The headquarters branches of the Met Police needed 550 more men, largely to deal with the increase in drug trafficking and other organised crime, and in the terrorist threat, the Home Secretary said to his fellow government minister. “Manpower on divisions is needed above all to increase the police presence on the streets: the force cannot at present provide an adequate response to incidents or an adequate presence at places where and at times when criminal activity or hooliganism regularly occurs. I consider that the present level of service is unacceptably low.”
If it sounds like today, in fact it was written in March 1986, by the then Home Secretary Douglas Hurd, to the Treasury minister, John McGregor.
Police manpower – the subject of that letter – was political then, and now; the Conservatives have made much of their 20,000 extra officers, regardless of whether that will merely bring numbers up to about what they were when they took power in Coalition in 2010, and then brought in public sector austerity.
As the letter also shows, besides outright numbers of police, there are ways to get more police by alterations; in the 1980s, civilianisation in a word, that is, having civilians without police arrest powers to do some tasks. Thus Hurd proposed 150 more staff in the magistrates courts service, to release 150 police.
As the destination of the letter showed, money to pay for police mattered; not only to start them, but for years after. As Home Secretary, Hurd took particular interest in the Met.
The ‘uplift’ of 20,000 police these days raises the question of the rest of the criminal justice system – if extra police are at work, will that mean more arrests and court convictions, requiring a similar ‘uplift’ and extra spend on courts and prisons? Hurd’s letter addressed this: “Increases in police manpower may have an effect on other parts of the criminal justice system. I would propose to monitor this carefully.”
He described the effects of any extra police as ‘difficult to foresee’: “There is not a simple mechanical link between police strength and other variables such as the number of prosecutions and the prison population.” Hence he was not (‘at this stage’) asking for more money for ‘non-police resources’; in that era the Home Office was also in charge of courts and prisons.
The letter is part of a file freely downloadable from the National Archives at Kew in west London, file Prem-19-1886.
Another theme for police manpower then as now is the need for stability – numbers yo-yoing up and down is bad for the service; it makes it harder to recruit and train relatively few, then many, new bobbies, and (as Hurd wrote) makes it easier for police chiefs to ‘plan the most effective deployment’.
Hurd also was wise to the politics of it all (‘presentationally’), looking ‘to make a strong announcement’, rather than ‘dribs and drabs’, to respond to police concern about crime, ‘and to improve police morale’. While in those days the Conservatives regarded themselves as the party of law and order, while Labour was not, Hurd noted that Labour had ‘shown signs of exploiting in an opportunistic way the public desire for more policemen’.
Then as now, police spending had to be part of the wider spend on local government, and Hurd argued that even without an increase in police manpower ‘there would have to be some easement …. of the general downward pressure on local government expenditure’, before county councils would spend more on police.
Background
As for what actual police numbers were, the Home Office said that nationally England and Wales had thousands more police, and police civilians, than when the Tories took power in 1979, albeit below establishment: in 1985, some 120,971 police, and the Met had 26,670 police.
October 1985 had seen the Broadwater Farm riots in Tottenham in north London, when PC Keith Blakelock was stabbed to death; while Liverpool FC fans’ hooliganism caused the death of 39 and injury to hundreds in the Heysel Stadium disaster at the May 1985 European Cup Final. As a result the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher took a ‘close interest’ as a Home Office confidential letter put it in December 1985; and as Hurd recalled in a November 1985 letter to Environment (local government) minister Kenneth Baker, Mrs Thatcher had made a ‘pledge at the Party Conference’ that autumn in Blackpool.
Government ministers in October 1985 talked about bringing in water cannon against public disorder, and ‘in the last resort’ firing plastic bullets. The Met Commissioner, Sir Kenneth Newman, and his senior officers talked with Mrs Thatcher’s adviser Hartley Booth (a future Tory MP) for two and a half hours over a lunch: Newman, the PM was told, ‘was privately unhappy that plastic bullets were not used at Tottenham after he had permitted their use’. As for water cannon, while Sir Kenneth was ‘also unhappy’ the Home Office had not tested water cannons, ‘Newman felt the riot would not have been stopped by water alone in Tottenham’.
The Secretary of State for Scotland George Younger in a letter to Mrs Thatcher in November 1985 raised some points that ring as true today; that demands on police and public expectations had increased; so had reported crime. New ways of working only added to spend (‘tape recording of police interviews will be a heavy commitment on police funds’) and there were always special occasions to police (such as the Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh in 1986).
Younger pointed to ‘the basic problem of reconciling our general policy of reducing local government expenditure with our specific policy of increasing support for the police. The two policies are in conflict.’ The file’s papers show that Mrs Thatcher with the briefest remarks in blue ink in November 1985 backed Douglas Hurd’s ‘urgent talks at official level’ towards getting more money for police (and because then as now most of the money for the police went on their pay, that meant manpower).
Even if nothing happened, as the file showed, police forces had to recruit, to make good ‘wastage’, of police leaving; 23 a week from the Met, which added up to 1200 a year; and the Met indeed recruited about 1400 a year, in bulk intakes of 160 every six weeks.
