would like to reform or review both the Independent Office for Police Conduct and the role of police and crime commissioners.
You could summarise all of this as more resources, used far more efficiently, for what the public wants the police to be doing. He wants to return to the days of open community meetings where local people could speak directly to officers to give them their priorities, rather than senior officers taking their cue from 'community leaders' who all too often have an agenda that does not reflect the true wishes of the local population.
'It's about re-engagement with ordinary people,' he says. 'Saying, what do you actually want us to be doing? If you'd rather us be looking through Twitter and looking at things that may be offensive, then we'll do that. But if you'd actually rather we were there to respond to you when your house gets broken into and would investigate the crime, or patrolling down your street to make you feel safer, then tell us and we'll do what you want us to do, because it should be policing of the people, by the people.'
A few years ago Sutton wrote in his blog that he did not believe beat patrols were a good use of resources, but he now says he is a 'born-again' believer in them, mainly because of the all-important issue of trust.
Having started his career on the beat in Tottenham's tough Broadwater Farm estate a few years before the 1985 riots that culminated in the murder of PC Keith Blakelock, Sutton formed the view that people who were minded to help the police would always help the police, regardless of whether they knew a dedicated community officer or not, while those who were unco-operative (to put it mildly) would never be won round.
But that was before the general levels of trust in the police plunged to their current all-time low.
'I'm not sure the Met does any foot patrolling at all now,' he says. 'So there's an opportunity to rebuild trust through proper engagement with the whole community, rather than just the people who decide they represent the community.'
But he still maintains that foot patrols do not necessarily reduce crime, and that what people care about most is that if they are in trouble and dial 999 two well-trained, competent officers turn up quickly and help, regardless of their gender or ethnicity.
Sutton might have seemed destined to join the police, given that his great-grandfather and father were both constables (he also has a son in the police) and that he grew up surrounded by uniformed officers.
An only child, he would tag along with his parents to social events, 'so I guess I was kind of steeped in the culture and traditions of the Met Police from an early age'.
His interests went far beyond policing though. He joined the Conservatives when he was 17 and helped them with the canvassing for the 1979 election in Enfield North, helping to overturn a Labour majority and get Tim Eggar (later a minister) elected as Margaret Thatcher swept to power.
He did well in his A-levels at Latymer grammar school in Edmonton, north London, and headed off to Leeds University to study law. But he hated being away from London and in his second year he dropped out, the gravitational pull of the Metropolitan Police proving just too strong to resist.
'It was the idea of service,' he says about the attraction of policing. 'You know, on the side of the goodies and against the baddies.'
He was a sergeant after two years, was fast-tracked to inspector rank by the age of 25 and showed such promise that the Met, ironically, decided he should take a law degree, which he did, at University College London.
After transferring to West Yorkshire Police and then Surrey Police, during which time he married, had two children and got divorced, he ended up back at the Met as a detective chief inspector, working as a senior investigating officer until his retirement in 2011.
It was during that time that he headed the team that caught Levi Bellfield, convicted in 2008 of the murders of Marsha McDonnell and Amelie Delagrange and then, in 2011, of the murder of Surrey schoolgirl Milly Dowler.
Also in 2011, Delroy Grant, the so-called Night Stalker, was convicted of 29 offences over a 17-year period following the biggest rape investigation ever undertaken by the Met. Today, Sutton says his proudest achievement is 'leading the teams that meant Bellfield and Grant couldn't victimise any more women and girls. That's our legacy. We stopped people from being victims.'
Farage would dearly love to be in a position to have his own legacy of cutting crime, and Sutton will be drawing on all his experience as a beat bobby, a leader and a detective to help him get there.
As far as operational issues go, he believes that all front-line officers who want to be equipped with Tasers should be given them. He also has strong views on reducing knife crime, which surged by 58 per cent in London in the space of three years to 2024 and by 86 per cent in a decade – a 'horrific' statistic, Sutton says. In the same period stop and search has been on the decline – falling by 23 per cent between March 2023 and March 2024.
