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Conventional wisdom appears to have it that in any fight there is tactical merit in landing the first blow. Well, in the fight for control of policing, the Local Government Association, in anticipation of the forthcoming green paper on policing from the Home Office, has landed its blow and staked out its territory. Their blow takes the form of a discussion paper entitled ‘answering to you – policing in the 21st century’, and an enlightening little read it is.
A role in the hiring and firing BCU Commanders, local control over finances and priorities, dissolution of Police Authorities, commissioning of services from the BCU, the paper has all sorts of good things.
So, here are the LGA’s 12 ways to improve policing:
The first component in the LGA’s reformed tripartite structure is to change the home secretary’s responsibilities for local policing.
The second is the merger of police authorities and local authorities, so local police accountability is exercised through local authorities.
Third is the introduction of community safety charters between the local authority and its local community, against which the local authority and the local police can be held to account by local people.
Fourth is the creation of Community Safety Finance Account’s in local authority budgets to safeguard spending on policing and community safety functions.
Fifth comes the consideration and debate by councils of Community Safety Finance Accounts in their own right during the budget setting process.
Sixth is for merged police and local authorities to set the strategic context of police budgets, and to be able to amend that context as necessary.
Seventh is for local authorities to play a role in collaboration with chief constables in the police workforce modernisation agenda.
The eighth component is for the BCU commanders to be given fully devolved budget responsibility, with existing BCU funds to be given to CDRPs/CSPs to commission services from their BCU commander
Ninth is for the concept of chief constables’ operational independence to be replaced by operational responsibility.
Tenth is for BCUs to become more accountable to the communities they serve through:
• an increase in the number of BCUs, with their size dictated by their local policing functions;
• their boundaries coterminous as much as possible with local authority boundaries;
• BCU commanders to be subject to oversight from local authority scrutiny committees
through the introduction of the provisions in the Police and Justice Act; and
• local authorities to be given a role in the appointment and dismissal of BCU commanders.
The eleventh component is for neighbourhood policing to become a mainstream police activity.
and finally, the twelfth component of the LGA’s reformed tripartite structure is:
• the establishment of Safer Ward Partnerships to bring local ward councillors and neighbourhood policing teams together to tackle crime at a street level; and
• for ward councillors to become local community safety champions for their wards, in the interim through the introduction of the Councillors Call for Action provisions in the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007.
The context that the paper paints of current policing also makes for interesting reading. The full report (28 pages) can be found in the downloads section.
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