Labour have announced that they will abolish police and crime commissioners. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood described PCCs as a ‘failed experiment’. While that may be true, is what Labour is proposing in their place any less failed? Mark Rowe asks.
To go through Labour’s arguments first. They say that ending PCCs will save the suspiciously round sum of £100m. PCCs may have had a habit of growing their staffs, as is only natural (in the House of Commons, Home Office minister Sarah Jones setting out the Government’s decision said that ‘on average, I would say that they have between 20 and 50’). Still, someone will have to be paid for doing the work of oversight of police forces. Labour propose to go back to local government doing the task, where elected city mayors are not in place. While some city mayors were already doing the job of a PCC, notably in London, what Labour is proposing will make matters more fragmented.
Party-political
It does make party-political sense. At the PCC election of 2021 (held over from 2020 because of the covid pandemic) at the height of Boris Johnson’s sway, Labour held almost no PCC posts. While they got some back at the May 2024 elections, a forerunner of Labour’s landslide win in July 2024, many shires still have Conservative PCCs (and Leicestershire’s has since defected to Reform UK). It means that while Labour has some casualties, it is handing the PCC role to mainly Labour city mayors.
Practical
In practical terms, it’s hard to imagine that any PCC or their staff will bust a gut for the remainder of their time. The cynic might answer; will anybody notice? Before the Tory-led Coalition brought in PCCs, first elected in 2012, some said that PCCs would be more accountable; to businesses for example. I have to report that I saw few, and dwindling signs of that. I went to annual business crime forums by the (Labour) West Midlands PCC pre-covid. They became progressively less well attended and the PCC appeared to lose interest (he made his apologies latterly and a deputy chaired the meetings instead). A new PCC held such a meeting in 2024 (featured in the November 2024 edition of Professional Security Magazine) and appeared stumped by the litany of complaints by businesses, and business improvement districts, of poor and inconsistent service from the police. The public made their own judgement; turn-outs at PCC elections has been low, as Shabana Mahmood noted; lower even than for local government elections; although turn-out even at national level has been falling, presumably because ever more adults are disillusioned.
National
In other words, what you might have hoped for after a dozen years, a body of knowledge, if not among PCCs (who could be after all voted out by the electorate after four years) then among staffers, was not apparent. At national level, nor was good practice among police forces getting spread among PCCs. To stick with crime against retail and other business, of the two PCCs with that portfolio at national level, the Sussex PCC Katy Bourne (Conservative) has made efforts in business crime reduction partnerships, including hiring of private security; but have other PCCs taken note? The other joint lead, North Wales PCC Andy Dunbobbin (Labour) spoke at the NABCP (National Association of Business Crime Partnerships) conference in Birmingham in October, featured in the November edition of the magazine. He gave the party line on good work in the field (such as the Home Office’s Safer Streets initiative nationwide from July to September); but if he was piloting innovation in his region, and banging the drum for it nationally, he kept it to himself.
Problem
There lies the problem. Not only in partnership work (the proven approach to going after serious and organised shop thieves that routinely and prolifically cross police force borders to target high streets), but other fields of police work, various police forces are making good progress; what’s needed is a national pulling together of ‘what works’ and broadcasting it, if necessary banging heads together so that the good practice happens everywhere. That could be in use of tech; drug rehabilitation schemes to take willing addicts away from stealing from shops to pay for their addiction (West Midlands has pioneered; surely the need for it is national?). In a recent report about police productivity, the National Audit Office has noted what a poor job the Home Office does; or in the measured words of the NAO, ‘the Home Office is strengthening its oversight of police forces but there are important gaps in its understanding’, and ‘there is little evidence that the Home Office’s previous efficiency initiatives have led to lasting improvements in working practices across all police forces’. No wonder, because ‘the Home Office has not yet established an approach to measuring police productivity’. Perhaps Shabana Mahmood should be looking to abolish her department instead?!
What next
As for what Labour is proposing, what kind of job are elected mayors (another experiment), in Manchester and London long-serving Labour ones, doing, looking after the police? The Greater Manchester force was in ‘special measures’ from 2020 to 2022. The Casey report of 2023 set out quite how toxic the Metropolitan Police’s occupational culture is, seemingly impervious to politics. The mayors appoint deputies who typically have a Labour party-political background rather than experience of policing (which was the norm among PCCs, although you did get some PCCs elected who had been in the police, who at least would know the ropes, ‘where the bodies were buried’). Mayors naturally will appoint someone they know and trust will take orders. Outside the cities, presumably oversight of the police will revert to local government. Whatever their faults, everyone knew a PCC had the responsibility of going toe to toe with the chief constable. A PCC therefore had more clout than the councillor who’s leader of Bogshire Council. The prospect is of even less passing on of good practice wherever it’s found, across the 43 police forces.
Photo by Mark Rowe: Gloucestershire Police car, Cheltenham town centre.
