Elections are coming to the UK this year – a general election probably in the spring or autumn; and as part of local elections, the elections for police and crime commissioners (PCCs). How to judge records of incumbents, and the promises of candidates? Metrics – measuring performance, how well something’s done or how profitable it is – is one thing; an independent and consistent metric another.
Neil Garratt, London Assembly member and chair of the Assembly’s Budget and Performance Committee, in a February 2024 letter to London Mayor Sadiq Khan, quoted Prof Tony Travers of the London School of Economics (LSE) from a meeting of the committee in January 2024. Travers stressed ‘outcomes and outputs’, and ‘effective mechanisms to monitor them over time’. Travers said: “When Michael Bloomberg was Mayor of New York City, he had an office devoted not to targets so much as to consistent data over time that made it possible to judge whether, to take an obviously very difficult one, crime is going up or down. You only have to say crime is going up or down, particularly in an election year, to know how easy it is to choose time series, to choose indicators and whatever. It is not unique to this year and the election. It happens all the time and Government and Oppositions do this.” This applies equally to public transport, and housing, that Travers was talking about earlier to the committee.
Some measures, Travers suggested, are more useful, and mean more to the public, than others: numbers of police officers (although regularly trumpeted by the Home Office thanks to the much-publicised ‘uplift’ of officers under the Boris Johnson regime), Travers found less important than ‘whether those police officers deliver value for money’; and whether crime was going down and (TfL) passenger numbers going up.
That’s not to write off targets, which another invited speaker to the committee, Stuart Hoggan, said he was a strong believer in, because ‘they influence the direction and the resources within organisations, but they do need to be framed properly and reported in the right way and do everything they can to avoid perverse incentives’.
Hoggan also addressed institutions’ ‘cultural change, which we would all agree is a substantial priority, likely for all police authorities across the country but certainly for the Metropolitan Police’. Garratt’s committee was chewing over the Met’s budget, and how and whether the proposed working out of the Casey Review, published a year ago after Baroness Louise Casey surveyed the standards of behaviour and internal culture of the Met force, would get funded. But how to capture intangibles, perceptions, such as people’s trust in the police, or indeed feelings such as fear of crime?