'Stop and search is virtually non-existent,' he says. 'If you oppose stop and search, you oppose enforcing anti-knife laws, because stop and search works and it is the only way you can tell if somebody's got a knife on them in a public place.'
He has little time for community leaders who, he says, dishonestly use statistics to oppose stop and search when research has shown that, judged against the ethnic breakdown of the population on the street at any given time, rather than the resident population, young white men are marginally more likely to be stopped than young black men.
'I've spoken to more bereaved parents whose children have succumbed to knife crime than most people. Every single one of those, irrespective of their race, gender, their background, every single one wishes with all their heart that somebody had stopped and searched that assailant 10 minutes before they killed their child.'
Sutton had to give up his Tory Party membership when he joined the police but he never lost his interest in politics. After he retired he rejoined the Conservatives 'simply so I could vote against Theresa May when she stood as leader, then I left again'.
He adds: 'Like many police officers I will never, ever forgive them, and specifically her, for what they did to policing [by cutting police numbers by 20,000]. We're still paying for that now.'
In 2013 when the Met first began closing its front counters there were nearly 140 in London. Closures took that firgure down to 37, and this week the Met announced plans for further cuts to just 20
Having turned his back on the Tories, and with no confidence in Sir Keir Starmer's chances of doing better, he joined Reform UK in May last year after bumping into the local parliamentary candidate and deciding he was saying all the right things about 'the sort of reset that I think is necessary'.
Having volunteered to be deputy chairman of his local Reform branch (because 'nobody was sticking their hand up') it was only a matter of time before Farage latched on to the gift that had landed in his lap.
Sutton was unveiled as Reform's new crime tsar in July at one of Farage's weekly press conferences, when Sutton marvelled at Farage's communication skills.
'The man's command of facts, the way in which he uses them, it's just amazing. And I thought I could talk! Then you look at others, you watch [Prime Minister's] Questions and look at the scripted questions and the scripted answers. Keir Starmer looks like a startled rabbit in the headlights. He's just not got that kind of ability, that kind of brain that works that way.'
Sutton knows leadership when he sees it, and he certainly doesn't see it in Sir Keir.
'I think leadership is what I did best when I was in the police. People think I'm a great detective. In truth I had great detectives working for me, but I got the best out of them.'
Leadership, he says, is key to getting the most out of the resources available to the police. Some chief constables have promised a return to investigating every burglary, a policy Sutton believes should be adopted nationwide, as burglary is 'one of the most invasive and destructive and horrifying' crimes there is.
'There are probably enough people there and enough vehicles' to do that, he says. 'What's missing is the leadership and the will to say you will go to every burglary, and you will not worry if someone's been offended or misgendered on Twitter.'
What, then, does he make of the leadership of Britain's top policeman, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley? What would Sutton do differently?
'I'd be listening more carefully to the wider community,' he says, 'and I'd like to think I'd be a lot more firm with the mayor. I'm not sure how much Mark stands up to [Sir Sadiq Khan].
'There's no legal limit on what the mayor can spend on policing. And he chooses to spend money on six-figure salaries for dozens of Transport for London employees. He spends money on nighttime economy tsars. He chooses to spend half a million on a piece of sculpture that looks like I don't know what and he doesn't choose to make that difference in policing.'
Sutton agrees with Farage's assessment that crime is getting worse, despite official figures that claim it is lessening, and he also thinks there is merit in the theory that recent increases in sex crimes are linked to immigration.
'If you look at the figures, not just here, but the figures for Germany and Sweden, there is no doubt that there has been an explosion of sexual offences in those countries that coincides with their explosion in migration. So I think it's certainly a conversation worth having.'
He thinks it is 'looking likely' that Reform will win the next election. Would he consider standing as an MP if Farage suggested it?
'I would give serious consideration to that,' he replies without hesitation. Might we be looking at a future home secretary? 'I don't think I would go that far!' he laughs. 'But who knows what happens in life?'