By - 24th October 2006
Question: What work is the police reform policy task force undertaking?
Nick Herbert: David Cameron has asked me to lead a task force specifically on police reform, and that is looking really at two principal ways we think we can improve police performance.
One is looking at an area that I think politicians have generally neglected, which is the structure of the police force itself, in terms of its workforce and the need for workforce modernisation and to adopt new flexibilities to expand the police family, to adapt to the fact that we live in a different world where new technologies have come on stream, new skills are required on the part of police officers.
And the second part is to look at the accountability of the police and we think that needs enhancing, and accountability should primarily be local.
A great advantage of that approach is we could put an end to this movement that there has been in the police - I think in common with other public services - towards central direction, national targets, a plethora of bodies seeking to interfere with the police. We want to release police officers from that and from the bureaucracy which bedevils them, as it does other public services.
But you have to put something else in its place and ensure that the public is getting value for money and the policing that it wants, so I think you have to put in place a local accountability mechanism, and we're looking at direct forms of accountability which I think will be radical and exciting and will I hope reengage the public with the police.
Question: What's the mechanism you’re talking about? Elected chief constables?
Nick Herbert: We're not talking about elected chief constables. What we've said is there needs to be some form of direct local accountability, and that means a directly elected body or individual. Now that could be an existing mayor, but there aren't very many mayors at the moment. There could be more, we have yet to see what the government will propose in the next few weeks.
And if there are, I think it makes a lot of sense for the police to report to the mayor, but that does give rise to questions of the coincidence of boundaries and so on. That's one possibility, the other is you could directly elect police authorities rather than have them as partially-appointed bodies and give them a democratic legitimacy, the other is there could be an individual who is directly elected who then is responsible for the police.
But there would be a separation between that individual who would set local strategy and control the budget - and I think there does need to be a clear funding relationship as well - and the chief officer who would remain operationally independent.
And in fact I think that operational independence, which has always been regarded in this country as very important and rightly so, has actually been compromised by the way in which chief officers are increasingly directed by government, and the police and justice bill will actually strengthen the ability of government to direct the police, and I think that's highly problematic.
So we would actually enshrine the principle of local accountability with operational independence of police chiefs, and I think that's very important.
What I think is that having a directly elected element in the process will reenergise the relationship the police have with the public. I think it will get the police facing more towards the public and less towards
I think we need the energy that an electoral process can provide to reflect the community’s desire to see some real action in relation to criminality.
Question: How are the police reacting to your ideas?
Nick Herbert: Well I've been talking a lot to police officers of all ranks, and I think firstly there has been some misunderstanding, because I think a lot of people thought we were talking about electing chief constables, and understandably they wouldn't have supported that and nor would we, that's not what we're proposing.
I think when we present it as if you like a trade-off, a deal, which is that chief officers will not have the direction, the interference, the targeting which makes their life so difficult, they must accept that there needs to be some form of accountability and that that should be local, but there will be checks and balances, I think we will win their support.
And I certainly think we can persuade police officers of all ranks that what we want to do is free them of the bureaucracy and red tape which stops them doing their job. A few minutes to fill in a foot-long form every time an officer stops someone, hours to process an arrest, hours of time spent in engaging with very inefficient court processes, less than a fifth of an officer's time on the beat, freeing up police officers for frontline duties, perhaps by recruiting more civilian staff, giving chief officers the discretion to run their workforces rather than seek to interfere politically.
I think those are all attractive messages which I think are in tune with the kind of themes we're developing for health care and education which is about trusting professionals, allowing them to get on with their job, but that has to be against a background of accountability.
Question:You’ve written about the principle of allowing private companies into more areas of police work like finger print identification. How far would you take that, and what is sacrosanct?
Nick Herbert: I think in the main policing is going to remain a natural public monopoly, I think that where people are sworn police officers who are using the power of the state to arrest people, detain people, that they should be publicly employed. I don't think there's any disagreement about that at all.
But at the margins I think there are areas where the private sector could do more, where it makes sense to release officers from front-line duties. We've seen this successfully employed with the escort of offenders for instance or in the management of custody suites, and there is more that could be done.
I don't think it's going to be a controversial encroachment into areas of natural policing but I think it is going to be increasingly a viable option for doing administrative tasks which it doesn't make sense for police officers to do.
We want highly-trained, well remunerated police officers, doing the job which the public wants them to do which is being out there tackling criminals, being on the streets, it doesn't make sense to use sworn officers to do a lot of administrative tasks that neither they want to do nor the public want them to do.
Question: Does it still make sense to talk about being the party of law and order? Do you think the idea of tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime is still relevant?
Nick Herbert: The Conservative Party will always be the party of law and order, we will remain so, and the government not surprisingly has absolutely forfeited any claim to be successful in dealing with crime because of its lamentable record.
And Tony Blair's slogan 10 years ago was absolutely the right one. Tough on crime, tough on causes of crime is the right approach, the tragedy is he's been able to deliver on neither account, neither has he really addressed the causes of crime the underlying drivers, which is something David Cameron has tried to talk about.
Nor has he addressed crime itself or been tough on it,. We've seen crime figures showing rises in violent crime, we've seen catastrophic mismanagement in the home office. The criminal justice system is a chain, to work effectively each link in the chain must be strong, but every single link is actually broken.
Herbert on crime figures
Question: Are crime figures trustworthy?
Nick Herbert: The crime figures are unreliable, politically manipulated as the Statistics Commission has said. We do need independent measures of crime. I believe there needs to be a completely independent measurement of crime and police performance separated from government so that public can trust the figures so that we know what it really happening.
Question: Do you envisage that being statistics collected from the police, or from the public like the British Crime Survey?
Nick Herbert: It might be a mix of those things, but I think it must be collated and scrutinised independently so that when this independent body produces the figures we can all trust them and I think that's good for everybody. It means the public, the media, the police themselves have a measurement of crime they can trust, and it means we stop having a debate every time the figures are produced about whether they tell us anything or not.
Question: Do we underestimate crime?
Nick Herbert: The think tank Civitas believes crime is significantly underestimated, that there are millions more crimes than are reported and I think people’s dissatisfaction with procedures means that they don’t very often report minor crimes, people don’t feel there’s any point.
We know that in terms of recorded crime it’s 10 times the level in the 1950s, and crime is, even if you think it’s marginally gone up or down over the last few years, it is plateaued broadly at historically high levels, and in terms of comparators with out peer group countries it’s very high.
We have one of the highest crime rates in Europe. And I think we should start from the position that the public are dissatisfied, anxious and want to see action to deal with this problem.
The direction of our travel is very clear indeed, and this is an area in which we intend to be bold because we know that the public demands action, and I think they're right to.
One of the great mistakes of some politicians, particularly the other parties, is to believe that really crime levels are coming down and it's just that there's a confidence gap - the public are just more worried about crime than they ought to be, and I think that is gravely to underestimate what is actually happening on the streets, and people's dissatisfaction.
Dods Parliamentary Communications Ltd
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