I’m presenting Radio Four’s Week in Westminster this morning, on deficit wars, London wars, welfare wars, and another set of wars which no one has really discussed yet: the directly-elected police commissioners. There will be about 40 of them elected in November, and candidates are already emerging: Nick Ross (ex-Crimewatch), Colonel Tim Collins and London mayoral hopeful Brian Paddick. I
interview two names that have been thrown into the frame, both former ministers and both women: Jane Kennedy (Labour) and Ann Widdecombe (Tory). I wanted to find out just how excited we should be about these elected police commissioners.
The theory is very simple: that right now, England’s constabularies report to the Home Office and their priorities can be skewed towards those of a bureaucracy, not of the people that they serve. And that democratic control would realign police priorities with those whom they are paid to protect. Also, everyone knows what a difference a good police chief can make: Bill Bratton’s ‘broken windows’ policing policy in New York is famous for turning the city’s crime around.
Widdecombe, a former prisons officer, tells me that she had been approached to stand but decided not to because there’s no power to do anything useful in the job. It was Mayor Giuliani, she says, who was elected to clean up New York and he hired Bratton. Giuliani had power to micro-manage policing, go on operations, the lot. These new commissioners won’t have the power to do anything, she says. They will just be advisers, one voice on top of a dozen.
Jane Kennedy did not disagree. She was more optimistic: she is interested in standing as the elected police chief for Merseyside. But her focus was on helping the police forces through the government’s cuts, working with councils, etc. Midway through, she said that ‘we’ have not decided… ‘who’s we?’ I asked her. The Labour Party, she said. She’s not standing in her own right, she’s seeking nomination to be Labour’s candidate to be police chief, and she needs the permission of the party apparatus. She expects all of the local elections to be fought along party political lines: there’d be a Tory candidate to police Liverpool, a Lib Dem candidate, etc. The party political system has served Britain well for generations, she said. It can again.
To me, it’s rather a depressing prospect. I struggle to see how party political divisions are relevant to whether you know how to police a city. Sure, coppers have different political beliefs. So do soldiers. But such beliefs are not really relevant to the job. The idea of the Labour Party deciding who it will impose on a grateful Liverpool as a police chief, using its loyal bank of voters, seems very old school: surely, in these elections, people are likely to look at the person first and party (a distant) second? Jane Kennedy certainly has her merits, but does she really need that red rosette? Nick Herbert, the police minister, is trying to raise awareness of the scheme — and attract a wide range of applicants.
It may well be that all the parties play this game, and the police commissioner elections are fought by all parties. But I have the feeling that if individual coppers stood for the job on the basis that they turned around their beat and could do so more broadly — like Ray Mallon did in Middlesbrough — then they’d do very well.
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