The new Home Secretary appointed by the new Prime Minister Liz Truss to replace the Boris Johnson regime Home Secretary Priti Patel, Suella Braverman, has set out her stall in an open letter to ‘police leaders’. Mark Rowe picks out a couple of points from it.
As soon as Priti Patel was made Home Secretary in 2019, she gave a media interview when she said she wanted criminals to ‘literally feel terror’. On the end of her stint I recalled that statement, which was so distant from the reality of criminal justice, it left her without credibility (though she retained the power of the office).
What then of Suella Braverman? Quite apart from the death of Queen Elizabeth II, we have heard little of home affairs so far, compared with all the hoo-ha about the economy and national finances. On the Home Office website is a September 23 ‘open letter‘ (‘by email only’) sent to chief constables, police and crime commissioners and the like.
Much of it is commonplace: ‘must deliver the public’s priorities’ …. ‘must treat victims with the respect they deserve’ …. ‘reducing crime is a key Prime Ministerial commitment …. need to see a renewed focus on tackling neighbourhood crime’. A minister is hardly going to want victims of crime treated with disrespect, or call for more crime?
First point: she writes that she has ‘been heartened to learn that overall crime, excluding fraud and computer misuse, has continued to fall over the last decade, but there is more we must do to see a further reduction’. She has learned that since becoming Home Secretary? She has not been following the (dubious) claims by the Coalition and then the Conservative-only Governments that they have brought down crime since 2010?
Admittedly she has only been an MP since 2015; and in the October print edition of Professional Security I did raise the concern that she and her junior ministers are inexperienced as ministers, or even in Parliament, especially when you consider that more experienced people (notably Theresa May) are sitting on the backbenches of the Commons. However, she did well in the Tory leadership contest in the summer, and the home affairs job is her reward; such is modern British politics.
But the rest of that quote is ridiculous, because fraud and computer misuse, for years ignored by official statistics, once it was counted, turned out to be the number one volume crime (and even then under-reported and not even the tip of the iceberg of frauds leads to a fraudster in court – something Professional Security and the counter-fraud community have harped on for years). For Suella Braverman to say crime is falling – except for the largest sort of crime – is like whoever came second in the Premier League last season to say that they won the league, excluding Manchester City.
Second point. When wanting the police to do more – for victims, to respond to a burglary, and about anti-social behaviour – she writes:
‘Unfortunately, there is a perception that the police have had to spend too much time on symbolic gestures, than actually fighting criminals. This must change. Initiatives on diversity and inclusion should not take precedence over common sense policing.’
Now that statement will resonate with many. In fact a fortnight before, during the pair of Security TWENTY events in Belfast and Dublin, a retired cop made that precise point to me in conversation. To take only a couple of recent pieces of news. The polling firm Yougov found that ‘most Britons lack confidence that the police will even bother to try and properly investigate a whole host of crimes’, above all bicycle theft from a list of 15 crimes. Among the 15, majorities thought the police would not bother with burglary of the home, phone or internet scams, and anti-social behaviour – in other words, the volume crimes.
As Yougov quoted, this followed a report by the police inspectorate that ‘police response to burglary, robbery and theft is not consistently good enough – and victims face a postcode lottery’.
To return to Suella Braverman. She would have us think it’s either-or; either police are standing with hands to foreheads in the police station yard, asking themselves if the stripes on the rainbow on their cars are wide enough, or they are ‘actually fighting criminals’.
You only have to hear from a response cop that that’s simply not how it is. One piped up at the recent Emergency Services Show at the Birmingham NEC in the audience for a security industry debate on whether private security is the fourth emergency service (as an aside, presumably forgetting HM Coastguard). Response police are dashing from one 999 call to the next; some get reached only late, or not at all. Again, Professional Security has reported the concerns and frustration from retail in general and retail loss prevention and security people in particular, that they detain shop thieves and then have to let them go, because police do not attend to make an arrest or take details. Is Suella Braverman really blaming that on too much diversity and inclusion? No, because she includes the word ‘perception’.
In other words, she is complaining about something that even she doesn’t think actually is affecting policing. However, such is the modern, post-Brexit Conservative politician, who prefers slogans to policies arising from the facts of reality. And it has worked; Suella Braverman has won promotion from Attorney General.
Does Suella Braverman believe that diversity gesturing is getting in the way of policing – which would make her ignorant; or does she know it isn’t, but she said it anyway, because she could not resist making a cheap point?
The problem is when politicians with fixed beliefs come into contact with reality, such as the plain crackers Northern Irish border in the middle of the Irish Sea; or the slogan so popular during the 2016 vote on whether to leave the European Union, ‘take back control’. How is border control, on the beaches of Kent, at Dover? Priti Patel’s answer to that was to outsource; to a conservative Australian politician Alexander Downer, who duly reported; as featured in the September print edition of Professional Security. Rather than: attend to the detail of what is going on, illegal immigration at all hours and weathers in the Channel and on the coast, seeing that Border Force are equipped, trained and given the processes to do their job, and monitoring pitilessly to see that things improve, and stay improved.
Instead as Mr Downer put it, like the diplomat he has been, Border Force works at a ‘sub-optimal level’ because it’s forever in crisis management. Because the leaders, in political terms ultimately the Home Secretary, have not got a grip. We await a Suella Braverman open letter to Border Force.
