Training | 2010.02.20
It's time to shout down the bobbies-on-the-beat mantra | Martin Kettle
For 20 years Britain\'s two main parties have used police numbers as a vote-getter. But where\'s the evidence of public good?
To govern is to choose, the saying goes. And choices are certainly at the heart of the pre-election manoeuvring between the parties over future government spending. The conventional wisdom is that Labour and the Conservatives are basically in the same place now, committed to major spending cuts over the next parliament, cautious about making them too early before the recovery is established, and in harmony about which main programmes to protect.
But there is one significant exception. Labour has been more explicit about what it will ringfence, and Alistair Darling is preparing to be even more explicit in next month\'s budget. So far, Labour has committed itself to protecting frontline health spending, schools, police and overseas aid. But the Tories have only followed Labour down part of this road – and with better reason than is generally acknowledged.
It is clear why Labour should want to protect spending on schools and health if it can – you end up with a better educated and trained population, and you keep more people alive and healthy for longer. The benefit to the voter of making the aid budget sacrosanct is less obvious; but the subject is a sacred cow, and the amounts involved are tiny.
The one that ought to have us thinking twice is policing. Spend more on policing – levels are set to rise by 2.7% to nearly £10bn next year – and what do you get? The answer is nowhere near as obvious as it is with education and health. For every extra pound you spend on police you just get more police officers. There are 145,000 of them in England and Wales now, taking up 70% of the £10bn budget. In his Political Quarterly lecture this week , the former Metropolitan commissioner Sir Ian Blair made the striking remark that "policing is simply becoming unaffordable".
For politicians, it is a no-brainer: spend more on the police and you get elected. Margaret Thatcher, egged on by the press, was the first to really grasp this. Giving the police a huge pay rise, at a time when other public sector workers were been squeezed dry, was at the heart of her successful 1979 election campaign . Promises of more police, more police pay and more police powers always hit the electoral spot for the Tories in the 80s and 90s. Then Tony Blair got in on the act, too, and the current bidding war between the main parties began. We\'ll never lose votes by being strong on crime, Blair used to say.
Until very recently, that was where the politics of policing had remained for nearly 20 years. Crime, including many violent crimes, might have declined , most neighbourhoods might be safer, most people might have little or no direct experience of crime – all true, and all, in a rational world, something to build on with new priorities. But when the law and order light shines, the response is always the same: more police, more powers, more spending. And that is still where Labour is stuck, even though police numbers have actually drifted downwards in some places.
To their credit, it is not quite where the Tories are. This is in some ways a bold claim, since Conservative policy on police remains a work in progress. Shadow home secretary Chris Grayling promises more detail soon. For now, however, Tory policy remains a mix of promises to get officers back out on patrol, to strengthen police powers, and a controversial plan to replace the existing police authorities with elected commissioners. With the exception of this last, which has had the police establishment up in arms, Tory policy in 2010 is a recognisable descendent of Thatcher\'s 1979 programme.
On police numbers, however, the Tories remain studiously vague. Grayling\'s draft manifesto implicitly acknowledges that there is a problem of large numbers of high-cost officers not being put to efficient use. But it doesn\'t explicitly say so, or get entangled in the sensitive business of wondering whether these expensive human resources are justifiable at present. In any other area of public services, though, those questions would be asked. So they should be asked here, too.
To understand the problem at the sharp end, you have to go to documents like London mayor Boris Johnson\'s draft 2010-11 budget this week. This dares to set out the problem in terms from which the national parties still recoil. Crime is down, Johnson says, money is tight, and efficiencies are needed. Part of the answer, therefore, is his proposed 2.5% cut in the mayor\'s share of the £3.6bn spent on London\'s police and the loss of 455 police officer jobs over three years from London\'s present 33,000.
These are modest cuts. Yet to judge by the response from Gordon Brown and Ken Livingstone, who rarely agree about anything, you would think Johnson had proposed the slaughter of every first-born child in London. In fact, what he is suggesting is a marginal trim in a highly labour intensive, very well-paid service with a record of questionable efficiency. Something similar has happened in several forces this year without dire consequences.
We do not talk truthfully about policing in Britain. We plunge blindly ahead with what seem like good ideas, without taking the consequences into account. The continuing mantra of "more bobbies on the beat" means a lot of officers have been recruited at a time when crime has been falling, leaving many with not enough to do and the Home Office issuing hopelessly confused reports on getting value for money from a system that is the embodiment of the opposite. The understandable preoccupation with recruiting a multicultural force meant the rise of a loose cannon like Ali Dizaei went unchecked in the name of anti-racism. Now the Tories are blundering into the most radical upheaval in accountability in British policing history without proper planning, let alone public consent.
The most serious collective failing, though, is the cult of ever-expanding recruitment. By and large, more doctors and teachers means more public good. More police officers, though, cannot be justified in this way. Our need for them ebbs and flows. The Tories seem to half-realise this. In public, at least, Labour remains wholly in denial. The truth is that the spending crisis is doing us a favour, forcing us to make decisions that politics will not otherwise permit. In the words of White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel , we should not let a good crisis go to waste. But it\'s no way to run a country.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]1/police-numbers-uk-crime-rate
