Home Office consultation document: Policing Building Safer Communities Together

Report: 9
Date: 9 December 2003
By: Clerk

Summary

This report outlines the key themes in the Home Office Consultation Document, ‘Policing: Building Safer Communities Together’ and outlines proposals for responding to the consultation exercise by mid January.

A. Recommendations

1. indicate whether they want a workshop convened to discuss the terms of a response or would prefer that a draft response be prepared by officers and circulated for comment in writing.
2. give a preliminary steer as to the line to be taken in response to the proposals.

B. Supporting information

1. The Government’s Consultative Document, ‘Policing: Building Safer Communities Together’ was published on 4 November 2003, and launched by the Home Secretary at the Association of Police Authorities’ (APA) Annual Conference in Manchester. The APA is co-ordinating a national response to the consultation exercise and has asked for returns from police authorities by 9 January. The Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) is similarly co-ordinating a national response to the consultation paper. Its officers have begun discussions with officers within the MPS as to the extent to which there can be common response from both organisations. This paper is prepared on the assumption that members will want to respond to the Home Office directly as well as via the APA national response, taking into account the views of the MPS. There is a special plenary meeting of the APA on 19 January 2004 at which the co-ordinated response will be finalised. It may be that the MPA view will differ in significant respects from that of other police authorities and this will need to be considered as the response is developed.

2. Members have already received a copy of the consultative document: further copies are available from the MPA Secretariat. The paper builds on the Police Reform agenda as carried through into the Police Reform Act 2002. It identifies four key areas:

• Community engagement
  • Empowering local people to use information and networks to engage with their local police
  • Ensuring a policing style which is both visible and accessible and enables and helps local people to take action themselves
  • Strengthening voluntary community and business involvement in policing – especially through special constables, neighbourhood watch and a wider range of volunteers in local business
• Accountability
  • Strengthened accountability for delivering effective neighbourhood policing
  • Enhancing the leadership capacity, process of accountability and responsiveness to communities of Basic Command Unit (BCU) Commanders in the context of their force wide obligations
  • Ensuring a responsive police service
  • Development of a community advocate role
  • Assessing the scope for radical change to police authorities and broader partnership arrangements
• Operational effectiveness
  • Ensuring there is sufficient capacity to combat crime at neighbourhood, BCU, force and national levels
  • Opening the debate on structural change of police forces
  • Delivering the right powers to maximise effectiveness
• Service modernisation
  • Rewarding good performance
  • Delivering a more unified, representative police service with a better skills mix
  • Bringing forward a transformational leadership agenda

3. Initial views of officers suggest that the two key areas where the MPA will be able to make a particularly valuable contribution to the debate are local accountability and, linked to this, the contribution to operational effectiveness of reducing the number of police forces. To all intents and purposes the MPS is already a regional police force, representing over one fifth of the police strength in England and Wales. Any move to regionalisation is bound to draw on the experience of the constitutional arrangements set up by the Greater London Authority Act and the MPA response will have to be explicit about the extent to which this structure is effective and responsive to local need.

4. The MPA response will therefore need to focus on the strengths and weaknesses of the current arrangements in London at a strategic level. At more local level, where it is well accepted that there is a need for a more coherent accountability mechanism to reflect the development of partnerships and the new moves to towards even more locally based policing via the reassurance and step change projects, the green paper gives an opportunity for the MPA to demonstrate what is already being explored by developing alternative models to the current CPCG mechanisms.

5. The Consultative Paper focuses in some detail on options for change and accountability, proposing what looks at first blush a structure of governance very similar to that already existing in London with a ‘Police Board’ at a strategic level, underpinned by a local policing/community safety board (effectively the CDRP partnership) which itself is underpinned by neighbour panels. There are specific suggestions for a directly elected police board or for the membership of such a board to come via different routes from that currently in place of police authorities. It may be that this is an issue on which it will be difficult to achieve consensus.

6. The Green Paper also requires that police authorities conduct consultation more widely on the issues it raises. At the Authority meeting officers will report orally on the progress made in respect of a plan to consult.

Next steps

7. Members are invited to consider whether they would welcome one or more board blasting sessions to develop a response to the consultative paper or whether they would prefer officers to put together a draft response for circulation and comment.

C. Equality and diversity implications

None in respect of this paper but the equality and diversity implications of some of the proposals will need to be fully explored when developing the Authority’s response.

D. Financial implications

None directly for the Authority at this stage but significant change to the governance framework would undoubtedly involve extra resources.

E. Background papers

• Policing: Building Safer Communities Together

F. Contact details

Report author: Catherine Crawford, Clerk, MPA.

For more information contact:

MPA general: 020 7202 0202
Media enquiries: 020 7202 0217/18

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