Regardless of any party political feelings, it’s a fact that the UK shall have a general election in the next couple of years and that Labour might form a government after a dozen or more years of Coalition and then Conservative government. To stress, leaving aside how likely or welcome a Labour government is, what might be new from them, of interest to private security? A slightly different question is what ideas are around, that a new broom might sweep in? Or is the cupboard bare? asks Mark Rowe.
The February print edition of Professional Security Magazine featured (‘Leaders set out stalls‘) what the PM Rishi Sunak and the Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer had to say about crime and law and order. Arguably the most striking thing is how little either had to say about crime, compared with other ever-pressing issues – the NHS, the cost of living and the economy; illegal immigration. Also, either side’s headline answer to crime is more police – the Conservatives’ ‘uplift’ of 20,000 police (that may bring forces up to the level of 2010 when the Conservatives came to power in coalition with Lib Dems), while Labour Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper in a speech at the Labour conference last autumn claimed the Conservatives have cut 20,000. Labour on its website promises ‘13,000 additional police and PCSOs’.
A focus on numbers is understandable. It’s tangible, and gives the impression that something is being done, whereas the number one crime by volume, fraud, usually computer-enabled, is altogether harder to grasp or to propose anything about in policy terms (again, it’s tempting for politicians to make a new law about something, which is not necessarily the same as actually tackling the legislated about problem).
Labour tactics lately has been for home affairs shadow ministers to speak to selected newspapers, and give a little more detail. Yvette Cooper for example spoke recently to the Daily Mirror (‘exclusive’) and Labour tweeted: “Labour will clamp down on neighbourhood drug dealing, get tough on gangs, and extend closure powers for drug dens. We’ll put an extra 13,000 neighbourhood police and PCSOs on our streets to prevent crime, punish criminals, and protect communities.” Snappy stuff, but how will ‘get tough’ translate into policy; what difference will any of the fine phrases make?
For some time and for both the main political parties, while the politicians are too busy or clapped-out to come up with novel ideas (assuming that they’re needed rather than more of the same), they draw on ideas from bright, ambitious, even young people who staff think-tanks and write papers. Such as Policy Exchange, where (to gauge its political leanings) a trustee is Alexander Downer, a former senior Australian conservative politician who did a review of Border Force for the Home Secretary Priti Patel, reporting last year.
Policy Exchange’s papers are voluminous, about crime and generally. To name some, a former Met Police DCI David Spencer wrote an excellent one last summer as the Boris Johnson regime was going out, a ‘manifesto’ titled ‘Crime & Policing: What do we want from the next Prime Minister?’. He has since written on the new Met Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley’s first 100 days, with others on the Just Stop Oil protests (‘a legal and policing quagmire’) and littering. Sir Stephen Laws has written pointedly (‘How Not to Legislate About Begging and Rough Sleeping’) of the Government’s proposals to update the Vagrancy Act 1824. In that case, however, the think-tank is reacting, and while Sir Stephen’s critique was useful, I’m asking here about new ideas, new approaches to known problems – to name three, drug crime that entrepreneurially spread into ‘county lines’ dealing; frauds and scams; anti-social behaviour as varied as flares thrown at football grounds and fare-dodging on trains, that spoils the quality of life for the law-abiding.
Nor are we talking about research or audit into how departments are doing their jobs or how policies are proceeding, helpful though that is – such as into the Home Office’s Safer Streets Fund money, which so far appears (to paraphrase) to have made no actual difference to crimes where the money’s been spent, but made people feel better.
Attention does tend to focus on the police, rather than (not the same) how to take on a type of crime. Thus in a foreword to Policy Exchange’s paper on ‘Blurred Lines‘ asking if police staff networks are too political – authored by David Spencer, another former Met Police man Chris Donaldson, and the think tank’s head of security and extremism Dr Paul Stott – the former Home Secretary Priti Patel (no less) in a foreword writes ‘it is a tragic reality that British policing is in crisis’. Let’s leave aside the remarkable lack of responsibility that Priti Patel appears to show for that crisis, despite having been in charge of the police for three years until last summer.
Here is a tendency for think tanks to stoke up, to repeat the cliche, ‘culture wars’, seeing in this case the police as too political – paying too much attention to modish things while leaving undone or less done, volume crimes that people actually suffer from. Commentators on both sides of the political party spectrum complain that policing or something else in the civic realm is too political – in the name of making political capital out of it, to please supporters and unite them by riling them about something they can agree to dislike instinctively. Crimes meanwhile don’t get solved or even recorded.
Informed comment on the police is out there, such as via the Police Foundation, which blogged recently about Sir Mark Rowley’s speech last month. Where is the equivalent for private security, the generating of ideas to take to the political parties?
Andy Higgins of the Police Foundation (someone else, formerly from the Met!) significantly titled that blog ‘More precision please’ and indeed it makes political sense for any Home Secretary or politician, to focus on a handful of things. More than one or two, and you cannot devote enough time and effort to what’s important (because presumably you rate some things as more important than others?). The reality is that if you feel strongly about something – protest outside abortion clinics; low rate of rape convictions; gun and knife killings; hate speech online – they are all valid, yet politics only has so much ‘bandwidth’ to use a cliche; one gets focused on at the expense of another.
It’s politically smart either to focus on the short term (you achieve things you can point to, before the next election) or long term like the Boris Johnson penchant for strategy documents, on crime and separately on drugs (you’re out of power before any reckoning). In her conference speech, Yvette Cooper actually used the famous phrase of the 1997-2010 Labour: “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.”
It’s a cliche, true like all cliches, that there’s nothing new under the sun. Choices on public policy response to crime are binary, like that Blairite phrase – either punish (arrest and imprison offenders) or ameliorate (offer probation, restorative justice, rehabilitation for drug addicts and so on). The catches are that the prisons are full; and that some offenders don’t want to be reformed, yet, or ever. The good ideas are around already, such as Stuart Toogood’s Offender to Rehab scheme in Birmingham, featured in the December print edition of Professional Security Magazine. What’s called for is the political will, besides money, to make it nationwide.
Photo by Mark Rowe, street art on side of Coventry police station.
