Royal Commission on Police Funding

Holly Lynch Excerpts

Tuesday 26th March 2019 Westminster Hall

[Mr Hurd]

I understand the point, and I will address it, but my point is that I am not sure that a royal commission is the right solution at the moment for addressing some of the challenges that we know about. We have the capacity among the Government, the political process in this place and police leadership to work through them ourselves. I mentioned the spending review, and that is the major opportunity in the short term. We must not lose sight of getting it right or be distracted by the idea of royal commissions.

We are working closely with the police to look at demand and cost pressures and to ensure that the bid into the spending review is properly informed. With the police we are working through the question of how much further we can go in making the police more efficient and productive on behalf of the taxpayer. We are looking at the balance between crime prevention and the reaction to crime. We are looking at how we can give better support to frontline officers, because it is clear that we can and should do that. We are looking at system issues—issues that have rolled down through the ages, but that continue to be relevant, such as the balance between the centre and the local, the question of how we build and deliver national capabilities and the fundamental question of how we learn from the past for the next stage of upgrading police technology across this fragmented system.

How do we develop more consistent standards across the fragmented system? How do we do a better job of spreading innovation and best practice? Some of that best practice is frankly brilliant, but it exists in pockets. How do we ensure that it is spread across the system? How do we ensure that the fragmented system takes a more systemic approach to tackling some of the perennial problems that it faces? How do we ensure that we allocate resources in the fairest possible way? Those are challenges that we know we have to address, and we are working together with the police to do so. I simply am not persuaded that a royal commission will help those things in the immediate specific context, but I will come back to the point. First, I will give way to the hon. Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch), who is a great supporter of the police.

[Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for giving way and the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Stephen Lloyd) for eloquently setting out the challenges facing the police. Will the Minister give us a little more information on the points he was making? I am aware of the work Tom Winsor is undertaking with forces as they go through their assessments of what crime demand will look like in the coming years, with a view then to look at the resources required to match that. What might the timeline and the process be? However we approach having to meet resources in the future, that information and analysis will be important.

[Mr Hurd]

The hon. Lady is superbly informed and passionate about policing. She makes a good point and illustrates something I was trying to capture: the degree to which the police are changing and responding to challenge. The challenge to police leadership from Her Majesty’s independent inspectorate was, “You don’t do a good enough job of anticipating and managing future demand.” That sounds critical, but we know the reality. Police leadership is stretched in dealing with the demand in front of it.

The challenge from the inspectorate is that we need to do a better job of anticipating future demand, and the instrument was the force management statement. There were some grumblings and criticism at the start of that process, but every force complied with it. The inspectorate handled that process very well. We have all our first force management statements in, and we are now into a second iteration of that process. That is a good example of where the police have recognised the need for change, prodded by external eyes and external challenge. The system is now working together to improve on the first iteration, and I am encouraged by that.

I recognise the clarity of the argument made by the hon. Member for Eastbourne, and I understand its drivers. I have tried to explain why I am not persuaded in the short term that a royal commission is the answer to some of the challenges we have to work through with the police in the immediate context, which is the critical spending review. We have to get that right, because it will shape the future of policing for the next three to five years.

I want to close on a more constructive and positive note. Looking at the history of police reform in this country going back centuries, it is striking that the same questions are always asked. They tend to come back to, “What is the right balance between the centre and the local?”, “Who are the police accountable to?”, and, “How do we strike the right balance between law and order and the protection of individual liberties?” Then there is the fundamental question of, “Have we got the right structure of policing?” That tends to come back, as it has over the years, to the question of, “What is the right structure in terms of the number of police forces?” If we look at the length of history, we have come down from 200-odd forces to 43, and the question whether it is the right structure is still being asked.

The reality is this: the system has real strengths in local accountability and ensuring that local police forces are attuned to local need and accountable to the residents and citizens they serve. The hon. Gentleman spoke about piecemeal reform, but I would argue that the reforms to the police system since 2010 have not been piecemeal. They have been extremely significant, not least the introduction of police and crime commissioners to further sharpen local accountability. That is a real strength in the system that the public understand and respect, but the reality—it is heard from every police audience—is that the system is extremely challenged by the current environment of policing, not least because more and more crime simply does not respect borders, because it is either online or physically runs across borders, such as county lines. The fragmented police system struggles with this environment of rapid change. Although a lot of change is going on, it is driven at a slow and unsteady pace across the system, and the police recognise that.

As it has been over time, the whole question of whether this is the right policing structure continues to be valid, and it will continue to be asked. I happen to think that we can do a great deal to make the system work smarter, and that is one of my major priorities, but the political reality is that no party—Conservative, Labour or any other—has a mandate from the British people to take a big-bang approach to restructuring policing, even if it wanted to. I have no doubt that whoever is in power, we will come back to the question whether we have the right structure to combat modern crime and modern demand on the police as the police evolve, as we understand it through the police’s own understanding and as we build capability in the system to look ahead a bit further, which is one of my priorities. In that context, there may well be merits to and an argument for an independent look at that.