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FOUR
Oversight and chief officersâ relationships with police authorities, directly elected police crime commissioners, HMIC and the Home Office
Relations between chief officers and police authorities
Responding to the initiatives, requirements and oversight of the police authority, both as a corporate body and in individual interactions, is one of the clear divides between the largely operational command role of a chief superintendent and the strategic command role of the chief officer.1 This interrelationship is unlikely to change substantially when the police authority as a body is replaced in mid-2012 by the directly elected police crime commissioner (PCC) and his or her supporting police and crime panel. The 15% or so of an average chief officerâs time which is devoted to police authority matters (local oversight) does not always produce or encourage mutual cooperation or understanding. Occasionally, the contrast between private and public demeanour can be startling:
The bemusement of this chief officer at the unpredictable actions of the chair of his police authority, the scarcely veiled antagonism between the police and their local oversight mechanism, and the ubiquity of the political games that seem to be played out both in private and public between chief officers and those appointed or elected to the police authority, are nicely captured in this rueful anecdote. I propose to explore in greater depth the tensions that appear to exist between some chief officers and their police authorities (collectively and as individuals), the ways in which those tensions are sometimes expressed; the origins of the unease which the police feel about âsupervision by amateursâ and the ways in which some wily police officers manipulate their sometimes naĂŻve or gullible police authority members. The viewpoint I give is almost entirely that of the chief officer rather than the police authority member, partly because this is a book about chief officers, and partly because the opportunity to respond on behalf of police authorities, though extended several times to the Association of Police Authorities (APA), was not taken up.
The responses which I now examine are derived from a single question posed to chief officers: How would you describe your relationship with your police authority or other oversight body? There were 89 respondents to the question (Table 4.1), more or less starkly in two camps:
Table 4.1: Relationships with police authorities2
To understand the tensions that might exist between some chief police officers and members of their police authority, it is necessary first to have a brief foray into history. From before Tudor times, the function of maintaining law and order in a local community was overseen by the âwatch committeeâ, a group of respectable residents in a town or district with a vested interest in maintaining the peace. Following the establishment of uniformed civilian police forces across England and Wales during the 19th century (counties and cities having taken their lead from the establishment of the New Police by Robert Peel in London in 1830), the watch committees needed reformation and re-evaluation. In 1889, âstanding joint committeesâ were created, which were composed of local and county councillors and magistrates. This formal oversight mechanism for the police remained until the Police Act 1964, when police authorities were established.3 This new body consisted of two thirds local and county councillors and one third magistrates. Power in policing was effectively shared on a tripartite basis between the Home Secretary, the police authority and the chief constable, where none had an absolute monopoly of power, but where all three were supposed to work in balance.
Under subsequent legislation (Police and Magistratesâ Courts Act 1994), most police authorities were defined as consisting of 17 people in a mix of elected councillors, independent appointees and the magistracy.4 The remit of the police authority was laid out in schedule 4.1 of the 1994 Act as follows:
The composition of police authorities changed again with the Police and Justice Act 2006, when magistrate members no longer formed a separate category, but at least five (though normally eight) police authority members â one of whom must be from âlay justiceâ â are formally appointed as independent of any political party (appointments are, however, approved by the Home Secretary which may allow political patronage to show its nose from time to time).
All this is of a piece with contemporary political platforms about empowerment of local communities and the realigning of relationships between neighbourhoods and the police within a âBig Societyâ. Police authorities are representatives, collectively, of the public. They are, or should be, responsive to the publicâs sense of security, its fear of crime and its satisfaction with the police. The Home Secretary acts on behalf of the government (and, theoretically, expresses the will of the whole electorate) by delivering central policy direction to the police service of England and Wales, and to police authorities. The police, for their part, are the âgatewayâ to the criminal justice system: investigating crime without fear or favour, keeping the peace, preventing lawlessness and acting independently of any political agendas, local or national.
Day-to-day contact between police authority/PCC, Home Office and the police tends to be at the chief officer level, strategically geared and oriented in terms of police performance. It is here, among chief officers anyway, that we find the private frustrations, the hidden anger and resentment and the relative intensity of feelings about being held to account. Most chief officers understand that they must be held to account; it seems to be the ways in which this happens, including degrees of relish or venom within the processes, that they object to.
However, a couple of significant changes have been made, more or less quietly, to the tripartite âbalance of powerâ described in the preceding paragraph. The Home Secretary has taken powers, under the Police and Justice Act 2006, effectively to be able to remove, or require a police authority to remove, a chief constable. This was in the wake of a highly public and rather unedifying battle of wills in 2004â05 between the Chief Constable of Humberside and the then Home Secretary, David Blunkett, following Sir Michael Bichardâs report into the police investigation of the Soham murders in 2003.5 At the same time and through the medium of the same Act, the powers and remit of police authorities were extended. To understand the significance of these changes and the uneasiness with which they are regarded by some chief officers, we must look in greater detail at how police authorities function.
The primary remit for police authorities is, as noted under Schedule 4.1 of the 1994 Act, to ensure on behalf of the public, that their police forces are âefficient and effectiveâ; this usually entails scrutinising the work of the force and holding the chief constable to account. In practice, the principal contacts that police authority members have with their police force are the range of chief officers, whom they meet regularly. For their part, chief officers tend to modulate or control the individual police authority memberâs access to other policing ranks and the general workforce below the board level. The police authority is formally responsible for consulting with local people about the kinds of service the public expects from its police; it publishes an annual plan setting out targets for and required services from the force and it holds the purse-strings. Because the police authority also sets the âpreceptâ (the amount by which local council tax rises annually or sometimes triennially to pay for policing), it has a powerful voice in how much money there is and where it goes.
Scrutiny of the force budget and the detail of expenditure is one of the primary means by which a police authority holds a chief constable to account. The non-elected (local civil servant) role of police authority finance director or treasurer â there are a number of designations â is a very powerful one, second only to the elected chair/PCC and the appointed chief executive or clerk. There are various other factors for which the police authority has responsibility, such as ensuring proportionate ethnic and gender mixes in the police force, quality assuring the nature of learning and development and overseeing âcomprehensive performance improvementâ (which used to be called Best Value) (Raine, 2008).
But there are two remaining areas of considerable power. First, the police authority/PCC is the designated employer of all police staff (that is, all employees of the force other than warrant-holding police officers) and it can hire and fire the chief officers themselves. Second, since early 2009, the police authority has conducted the annual appraisal of the chief constable and has an input into the performance development reviews (PDRs) of the other chief officers. This combination of the employer role and the assessor role makes police authorities increasingly powerful, and has led to many chief police officers feeling uneasy.
With such augmented powers, police authorities can often be accused by chief officers of interfering with the operational independence of the police, a point made clearly by Sir Paul Stephenson (former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and successor to Sir Ian Blair), when he remarked, during his keynote speech at the annual Conference of the Superintendentsâ Association in 2009, that:
This seems to have been provoked by a comment by the Deputy Mayor of London, Kit Malthouse,6 that he and the Mayor now âhad their hands on the tillerâ of the Metropolitan Police. Sir Paulâs comments caused a minor political storm at the time (September 2009), and provoked an idiosyncratic letter to The Times, part of which read:
âThe partiality of local politicsâ indeed concerns some chief officers, who see the steady encroachment of the police authority into police operational matters as the beginning of the end of police independence. One chief officer laconically noted:
Another was sure that the police were disadvantaged by processes owned by the police authority and that the âpartnershipâ was inequitable:
