Force restructuring in England and Wales

ps/19/06
24 April 2006
MPA briefing paper

Author: Alan Johnson, MPA

This briefing paper has been prepared to inform members and staff. It is not a committee report and no decisions are required.

1. Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) report ‘Closing the gap - A review of 'fitness for purpose' of the current structure of policing in England & Wales’ was a follow up to an earlier report ‘Mind the (Level 2) gap’ and perhaps gives a clear indication of the report’s focus.

2. The Level 2 classification is from the National Intelligence Model (NIM) of policing and categorises crime as follows:

• Level 1 Crime - Local criminality managed at Borough or Basic (Operational) Command Unit (e.g. anti-social behaviour, criminal damage, assault.)
• Level 2 Crime - Crime crossing force or B(O)CU boundaries
• Level 3 Crime - Serious crime, organized at a national or international level (e.g. terrorism, people / narcotics trafficking).

3. The report points to a future policing environment characterised by:

• Widespread enterprising organised criminality, proliferating international terrorism and domestic extremism; and
• A premium on intelligence, expertise and smart use of capacity.

4. The report highlighted the following considerations:

• National assessment of police organisational fitness - HMIC findings suggest very few forces assessed fully meet the required standard and that size matters.
• Intelligence need development - Intelligence was the aspect with the lowest scores, and greatest shortcomings, regardless of size of police force.
• Performance management - Performance management is currently geared toward reducing volume crimes, such as burglary. Performance measurement of ‘protective’ services (i.e. major crime (homicide), serious organised and cross border crime, counter terrorism and extremism, civil contingencies, critical incidents, public order and strategic roads policing) is weak.
• Organised crime - many gaps exist in the knowledge of organised criminal enterprises
• Stakeholders’ views – some people identified strongly with a discrete neighbourhood, some partners and local politicians identify with B(O)CU level services, while a smaller group value links at the county/supra-county level.
• Creating a 21st Century service - evidence gathered regarding capability of forces, criminal risk and economics is not definitive, but points to significant inadequacies in the present approach.
• Design considerations – the existing structure matches local government structures and has emphasised the need to drive down volume crime and provide local policing, with considerable success. But current scope and scale now act as constraints to improve protective services.

5. The report provided the following options:

• Collaboration – this essentially preserves the status quo but the report suggests that issues such as governance and performance and accountability suggests that, at best, progress will be complex, slow and of limited impact.
• Lead force for specialist capabilities - the 'lead force' concept would have significant implications for smaller forces in relation to the control and direction of enquiries conducted within their own borders.
• Lead regional force – this would build upon the existing infrastructure, processes and partnership arrangements, with one force within region being resourced as a lead force to host the personnel, finance and logistics of the regional protective services.
• Federation of forces – forces would contract together to be served by a common set of protective services that could extend to the brigading of support services.
• Strategic forces – this (according to HMIC) is the most radical option with forces being re-grouped against a framework of design considerations, such as: exceeding critical mass, criminality and geography. Local policing arrangements (B(O)CU, etc) would not be disrupted whilst force level services were rationalised.

6. HMIC suggest the strategic forces option offers the best business solution and best potential, within reasonable time-scales, of improving protective services and providing better value for money. It recognises that it needs to be well supported and to be part of a strategy that reconfigures intelligence, performance and value for money.

7. Of the other options, HMIC suggest that a federal structure is the best alternative and could offer a degree of greater resilience, but may not offer a clear, decisive, durable solution, although both the strategic and federal options would need appropriate accountability mechanisms at the local and strategic level. The lead force/lead regional force concepts could be initiated more rapidly, but would not deal well with the issues identified in the review.

Responses to the HMIC report

The proposals

8. The Association of Police Authorities (APA) would have preferred the federal option, perhaps with every force ion a region contributing to the provision of ‘protective services’ and key support services, e.g. human resources, finance and Information Technology along the lines of planned changes for the fire and rescue services, but would continue to deliver local (Level 1) policing. On this basis, the costs and risks would arguably be significantly less than for the strategic force option and individual forces would retain their own, local identities.

9. The Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) recognises the need for restructuring to meet future threats and challenges and suggested, in evidence submitted on the police reform process, the need for strategic forces capable of dealing with emerging threats. However, ACPO recognises that such a change requires proper financing, realistic planning and implementation timescales, and felt that the restructuring exercise should take account of other major programmes of work.

10. The Police Superintendents Association for England and Wales (PSAEW) in their report ‘Moving Policing Forward – proposals for the future’ (2004) suggested the current force structure did not deliver consistency and that some forces did not have the capacity to cope with extraordinary policing events or a concentrated series of serious policing incidents. This found echoes in the HMIC report. The PSAEW suggested the structure was an inhibitor to change and improved performance and needed to be reformed as a matter of urgency; they favour a national policing model delivered on a regional basis, with B(O)CUs at the heart of policing delivery.

