Home Office White Paper ‘Building Communities, Beating Crime’

Report: 7
Date: 2 December 2004
By: Clerk

Summary

The Home Office White Paper ‘Building Communities, Beating Crime’ was released on 9 November 2004. This report summarises those aspects of the White Paper pertaining to community engagement.

A. Recommendation

That the Committee agrees that the proposals in the White Paper should inform the MPA’s Community Engagement Strategy.

B. Supporting information

1. The 172 page White Paper on police reform released by the Home Office on 9 November 2004 entitled ‘Building Communities, Beating Crime: A better police service for the twenty first century’ has three principal objectives:

• Developing more local policing through the spread of neighbourhood policing.
• Further modernisation of the police workforce to ensure it truly represents the communities it serves and that it has a stronger accountability and customer service orientation.
• Greater involvement of communities in determining and shaping how their communities are policed, in short, to build a new relationship between the service and communities.

This report highlights the last of these objectives.

2. This Paper on police reform needs to be understood first within the context of the Government’s wider strategy on public service reform and the central importance of engaging with communities and a commitment to partnership working. It is putting people at the centre of public services. The White Paper stresses the crucial importance to public confidence of the police service getting contact with the public right.

3. Underlying the notion of citizen-focused policing is the intent to move from traditional notions of policing by consent, or people’s passive acquiescence, to policing with the proactive engagement and cooperation of communities. The White Paper seeks to forge a new relationship between the police and the public by ensuring there is active collaboration between the police, their partners and citizens in the delivery of policing services. Effective policing will only be sustained over the long term when it is citizen focused – responsive to people’s needs and performed as a shared undertaking with the active involvement of the public.

4. Community police engagement is therefore being redefined by the Government from being a reactive activity to a proactive role of harnessing the energies of local communities and partners in not merely identifying problems but in negotiating priorities for action and shaping and participating in solutions.

5. In looking at the present state of fulfilling the police authority statutory responsibility to consult the public on local policing priorities, the White Paper notes:

This has most often been done via what are known as Police Community Consultative Groups. However, Home Office research has shown these formal public meetings to be ineffective for strategic consultation on priority setting. While these groups can sometimes be effective as a local problem-solving forum, they are often poorly attended and not representative of the whole community. Many authorities have constituted, abandoned or supplemented such groups with other forms of engagement, but progress has been variable within and between authorities. Moving beyond relying on public meeting as a sole form of engagement is a key aim of our reforms”. (Paragraph 3.46)

6. The CPCGs themselves and the MPA has certainly been aware and concerned with these criticisms and the MPA has been working with the CPCGs in London to strengthen their inclusiveness and partnership work. The MPA has also been active in developing additional innovative local community-police models and pan-London community engagement initiatives. The White Paper identifies further elements to improve public communication, information and involvement.

7. The dissemination to the public of better information about community safety and policing is identified as a necessary first step towards increasing informed community engagement. In providing communities with relevant and accessible information about local policing, the Government proposes to introduce a statutory minimum requirement in terms of what each household can expect to receive in terms of local policing information.

8. On furthering good practice on engaging more effectively with communities, the Home Office is developing new forms of support and advice and a database of examples. In this regard three officers of the MPA Community Engagement Unit participated in a national seminar sponsored by the Home Office in October on community engagement and will participate in a similar event in December sponsored by the Association of Police Authorities.

9. In pursuing the concept of the community advocate that was floated in the earlier Green Paper, the Government has identified local councillors as advocates in relation to local people’s concerns about policing or community safety and that any community “trigger mechanism” should only operate through local councillors. This proposal may create some confusion as to the role of GLA members and MPA Link Members.

10. In recognising that monitoring the impact of community engagement is not undertaken in any systematic way, the Government proposes to make changes to the way police performance is measured and inspected so that it reflects the priorities of the public and their view about the policing they have received. This will require further development and refinement of the Policy Performance Assessment Framework (PPAF) as they pertain to citizen focus measures. At present they assess little more than public satisfaction levels.

