Words and Deeds

This week the outgoing Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, was interviewed by The Evening Standard. He reflected on his time in charge of the country’s biggest police service and offered some advice for his successor, since named as Cressida Dick.

Within the interview he suggested that the pressures on police budgets are such that the Met would soon have to consider “rationing” services as the NHS does. I was reminded of a speech he delivered in March 2015 which was entitled “2020 Vision: Public Safety in a Global City”. In it, and again drawing comparisons with the NHS, he suggested that given the budgetary constraints in which the Met is operating; “every time we’re given a new priority, we have to ask the public, what do you want us to do less of, to de-prioritise?”

But where is the evidence of this “less with less” strategic direction over the last 2 years? All we have seen is a determined effort to maintain business as usual and the number of frontline police officers in London at a level of 32,000. In response to cuts to the police budget the Met has so far focused on (1) reducing the size of its estate, (2) reducing its support and headquarters staff, and (3) reducing the number of senior officers and managers. However, in doing so, the Met’s leadership has neglected the more fundamental and admittedly difficult question; “what do we need the police to do?”

There continues to be a particularly unhelpful fixation on police numbers as a measure of success. Let’s be clear, numbers of police officers are relevant but as a determining factor of success and/or as a demonstration of a London Mayor’s commitment to policing, this is insufficient without an appetite for wider reform. By 2020 London’s population is projected to increase to 10 million people. Let’s say for the sake of argument that currently there are 32,000 police officers in the Met and that number will remain static. That’s a ratio of one police officer to 312 people. Is that about right? But that’s the point. It really depends more on what you have those officers doing and how their work is prioritised, than determining success by the overall number of them doing it.  

Since 2010 the UK police service has managed cuts of around a fifth of its budget. The Met successfully argued that these cuts should be delayed until the Olympic & Paralympic Games had been concluded in 2012. An unfortunate and unforeseen side-effect of this is that the local authorities in London had already delivered cuts of up to 40% of their grants. By the time the Met had come back to the issue of austerity, their partners had already cut staff and reduced services, thereby increasing the demand on the Met just when it then needed to get its own house in order. 

I know of a case where one local authority, due to budget constraints, decided to discontinue responding to “noisy neighbour” issues. They then diverted all calls on this issue to the local police. The trouble is they hadn’t informed the police first. The whole idea of public services “shrinking together” never had a chance in London. I’ve seen the recent commentary on local authority Chief Executives challenging the Met’s decision to cluster Borough Command Units because in their view this will reduce police accountability. I have no doubt this will cause them some difficulties, especially as the Met has been back-stopping their community safety functions for a number of years now. Perhaps when the realities of the reducing police budget are brought home, they will add their voices to those of their police partners for the government to reconsider the scale and pace of reductions to the Met’s funding.  

In response to the financial challenge the Met needs to define the services it delivers, and then, based on consultation with the public and its partners, which of these services should be reduced or even discontinued altogether. And this is the difference between Sir Bernard’s words and his deeds. In suggesting that the Met should be having these difficult conversations in order to determine what the service should prioritise, while at the same time (for instance) insisting that all members of the public reporting crime to the police (any crime) should be entitled to a visit from a police officer, demonstrates a clear gap between what he has said and what he has done. Frontline officers are dealing with an incredibly challenging operating environment and when they see unnecessary headline-grabbing demands placed on top of already overloaded in-trays they are entitled to feel aggrieved.

I left the Met last summer. I was particularly frustrated by the way in which there was no sense of strategic direction or prioritisation of services across the organisation. Instead, we were left with a salami-slicing approach to cutting budgets across all departments with no appreciation that when the chips are down, clearly some departments have to be prioritised over others. This is about operational independence, making decisions based on risk, regardless of political expediency.

There are a number of areas where this service-driven approach would be of benefit. For instance; why does the Met continue to post police officers to Safer Schools when we have specialist CID departments at breaking point? Why is it that the Met continues to police the Notting Hill Carnival at a cost of ￡8 million and where approximately a third of the Met’s resources are diverted to the event over the Bank Holiday weekend? Why does the Met continue to spend so much of its time dealing with mental health issues and children absconding from care homes? These are the difficult conversations that I had hoped the “2020 Vision” would have heralded. And yet “more for less” continues to dominate the policing culture. The impact on officers and the wider policing family is tangible. No wonder morale is so low. In treating everything as a priority, nothing is a priority. And you end up burning out your best people.

With regard to “policing in austerity” Sir Bernard can stand by his record as having led the Met for the last five years and he has done much to reduce costs during his tenure. But cutting police staff, (some) senior officers and selling much of the estate doesn’t demonstrate the leadership required to make the really tough calls. For his successor, the really difficult decisions are yet to come.