Home Office junior minister Chris Philp recently gave a speech to announce about ‘cutting down on red tape which so often gets in the way of real police work’. Mark Rowe writes in praise of red tape.
Chris Philp gave his speech on Friday at the Law Society in London. An appropriate venue, as the phrase ‘red tape’ refers to the red tape that is tied around legal files. It’s come to mean over-lengthy, tangled procedure that gets in the way of the real work of policing or any other occupation. It’s a beguiling and recurring wish for politicians, to ‘cut’ red tape’, just as it used to be to cut quangos.
It’s bound to get welcomed by otherwise hard to police lobbies, in this case the Police Federation, the equivalent of a rank and file police trade union.
Philp like many ministers before him implied that policing is one thing or the other, typing reports, or, protecting the public and catching criminals, which they can’t do ‘if they are spending hours putting excessive information into computers. We have processes to ensure proper records are kept. But those can’t go too far’, Philp added, admitting (in passing) that record-keeping is needed. For example, when criminals actually go to court. Embarrassingly, the Crown Courts outstanding caseload rose by 3,539 cases from 57,539 in February 2022 to 60,898 in February 2023; the Law Society has described a ‘towering backlog of victims, defendants and their families who are waiting in limbo for justice’. But that’s the Ministry of Justice, not the Home Office.
In fact, record-keeping is part of life. How else can you keep track of business? Without it, workers might skive off or otherwise not do what they are paid to do. Yes, police grumbled for years about having to fill in paper forms; now forces have equipped officers with tablets (eventually, like other occupations, even commercial waste collectors), they can do necessary form-filling on the road (which does take away an excuse for returning to the station on a rainy day). Consider how any workplace will fall apart, without records, used well. “Recruitment and vetting systems are poor and fail to guard against those who seek power in order to abuse it. There has been no central record of training, so officers may well be in roles which they are not trained for,” said Baroness Louise Casey in her recently published, 363-page report (how much red tape needed to tie that together?!) into standards and internal culture of the Metropolitan Police. Which prompted one police and crime commissioner to repeat their call that the Met should be broken up.
Is it unfair to drag Casey (and the resulting opinions) into this? Philp went on to Casey. His choice of adjectives was significant. He leapt to superlatives to flatter the people he is politically in charge of (‘fantastic officers’, ‘incredible work’) and did the opposite otherwise (the public’s confidence in the police, not least after the Casey report, ‘has been shaken somewhat recently’; the Casey report itself ‘makes for very sobering reading’ – not incredibly sobering?).
But to return to what the Casey report had to say about the Met’s record-keeping. Concerns raised through the misconduct or complaints process are not well recorded. Official inspectors ‘have been critical of the police in general for poor performance on recording crime’. The Met doesn’t keep central records for workforce planning, so could not tell Casey how many trained drivers the force needed, or detectives. The Met has no training records – how can it judge if its officers have taken necessary courses (such as, for child abuse officers an advanced safeguarding course), or who to promote? Casey concluded: “Leadership is not taken seriously and people are not promoted according to their talents.”
On the complaint of Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley, here echoing Casey, that forces find the rules make it long and hard to dismiss an officer, Philp said in his speech that the Home Office has ‘initiated a process to review those rules’ – what is that but further red tape?!
Philp generally like so many appears to be stuck in the cosy, long-outdated picture of policing and Britain as it used to be, or perhaps never was like, but society liked to believe in – police forever cheery, and there for you as soon as you dialled 999. The reality – leaving aside the politics of austerity that created it or at least speeded the change up – is that police are like firefighters dashing from emergency to emergency, bad-tempered and alienated. However Philp spoke of, supposedly: ‘One minute officers could be racing to the scene of an emergency, the next visiting a victim of burglary.’
In truth, ‘the Met deprioritised responding to some crimes, including burglary’ (wrote Casey). Police response to burglary, robbery and theft is not consistently good enough, the police inspectorate reported last August (although Philp only became a Home Office minister in October, so let’s not fault him here).
In every other occupation, data is everything (as a consultant put it in a recent lunch put on by Professional Security Magazine, featured in the May edition). You only have to read the list of speakers at next week’s Retail Technology Show to appreciate that retail is no longer a simple matter of selling things to customers; retailers, traditional and newcomers like Deliveroo, are seeking an edge about data, to understand how they are doing and how to do better; and sifting aside the data of less or no use. Why should the police show such ambivalence to recording data? Perhaps because their detection and other outcomes are so poor? Back to the Casey report and actual crime; ‘recorded rapes and other sexual offences have been rising rapidly since 2012 (and to leave Casey again for a moment, how well are police and the criminal justice system doing there?!).
Why should a Home Office minister mix in a response to Casey with other things? The Casey report was, it’s important to state, about more than the shocking, ‘institutional’ racism and sexism; it pointed to chronic ‘initiative-itis’ – including initiatives to cut red tape? – poor communication by police with victims (if comms, or lack of, are not recorded, what trace is there of any problem?!). That word ‘institutional’ harked back to the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry of a generation ago. What has changed? Instructive here is the 2013 book Hidden Histories by Dr Richard Stone, an advisor to the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry judge, Sir William Macpherson. Stone saw a failure to implement the findings of Macpherson. More subtly and sinisterly, he saw official policy tending to get in the way of change for the better – the convention that those taking part in such an Inquiry don’t kick up a stink afterwards, the archived material not being opened to the public. The sense that official inquiries such as Casey’s and Macpherson, and into the Hillsborough tragedy (eventually), and Grenfell and Manchester Arena so on, create a wave on the surface of complacent British life, and a fuss for a few days, before the next big wave makes the news, and the wave before sinks back into the ocean.
One man’s unnecessary red tape is another man’s valuable info that can be added together to reveal a pattern of behaviour – such as a man loitering creepily, that can lead to more serious sexual offences. Hence Operation Vigilant, to combat offences against women in the night-time economy by sexual predators.
The lazy assumption that red tape is bad and to be curbed is part of that official mind, that everything ought to be smooth, and if something like a Casey report causes a stir, should be smoothed out as quickly as possible, with committees making recommendations, action plans, and so on – more red tape, in a word. The battle against that has to be constant.
Next week
The Home Affairs Committee of MPs will question Minister for Crime, Chris Philp, and Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Mark Rowley, in separate evidence sessions next week as part of its inquiry into policing priorities.
