When the idea of having Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) first arose it seemed so promising. These would be locally elected candidates, tough and charismatic and they’d be given the power needed to transform the country. Bureaucrats have taken control of British policing, said David Cameron at the time, and cops should be dealing with anti-social crime not fining motorists. PCCs were the local heroes who would revive proper policing, and hold bad police to account.
At the Conservative conference in 2011, the then Home Secretary, Theresa May, declared that the commissioners would be ‘powerful public figures’ of ‘the highest calibre’ who would ‘make the police truly accountable to the people’.
More than a decade later, as voters in local elections prepare to chose new police and crime commissioners, what happened to those high hopes? What happened to the great policing reform that the PCCs were supposed to deliver? The commissioners have neither captured the popular imagination nor presided over a programme of major police reform.
Far from heralding a new era of local democracy, they have in fact achieved only more bureaucracy.
PPC offices are a microcosm of modern public-sector officialdom, filled with underworked staff in their citadels of waste, where paper-shuffling, headline-grabbing, organisational tinkering and holding meetings serve as a substitute for real action.
In the Thames Valley commissioner’s office, for instance, there is a chief executive, a head of partnerships and community safety, a head of governance and compliance, three partnership analysts, two partnerships delivery managers and one partnerships project manager.
Like so much of the state’s machinery, the fashionable obsession with inclusion and diversity runs through the 41 commissioners’ fiefdoms, reflected in a plethora of race strategy plans, positive action programmes, ethnic monitoring, gender audits, training courses in unconscious bias and the celebration of awareness-raising days. Virtue-signalling is part of the job description. So when North Yorkshire Police unveiled a rainbow-coloured van for the York Pride Parade in June 2018, the local commissioner, Julia Mulligan, said, ‘I am very proud to support the Pride event, and I hope it goes some way to reassuring LGBT+ communities that policing is alive to their concerns regarding hate crime and other issues.’ This is hardly, in most people’s eyes, the promised return to proper police-work. The problem yet again is that much of the public feels that the police care less about burglary, fraud and assault than they do about their own image. Faith in the justice system has collapsed, and the commissioners, once held up as the heroes who’d cut through the red tape, have been partly responsible for this trend.
A briefing from the House of Commons Library in 2021 set out starkly some of negative perceptions of May’s model: ‘Public understanding of and engagement with the PCCs is poor,’ said the paper, adding that PCCs are viewed as ‘ineffective and provide weak leadership of policed forces’ while they are also ‘too parochial and struggle to drive collaboration on crime threats’.
The commissioners have never really recovered from a disastrous start to their existence. The think tank Policy Exchange had rejected the idea of sheriff-style Commissioners on the grounds that police should be accountable to local mayors, and as it turns out they were right. The turnout for the first commissioner elections in 2012 was between 10 and 20 per cent, and the controversies began almost as soon as the winning candidates took up their posts. Kent’s Ann Barnes caused widespread embarrassment with a bumbling, incoherent appearance in a fly-on-the-wall TV documentary called Meet the Police Commissioner, only to exacerbate doubts about her suitability by appointing Paris Brown, a hopelessly unqualified, foul-mouthed 17-year-old as her youth commissioner. Barnes attracted more negative publicity when she collided with a taxi, only for the police to discover that she did not have the correct insurance. The reputation of the PCC’s office in Bedfordshire also took a blow in 2014 when the deputy commissioner Tafheen Sharif had to quit after she broke judicial rules.
That same year, Shaun Wright had to resign as the South Yorkshire commissioner because of his central role in the Rotherham grooming scandal, having been head of children’s services at the council for five years. At a time of austerity, more damage was caused by the extravagance of some PCCs, who are paid between £68,000 and £101,000, depending on the size of their force. Richard Rhodes, the Conservative commissioner for Cumbria, spent £700 on two chauffeur-driven trips and in Norfolk, Stephen Bett claimed £3,000 in expenses for car journeys from his home to police headquarters.
The stature of the office holders much improved since the early days. Only last month Northamptonshire commissioner Stephen Mold left office after a row over his appointment of his friend Nicci Marzec as head of the county’s fire service, even though she had no experience for such a role. He denied they were lovers, but Ms Merzec lasted just ten days in her post and Mold followed her out of the door, his position made untenable after he reportedly told a meeting, in reference to Merzec’s successor: ‘I’ll dump the bitch.’
In a moment of candour in 2016, Theresa May confessed she feared she had ‘created a monster’. Not so much a monster as a useless blob of expensive officialdom that is doing nothing to make out country safer.
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