UK: "Free market" comes to policing
01 November 1994
The application of the government's "free market" ideology is now being applied to policing in the UK through a combination of the Police and Magistrates' Court Act 1994, the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, the Home Office review of core police tasks, and changes in the financing of policing. Sir John Smith, Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, recently commented that the overall effect could result in "an increasingly centralised police service with growing powers, alongside an
ad hoc emergence of unregulated quasi-police services" (italics in original).
The Police and Magistrates Court Act 1994: cuts local police authorities off from their local government roots; makes them into independent quangoes with the Chair and five out of seventeen members approved by the Home Secretary; and allows the Home Secretary to set "key objectives" to be measured against "performance indicators", with "league tables". Some critics say this turns remotely accountable police authorities into businesses. Critics like Sir John Smith see it as the central direction of policing combined with hiving off many of the police tasks in the community which bring them into contact with the public: "The government accountants have failed to consider how these ancillary tasks [to be hived off] reinforce the law-enforcement arm of policing by building up public trust".
The financing of local police forces is to break with the traditional provision of a 51% grant from the Home Office to be "cash limited, formula based". Ironically the 51% Home Office grant was introduced following the recommendations of the Desborough Committee in 1920 set up after the police strikes of 1918 and 1919.
The "key objectives" and "performance indicators" for 1995/6 were set out in a letter to the Chairs of local authorities in October by Mr Howard, the Home Secretary. The five "key objectives", in a telling phrase, set out "the main tasks the government wishes that the police should be tackling as matters of priority across England and Wales". The five objectives are:
to maintain and if possible increase the number of detections of violent crimes; increase the number of detections for burglaries of people's homes; to target and prevent crimes which are a particular local problem, including drug-related criminality, in partnership with the public and local agencies; to provide high visibility policing so as to reassure the public; to respond promptly to emergency calls from the public.
Four of the "performance indicators" are quantitative, the fifth is: "Public satisfaction with the levels of foot patrols".
Some local police authorities and Chief Constables are up in arms over the allied "funding formulae". This "accountant's" formula divided police work into "categories" with "resource allocation" and weighting according to the "formula". This divides police activity into: "Call Management" 30%; "Crime Management" 30%; "Public order/reassurance" 13%; "Traffic management" 12%; "Community relations" 4%; "Pensions and security" 11%. Factors in the "Call Management Index" include the proportion of people living in "areas categorised as ACORN category F (largely council estates)" and proportion in one parent families. The "Crime Management: Crime Index" factors include: "unemployed; ACORN F; and long term unemployed". While the factors in the "Disorder Index" is defined by:
proportion of people in one parent families; proportion in ACORN F; proportion unemployed; proportion of households with 1 adult; proportion living in terraced housing; and proportion of urban population.
Letter from Home Secretary to the Chairs of police authorities, 17.10.94; Observer 16.10.94; Report to AMA Police Committee, 9.11.94.