Why Labour’s policing targets won’t work

This week, the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper plans to announce new police performance targets. Perhaps the government has been stung by the growing perception that Labour’s stance on law and order consists mainly of hurty words overreach and emptying jails. But as the legacy of well-meaning but dumb crime policies introduced by the last Labour administration shows, Cooper should beware the law of unintended consequences.

Back in the late Noughties, I was by day the Home Office’s senior official in South West England, accountable for crime, drugs and counter terrorism. By night, I struggled into an ill-fitting stab vest and became Special Constable 74170. It gave me a unique opportunity to see nationally imposed crime targets from both ends of the telescope. Rolling about on the ground at 2 a.m. with belligerent drunk teenagers is an instructive way to critique policy made in Whitehall.

Back then, a series of top-down targets known as ‘public service agreements’ governed how the huge increase in public spending brought in by Tony Blair’s government was allocated.