11. The Police Federation for England and Wales (PFEW) believe that if reform must be carried out on a basis of service effectiveness not just financial efficiency. The PFEW do not want large remote police forces that are separated from the community they serve and felt the public must be left with an improved, more effective force that is able to provide a better service.

12. Unison, which represents most police staff in the affected police forces, wants greater priority given to workforce modernisation in order to increase the contribution of police staff to non-operational activities. They point to the increased powers given to Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs) as an example of the way forward (MPA briefing paper 27/06).

13. After a period of consultation with police forces and police authorities, the Home Office opted to create strategic forces across England and Wales, which it felt would be capable of offering the required levels of policing, both in protective services and at neighbourhood level. The mergers of the following forces have already been proposed (as at 23 April 2006):

• Yorkshire and Humberside
  Humberside, North Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire
• North West
  Lancashire and Cumbria (agreed by the two Police Authorities)
• Cheshire and Merseyside
• Greater Manchester Police, Thames Valley, Hampshire and Kent will be separate strategic forces
• North East
  Northumbria, Durham and Cleveland
• Wales
  North Wales, Dyfed-Powys, Gwent and South Wales
• West Midlands
  Staffordshire, West Mercia, Warwickshire and West Midlands
• East Midlands
  Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire and Nottingham
• Eastern – North
  Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Suffolk
• Eastern – South
  Bedfordshire, Essex and Hertfordshire
• Surrey and Sussex

14. The Secretary of State, Charles Clarke, told the House of Commons, “My vision is a police service which is close, responsive and accountable to the communities it serves, supported by larger forces with the capacity and specialist expertise to protect the public from wider threats such as serious and organised crime and terrorism.

15. “My overriding concern, and that of those responsible for leading the police service across the country, is to ensure that the police service is capable of preventing and responding to crime and disorder at every level: local neighbourhood; borough or local authority; force; nationally; and internationally. Although there has been much progress at all levels, especially at the local level where we have made a clear commitment to roll out neighbourhood policing across the country by 2008, it is vital that we close the gap in policing serious crime and major incidents identified by HMIC last year.

16. “I am grateful for the submissions received from police force areas ….. These submissions put forward a range of options for improving police capacity to tackle serious crime and major incidents, and at the same time delivering and sustaining neighbourhood policing. It is striking that all involved are clear that the current structures are not capable of delivering effective policing to meet 21st Century challenges.”

17. The ‘minimum’ size initially identified by HMIC was forces with 4000 police officers and 6000 staff in total, although neither Kent nor Hampshire fulfils this criterion. Nevertheless it is felt an important part of Hampshire’s successful business case was the consultation with staff, residents of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, Members of Parliament, partner agencies and local authorities, which showed overwhelming support for Hampshire to remain a stand alone strategic force. Kent’s arguments may have been helped by their recent success in the Securitas depot robbery (albeit with significant MPS assistance).

18. Decisions are awaited on Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Devon and Cornwall, Avon and Somerset and, in theory, the MPS, City of London Police and British Transport Police. The Department of Transport are looking at BTP as part of a wider review.

APA reaction

19. The APA have been very critical, referring to the report’s own recognition that “Being bigger is not enough to guarantee strong protective services. The environment also matters. For example, the presence of cities, ports or events (i.e. repeated exposure to risks and challenges) also enhance the repertoire of protective services that forces offer the public. Able leadership can also be influential in allowing smaller forces to punch above their weight on these issues.”

20. Five police authorities – Cleveland, Sussex, North Wales, Essex and West Mercia are threatening judicial reviews of these proposals (Police Review 14/4/06).

21. West Mercia police authority commissioned Anthony Lawrance, Professor of Statistics at the University of Warwick to review the HMIC assessments. Although both HMIC and the Home Office challenged his findings he found that:

• The quality of the statistical information gathered is questionable (scoring was based on subjective but informed judgement for each force)
• The statistical treatment of the data collected is largely unjustified (some small forces were almost as successful as the majority of the larger forces, whilst two large forces did poorly, e.g. Dyfed Powys and Gloucestershire have scored highly on the Policing Performance Assessment Framework (PPAF))
• The graphical presentation of the data is poor and trend lines could be misleading (one graph on page 30 entitled “overall trend for protective services” has no scale or axis).

