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Policing and Criminal Justice Minister Nick Herbert gave a speech today (23 June) at Policy Exchange in which he set out the seven principles which will run through their approach to reform of the criminal justice system.
Over the next few months, they will be setting out proposals for fundamental criminal justice reform and will introduce a Police Reform and Social Responsibility bill in this first session of Parliament. Later this year, they will set out proposals to reform sentencing and the way that offenders are managed.
I have edited the speech to draw out the seven principles. To get a sense of language and context it’s worth reading in full. It can be found here
The seven principles are:
First, a move away centralised direction and targets, and a focus on securing outcomes rather than dictating processes. We must stop telling criminal justice professionals how to do their job, and start holding them firmly to account for the results they deliver. The huge gain will be a reduction in bureaucracy, greater discretion and more local innovation. We must trust professionals, but that cannot mean giving up on the drive for higher standards. Stronger accountability is the quid pro quo for abandoning the decade of ‘deliverology’.
Second, we must get the incentives right in the criminal justice system. Targets are poor incentives, and often drive perverse behaviour and outcomes. We should embrace far more powerful incentives, opening up contestability in penal services and paying providers – from the private and not-for-profit sector – by results.
Third, with greater accountability comes the prize of greater autonomy for professionals in the criminal justice system. We have already announced that we want to return charging decisions in minor cases to police officers.
Fourth, we will drive value for money, focusing on the opportunity of greater back office collaboration, centralised procurement, and use of technology to improve the performance of the criminal justice system. We need to ensure that IT systems are compatible, and promote innovative ways of working that can drive efficiencies, such as handheld terminals for the police to record searches, and evaluating the capacity of video link technology to save time and money.
We need a cultural change throughout the criminal justice system, where every player is focused on performance rather than process, on cost-effective action rather than resource-sapping bureaucracy.
Fifth, in place of the torrent of new and frequently ill-considered laws and initiatives, we want to take an evidence-led approach, spreading information about what works in the system and ensuring that those who work in it are equipped to do the job.
Sixth, if the public are to be able to hold the criminal justice system to account, they need better information. We must open up the criminal justice system so that the public, and especially victims of crime, know more. So from January, we will be providing crime data at a level that allows every community in the country to really see what is happening on their streets. We will require police forces to hold regular ‘beat meetings’ so that residents can hold them to account. And I am determined to look for a cost effective way of driving forward a national non-emergency number, to give the public even better access to the police and other local public services.
Seventh, we need to encourage greater community involvement in keeping neighbourhoods safe. So we can make sure that local services, for example neighbourhood policing teams, have a clear role in enabling and encouraging communities to come together and get involved. We can devolve funding, power and decision-making to local groups, and engage the voluntary sector to run innovative services that provide value for money.
We want to build on neighbourhood watch and community crime fighters, linking these schemes together, making them more accessible and attractive to a wider group of people, and encouraging members to get their neighbourhoods involved. Whether it’s through looking out for our neighbours, reporting crimes or antisocial behaviour and knowing that action will be taken, challenging for better services at beat meetings or online, supporting victims or devoting more time to volunteering, building the Big Society is as important to fighting crime as running effective agencies. The criminal justice system cannot be isolated from community engagement, and it will be immeasurably strengthened by it.
We understand that crime matters and that people care deeply about it. It destroys individual lives and whole communities; for some people, crime has made life not worth living. This government is determined to put law and order where it belongs in the national agenda: right at the top.
We should aim for the public to have the same level of confidence in our criminal justice system, and respect for all those who work in it, as they do the NHS. And like the NHS, perhaps it is time to tell the public directly that this is not a criminal justice system, opaque, unaccountable and distant, but a criminal justice service, which exists to serve and protect them, just as much as it exists to serve the interests of justice.
The founder of modern policing, Sir Robert Peel, stated in his ninth principle of policing that ‘The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it.’
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