Lisa Townsend is the Conservative Police and Crime Commissioner for Surrey.
I doubt many Conservative Home readers cried into their coffee when they heard the news that the Police and Crime Commissioner role is to be scrapped in 2028. There will be some who agree with Sarah Jones, the Labour Minister who announced to the House of Commons on November 13th that PCCs were a “failed experiment”. But this Government’s willingness to remove, delay and frustrate the participation of its citizens – whether through David Lammy’s intention to scrap most jury trials, the continued delays to local and mayoral elections or yes, the abolition of PCCs – should concern us all, because it speaks to a wider belief from Keir Starmer’s Party that they know better than we do.
The reality is that David Cameron’s introduction of Police and Crime Commissioners in 2012 was never very popular among the public, let alone Conservative Party members. Despite the commitment appearing in both the 2005 and 2010 election manifestos, voters never really got behind the introduction of a single, accountable, elected individual who would be the ‘voice’ of policing in their community, with views ranging from apathy to downright hostility and a belief that it was the ‘politicisation of the police’. This early sentiment led to the election of 12 independent candidates (to the Tories’ 16 and Labour’s 13) in that first election. By 2021, all PCCs were either Conservative, Labour or Plaid Cymru.
I have often thought the charge that PCCs ‘politicise policing’ an interesting one, and I admit to having shared the concern early on. But if I have learnt anything in four and a half years as Surrey’s PCC, it’s that the police are more than capable of politicising themselves, and it’s rarely in the interests of the public they serve. Whether marching in Pride parades or taking views on when to police a protest, the actions of operational police leaders have led both myself and my PCC colleagues to ask whether they can really say that they always police ‘without fear or favour’.
If we agree with Conservative former Home Office and London Mayoral adviser Blair Gibbs that civilian oversight of policing is vital in a democracy, then we should care about what Labour plans next for police governance. But we don’t really know what the plans are because the decision to scrap PCCs wasn’t in the Labour manifesto, wasn’t consulted upon and seems to have been decided without any evidence to back it up or views sought from the victims’ groups, criminal justice partners, local authorities or myriad of other services PCCs commission, convene and collaborate with. If you think that Labour PCCs are happy, then you can read Merseyside PCC Emily Spurrell’s scathing attack on her own Government, and Durham’s Joy Allen concern that the decision has exposed “…a willingness to pursue major constitutional reform without the proper process, evidence or respect for the people and institutions directly affected”.
This ‘willingness’ to forgo the usual constitutional obligations brings us back to my original point, that while the average reader may not miss PCCs, the abolition of this elected role is part of a wider pattern from this dysfunctional Labour Government to fall for, in Michael Gove’s words “…the seductive allure of the policy scimitar”. There is rightly an outcry over the Justice Secretary’s announcement to end the right to jury trials for most crimes, and equally there are very real concerns over the further delay to elections for councillors and mayors in large parts of England and Wales.
It has become clear that the real reason for the Government’s decision to scrap PCCs is in order to create the recently-leaked ‘mega-forces’ that would make central control of operational policing much easier for Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood. That’s another article in its own right, but once again, no one voted to allow this Government to destroy independent police forces and replace them with giant constabularies, chief constables overseeing the policing of millions of residents and no real link to local concerns (how’s that working out for London?) Without the abolition of PCCs, with our mandate to be the voice of our communities within our forces (and vice versa) these mergers can’t take place.
We don’t yet know who will hold these super-chief constables to account to ensure they deliver for you. It’s hard to see how an Essex Mayor could hold the PCC-role when the force covers the whole of Eastern England. Or how a Hampshire Mayor could raise the council tax police precept when the Force looks after Sussex, Surrey and Kent too. Surrey Police celebrates its 175th birthday this month – could it be its last?
If we move to police boards as proposed by the Home Office for areas without a mayor (such as Surrey) then will that group challenge the chief constable when he insists that ‘trans women are women’ who deserve full, unimpeded use of female services, as I was told by my previous chief constable (who, perhaps unsurprisingly is fully in favour of these reforms now that he’s chair of the National Police Chiefs Council)? I doubt it, and it’s hard to see police boards as anything other than a retrograde step, bringing back the old police authorities who did little to help local residents.
If you ask most PCCs, we’d agree that reform of policing and of the wider criminal justice system is long overdue. And we agree that the PCC role should not be immune from reform, but by scrapping the one form of genuinely accountable governance, the public’s voice in its local force is lost along, it would seem, with your local police force.
So no, I don’t expect anyone to mourn the loss of PCCs, but we should all be asking why this Government doesn’t trust us on the most basic questions of safety, liberty and democracy.