22. Dr Lucy Harrad for Thames Valley police authority compared force performance using HMIC baseline assessments and Home Office police performance monitoring. This showed no correlation between the size of a police force and its performance in any area, except that larger forces had a slight advantage in tackling Level 2 crime over smaller police forces. The HMIC Baseline Assessment considered that all police forces – regardless of size – were either ‘fair’ or ‘good’ in tackling Level 2 (cross-border) criminality. Similarly, she found no correlation between the size of forces and detection rates or satisfaction with the police service.

What will it cost?

23. The HMIC report did not include any costings, although the APA have estimated costs at £430-520m, including all start-up costs, IT and police precept equalization within the new strategic regions. Tim Brain (Chief Constable of Gloucestershire) has calculated costs at somewhere between £500-627m.

24. In terms of costs, it is worth noting that in 2004-5 the gap between council tax payments for the police between non-metropolitan areas and most metropolitan areas was significant. In non-metropolitan areas council tax payers contributed 29% of total police budgets, compared with only 15% in most metropolitan areas.

25. Both the APA and Dr Harrad make the point that strategic forces will still have the same numbers of police officers and reducing police numbers, in a climate where the public and politicians are clamouring for more officers on the streets, would not be tenable. Equally, whilst it may be possible to save money by reducing the numbers of police staff, these roles were often created in order to redeploy police officers onto operational roles requiring police powers.

26. Similarly, the proportion of police staff to police officers is roughly the same regardless of the force size (around one support staff member to two policing staff, including police officers, wardens, PCSOs and specials), and the proportion of police officers to population density is roughly the same across the UK regardless of the size of the force, at around one police officer per 400 residents.

27. Because police resources are primarily in the form of people, spending is largely taken up with salaries and pensions, leaving few opportunities for large efficiency gains by reducing spending. Any savings would have to be from the remainder of the expenditure on premises, transport, supplies and services - which cannot be dramatically reduced - or sharing services and reducing role duplication (which is akin to the federation option).

28. As it currently stands, the police funding formula links central policing grants to measurable data such as crime figures. This emphasis on quantitative indicators rewards measurable crime-fighting activity at the expense of both community and preventative activities. If this continues it is possible the costs of restructuring, coupled with the demand for quantifiable results, will potentially lead to a conflict of priorities with the safer neighbourhoods initiative. How will dealing more proactively with Level 2 criminality and safer neighbourhoods be funded and resourced without increasing police officer and police staff numbers and therefore costs?

The role of the B(O)CU

29. Whilst the boundaries of BOCUs within the MPS are co-terminus with identifiable London borough boundaries, in other parts of the country this is not the case. In their paper ‘Moving Policing Forward’ the PSAEW argue having co-terminus boundaries was the single most important factor in determining if a B(O)CU delivered effective policing. HMIC said they were the critical building blocks of both the current structure and any new arrangement, since they deliver the vast bulk of everyday policing services.

30. The APA have a real concern that the eventual size of some B(O)CUs, comprising as they may several district council areas, will mean they become less accountable to the public because of their sheer geographical size and/or staff numbers. Members will be aware that Lambeth and Westminster – although not geographically large - have more than 1000 police officers and police staff. These numbers are already replicated in Bristol, Newcastle and Nottingham.

31. For members of the public, the difficulty will be that, although there is a clear desire for mechanisms that will hold B(O)CU commanders to account, these mechanisms are non statutory and accountability may mean no more than consultation in an increasing number of larger commands.

32. Similarly, as the PSAEW pointed out, the current funding arrangements for B(O)CUs differ significantly across the country, particularly around the issue of devolved budgets. Much of this is ‘ring fenced,’ e.g. around police officer numbers, whilst others have budgets heavily controlled or centrally influenced, e.g. the MPS currently has a restriction on filling police staff posts which means that central authority has to be sought to fill any vacancy.

33. Finally, both the APA and PSAEW have pointed out that the role of the B(O)CU is concerned with the prevention and detection of crime and disorder, public reassurance and partnerships, delivered through 24/7 response capability, intelligence-led policing, neighbourhood patrol and Level 1 crime investigation. Specialist support is, and can, be provided on a forcewide or regional basis.

34. Whilst the thrust of the strategic proposals will be a move towards co-terminus boundaries, for other parts of the criminal justice system the creation of strategic forces will be a move away from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) offices and Her Majesty’s Court Services outside London being co-terminus with force boundaries.

35. This is all the more surprising given the Home Office recognised this possibility in an earlier report ‘Police Reform; a joint Home Office / Strategy Unit project; summary report’ which said any “merger proposals should take into account “consequential risks for the rest of the criminal justice system” and that “Evidence from other sectors suggests that merger can be a costly, protracted exercise which does not always deliver expected benefits and inevitably causes distraction for management and staff.” Any case for merger would need to show that the likely benefits outweigh these risks.”

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