Former Home Secretary David Blunkett and think tank chief exec Alex Thomson answer the question: Are elected police and crime commissioners likely to increase accountability and give communities a real say in neighbourhood policing?

YES: Alex Thomson, chief executive, Localis

Hands up if you can name the chairman of your police authority. If you are eagerly grasping the air at this point, you must be a keen student of local government – a 2007 survey found that 94 per cent of people could not.

Frankly, if you even know what police authorities do, or rather are supposed to do, you are doing pretty well. Technically, they are responsible for appointing (and, if necessary, dismissing) chief constables, and for setting the strategic direction, and budget, for policing in their local area; but most people would surely assume such things were driven by Home Office directives, if not the home secretary herself.

Public satisfaction levels with the police have fallen substantially in recent years. And more worryingly, those people who had contact with their local police rated them more negatively than those who had not had contact. These findings contrast with those from other public services: for example, direct users of schools and hospitals tend to rate those services higher than the public as a whole. When allied to statistics that show the gap between actual and perceived levels of crime increasing, and that far more British people are worried about crime and violence than Americans, it is clear that something is wrong.

So what’s the problem? It’s certainly not lack of money that’s to blame – the UK spends far more on law and order as a proportion of total government spending than any other country in the OECD except the US. The answer is a fundamental mismatch between the policing that communities want and what they get.
 
The public want more visible ‘beat’ policing, but successive cadres of police management have flatly ignored these wishes. The public also think the police have inappropriate priorities and are unduly concerned with serious incidents at the expense of less serious incidents and problems. But that’s because chief constables look upwards to Whitehall, not down to communities.

Even the last Labour government – not noted for its decentralising instincts – finally proposed the creation of “a clear and powerful public voice in [police] decision-making through directly-elected representatives”. The fact that it chickened out when faced with the self-interested lobbying of chief constables doesn’t change the fact that it was right.

The system doesn’t work, policing lacks local accountability, and it’s time that local people had a real say over the policing in their area. 

NO: David Blunkett, former home secretary
How could anyone disagree with any form of election, for whatever post? It’s a serious question, because people equate democracy with voting, rather than with the importance of real answerability, accountability and responsibility.

That’s why, when I wrote my paper on police accountability, I came down against elected police and crime commissioners. This wasn’t because I don’t think there should be a clearer voice for communities; far from it. My objection is that a community is a place with an identity of interest, and the size of police authorities at the moment is anything but an easily definable community which will readily take to a single presidential figure.

It’s contrary to want the police to be accountable to the community and then indicate that there will be an intermediary who will be accountable instead.
With all their faults, police authorities don’t fudge this. The chief constable and his senior team are accountable for what they do. How they account for themselves to the community has been a longstanding struggle for the last 150 years; but no-one really pretended that this was solely the responsibility of the police authority.

The government’s proposals acknowledge that there should be a Police and Crime Panel – in essence, reinventing the police authority but with an elected chair, provided with new powers in relation to the chief constable – but without any clarity as to what happens when the chief constable and the elected commissioner find themselves in conflict. Either the police commissioner has real power and can override the chief constable, or he or she ends up as a kind of totem to local democracy, without any real power or influence. The consequence is self-evident. The democratic process, and the confidence that one can hold the commissioner to account, would be undermined. Greater clarity for neighbourhood answerability, involvement by elected local councillors in the broader swathe of police and crime prevention measures, and a strengthened police authority, must be a better way.

It’s not clear what the role of the home secretary will be in future. Without intervention powers, he or she becomes just another cipher, with the illusion of authority leading to the disillusionment with the political process.
Commissioners sound extremely innovative and ‘democratic’. That is, until you examine the reality and get into the detail of what is being proposed.

Written by CSW