Society
Bobbies on the beat
Published 14 February 2008
Management-speak has no role in police reform.
When the Tories first introduced market mechanisms to schools 20 years ago, I tried a little satire. Extend the market to the police, I suggested. A victim of burglary or theft, wanting the crook caught and their property restored, should have a choice of provider. Police funding should be related to the number of "customers". Dilatory constables should go to the wall. The following week, a reader wrote in to point out that some relative of Milton Friedman had seriously proposed exactly that.
So much for satire. Since then, life under new Labour has overtaken both my satirical imagination and the Friedman family's wilder ideas.
Take recommendation nine from this month's final report of the Home Office review on policing by Sir Ronnie Flanagan. "Chief constables should ensure that they are taking an entrepreneurial approach . . . through private-sector sponsorship and business enterprise . . . encouraging finance divisions to create and exploit 'business opportunities'." Flanagan provides little enlightenment as to what this might mean beyond noting some forces use "the strength of their corporate brand" to sell driving courses.
The report is full of this sort of stuff. "In any sector where people form the core of a business," Flanagan says, "leadership is key."
That sounds true enough, but are the police really a business requiring, to quote the report again, "demand management" (which presumably means those call centres that don't answer when you dial 999)? Flanagan writes of effective partnerships, improved delivery mechanisms, engagement activity, cross-governmental action plans and our old friends, joined-up approaches. Stakeholders are to be consulted widely. I never cease to be amazed by the extent to which this gobbledegook has penetrated the public services. Do people talk to each other like this? If so, it would explain why things keep going wrong. Told to get on with effective partnership or engagement activity, you could easily mislay computer files or shoot innocent Brazilians.
Flanagan's proposals on ways to reduce bureaucracy, so far as I can discern them, seem sound. The police, he says, have become "process-bound". They should distinguish between the important and the unimportant. Minor offences should be recorded on a form of one or two pages, not the 16 now typical.
But I fear there's a deeper malaise, echoed in Flanagan's tortured management-speak. The trouble with the police - as with teachers and many other public servants - is that they are no longer trusted. They are therefore overmanaged through targets, performance appraisals, inspections and demands for efficiency and higher productivity. Many issues raised by Flanagan will be all too recognisable to the education world, in particular. But having highlighted them, Flanagan seems unable to escape the underlying assumptions.
The loss of trust is partly the police's own fault; as a succession of miscarriages of justice showed, serious falsification of evidence had become too common. But we have ended with the worst of all worlds.
The police, like other public services, adhere to rules and keep meticulous records for good reason: they ensure the public is treated fairly and officers are accountable for how they use taxpayers' money. Most public-sector careers promise steady promotion, service increments, above-average job security and inflation-proof pensions, rather than spectacular rewards for high performance. The penalties for failing to follow the rules, therefore, are far greater than any potential rewards for an inspired departure from orthodoxy. Targets and inspections have accentuated what comes naturally to the police: going by the book.
At the same time, the growth of management-speak introduces notions such as efficiency and productivity that are not easily transferable to public services. For example, it is neither efficient nor productive for police to spend hours walking the streets, on the off-chance they will spot a couple of masked men carrying a ladder. No study has ever found that foot patrols prevent crime or improve detection. Yet ask the public what they want from policing, and foot patrols come near the top of the list. The sight of a traditional copper on the beat reduces fear of crime, increases confidence in policing, and creates a sense of order and authority that may at least reduce the street violence that now troubles the public above all else.
To their credit, the Home Office and the police have started to recognise this and have an experimental scheme to restore foot patrols. So do they call it something catchy, like Bob, for Bobbies on the Beat? On the contrary, they call it NRPP, which, unmemorably and rather patronisingly, means Neighbourhood Reassurance Policing Programme. Which reinforces my view that our public services will be fully back on course only when they learn once more to use plain English.
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