How many commissioners does it take to change the landscape?

West Yorkshire Police Authority’s Fraser Sampson continues his views on the radical alterations to the policing “landscape” and obvious challenges on the horizon by having directly-elected police and crime commissioners

Fraser Sampson

The publication of the Consultation Paper, Policing the 21st Century: Reconnecting People and the Police, sets out how the Government plans radical alterations to the policing “landscape”. Among other things, the paper proposes to abolish the existing governance arrangements and install directly-elected commissioners by 2012.

While the dull detail of the architecture is yet to be put
before Parliament, there are some obvious challenges on the
horizon.

The Metropolitan Police Service, which accounts for a quarter
of all police officers, already has a commissioner, as does the City of London Police, while the local government arrangements
for the remainder of England and Wales is very different from those of the Capital on which some of the proposed landscape has been modelled.

In trying to separate the two types of commissioner, some
are already talking of the new police and crime commissioners
as “PCCs”.

However, in a setting already blighted by acronyms, the addition of further letters and abbreviations is unlikely to improve the skyline.

For example, PCCs will have to work alongside IPCC commissioners. The former will be new creatures of democracy, some of whose constituencies will encompass those of almost 30 MPs and have populations exceeding two million people.

The latter are already part of the landscape and work for the
Independent Police Complaints Commission, investigating complaints against police officers of all ranks, along with police community support officers (PCSOs) plus officers from the Special Constabulary.

While the new PCCs will be responsible for investigating
complaints against the chief police officers, the IPCC commissioners will also investigate complaints against all chief
officers, including the police commissioners of the Metropolitan
and City of London forces, and will also investigate complaints against the new PCCs themselves.

In terms of public expectation, distinguishing between the
various commissioners will be critical, not least because the
ultimate performance measure of the PCCs will be the ballot box.

Some commentators are already billing the PCCs as “police
chiefs”, analogous to a town sheriff. This is completely wide of the mark on several levels, although the PCCs will get to appoint the chief police officers of the land – except London
where the commissioner is the chief police officer in the land.

Police and crime panels
One feature that is to be swept from the landscape is the police authority. This aspect of the new panorama appears to be both straightforward and iconoclastic until you look a little closer.

Police authorities are basically local boards made up of councillors and independent lay people. They will be abolished and replaced by local boards made up of councilors and independent lay people.

In landscape terms, this seems like the twinning of Zamoskvorechye with Lambeth – it made for interesting signage and cordial relations but the difference is hard to spot from the top of the Clapham omnibus.

The new boards will, however, get a new name and will become
police and crime panels, or PCPs. Voters of a certain vintage
may remember how in the old policing landscape PCP was a hallucinogenic drug but there is no reason to believe this is
an intentional witticism by the Home Office.

The PCP will hold the new nonpolice commissioners, or PCCs,
to account – no doubt working closely with the IPCC.

Not all forces or constabularies will have a PCP. In the Metropolis, there will be no need for a PCC or a PCP. Instead, the Metropolitan Police will continue to come under the leadership of the person keen to remain in proper charge of policing the Capital – the mayor.

He, of course, already comes under the scrutiny of the real
London eye, the Greater London Assembly, so has no need of a
further panel.

No change for some forces

Elsewhere, other familiar features will remain. For example, some officers who work shieldto-shield with the Met – like the British Transport Police (BTP) – will get to keep their old police authority, while the Ministry of Defence Police (MDP) and the City of London Police will still have a police committee (which is what all police forces used to have under the old landscape).

The Square Mile will be allowed to keep its police commissioner instead of a PCC. Further north, as the Scots were allowed to design their own parliament (without Big Ben or Brian Haw); they get to design their own policing landscape.

They don’t have police commissioners and, interestingly, have not been persuaded of the benefits of the PCC and PCP system so will not get police and crime commissioners either but will keep their Police Complaints Commissioner – the PCCS – who is like our IPCC but there’s just one of him.

Wales has an Assembly but, unlike the London one, it doesn’t
do policing so the valleys will have the same look as the provincial English constables’ landscape, while their beleaguered
brethren across the sea in Northern Ireland (PSNI) will still have their own chief constable and an Independent Policing Board but no PCC or PCP.

One part of the police landscape that won’t change is the
police landscape itself. The new arrangements will follow the
same esoteric boundaries which, with names like West Mercia
and Humberside, sound more at home alongside Mordor and
Helms Deep than the true modern communities they cover.

While the police map continues to have such confected
community boundaries (the commissioner for Humberside will actually cover the East Riding of Yorkshire, Hull, North and
North East Lincolnshire) keeping it “local” will be a challenge.

The new organisational landscape will also remain as challengingly unchanged as the physical one. Most of the 43
police forces will still have a Special Constabulary, including
those police forces that are not specifically “constabularies”
(such as the Met) and those that are (such as Lancashire
Constabulary).

However, forces regarded as special constabularies (such as
the Civil Nuclear Constabulary or CNC) will still be constabularies but won’t have a Special Constabulary and not all constabularies will have commissioners.

Pundit’s point of view

The consultation period ended on 20 September but the responses have yet to be reported, although there were reportedly some 900 of them. From a pundit’s point of view, here’s how the rest of the landscape is
shaping up.

London keeps its two police commissioners and doesn’t get
a PCP or a PCC; everyone else gets both a PCC and a PCP except the BTP, the CNC and the MDP. All PCs and PCSOs will still come under the IPCC except Scotland who keep their PCCS
and the PSNI who have a Police Ombudsman.

When it comes to commissioners, police complaints
commissioners and police and crime commissioners will investigate complaints against all police chiefs including police
commissioners.

While the police complaints commissioners will also investigate
complaints against the police and crime commissioners,
except in Scotland where they have a single Police Complaints
Commissioner and Northern Ireland where they have a Human
Rights Commissioner.

At time of going to press the Home Affairs Select Committee
said there should be a four-year “cooling-off period” for every former senior police officer wishing to stand for election as a police commissioner, otherwise they could be in the position of scrutinising decisions they had made while still in office.

More on the Home Affairs Select Committee report will be in
the next issue.

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