11. In providing greater community opportunities to influence policing, particularly at the neighbourhood and BCU level, the Government proposes a joint duty “on the police and local authorities in each CDRP area to ensure they have sufficient arrangements in place to deliver a range of engagement opportunities for local neighbourhoods and to respond to concerns as a result and that further, that it be a duty of police authorities to “oversee the relationship between CDRPs and neighbourhood bodies and ensure the implementation of citizen involvement.” This is to be welcomed and the MPA has already initiated a process as to how this can be achieved in London.

12. The intentions of the Government as reflected in this White Paper pertaining to community engagement are fully congruent with those of the MPA. One of the five strategic goals in the MPA Corporate Strategy is to ‘transform community engagement to help Londoners secure more responsive policing at a local level’. In pursuing this goal, the White Paper provides clear direction as to the ‘division of labour’ on community engagement between the MPA and MPS. For example, the proposals in the White Paper indicate that the police authority should take greater ownership at the force level of the gathering of community views on overall strategic priorities while the police service and its local partners should take the lead in engaging with the public on the more operational and tactical issues at the neighbourhood and borough level.

13. The White Paper suggests that the strategic strengths of police authority responsibilities for governance and oversight can be strengthened at the force level while supporting and overseeing local and operational consultation and accountability being undertaken through BCUs and the CDRP process. The Government’s approach is to strengthen police authorities responsibilities for ensuring effective arrangements are in place to secure police engagement at neighbourhood and district level. Through its responsibilities for monitoring, for setting standards, for scrutiny, for testing and developing exemplary models of community police engagement, and promoting best practice, the police authority can better support and ensure the integration and mainstreaming of community engagement throughout the police service.

14. Successful community-police engagement requires not only a police service willing and able to involve and be influenced by the viewpoints of Londoners, but also residents willing and able to get involved. While the White Paper does consider was to increase public awareness and understanding of policing issues, it is somewhat vague on the need to support the capacity and willingness of individuals and communities to work collectively to shape and strengthen the civic governance of policing. The MPA has been concerned for example that community engagement is often lowest in the most disadvantaged communities, which is why it has embarked on a process of engaging with those Londoners most at risk of social exclusion to strengthen their capacity to identify and articulate their particular policing needs.

15. While the full White Paper demands careful study, the above points highlight just some of the intentions of the Government in strengthening community-police engagement. The themes running throughout the White Paper in capturing the notion of citizen focused policing are greater visibility, expanded accessibility, regular local accountability, more preventive policing, increased partnership work, enlarged local delegation and authority, strengthened local democratic involvement, etc. Both the MPA and the MPS have already embraced these concepts in much of its work. The Safer Neighbourhoods programme for example, which is well underway across London directly relates to the White Paper proposals for community engagement for the purposes of setting local priorities.

16. The MPA can be fully supportive of the directions enunciated in the White Paper on community engagement. It provides a supportive framework within which the development of the MPA’s Community Engagement Strategy can ensure robust and sustainable processes of community involvement and a streamlined and seamless process by which priorities raised at a neighbourhood level can relate to decisions at a more strategic level.

C. Race and equality impact

One of the most important challenges for police reform is how the policing needs of London’s diverse population can be met in partnership with, and in a manner in which their differences can be taken into account effectively. The White Paper calls for a much sharper focus on connecting the delivery of policing with the real involvement of the public, in all its diversity. While the White Paper itself is not prescriptive as to how that should be undertaken apart from ensuring a more inclusive and representative workforce, a major plank of the MPA’s community engagement strategy is seeking the particular policing needs of London’s’ diverse communities.

D. Financial implications

There are no financial implications to this report.

E. Background papers

• Home Office White Paper ‘Building Communities, Beating Crime’, November 2004

F. Contact details

Report author: Tim Rees

For more information contact:

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

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