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Search for press releasesHome Secretary's speech at the Superintendents' Association annual conference
16 September 2009
This speech was given by the Rt Hon Alan Johnson MP, Home Secretary, at the Superintendents' Association annual conference on 16 September 2009 in Kenilworth.
Thank you, Ian.
Your association was indeed the first Home Office-linked organisation I met after becoming Home Secretary. In that short meeting with your executive, I had the luxury of not being expected to know anything and the benefit of hearing from people who knew an awful lot.
Since its formal recognition in 1952, the Police Superintendents’ Association has been a crucial influence not only in advocating on behalf of superintendents, but in shaping modern policing as we know it today.
I have been indebted to Ian and his colleagues for their advice and insight over the last few months.
I don’t want my address today to be a simple recitation of flattering statistics, but it would be remiss not to mention the significant reduction in crime over the last 12 years – a fall of 39% since 1997.
It is important to mention it because it is a real and genuine achievement. It’s your achievement and it is testament to the incredible commitment and dedication of Britain’s police.
But crime is the area of government policy where statistics matter the least and perception matters the most.
The achievements in crime reduction need to be balanced against the fact that people's concern about crime isn’t declining at the same rate. And fear of crime, as well as being debilitating in itself, dilutes public confidence.
The police have always had to ride two horses; a police force for those who break the law, and a police service for the law-abiding public.
As Sir Robert Peel said: 'the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen.'
It is testament to this legacy that while in many other countries in the world, the police are feared and reviled, in the UK, they are respected and admired.
While the renewed focus on the relationship between the police and the public through neighbourhood policing echoes the fundamental purpose of the police, as articulated so well in the 19th century, some of the challenges faced by modern police forces would be unrecognisable to Peel and his colleagues.
When the first modern police forces were established, they had to confront the impact of industrialisation and urbanisation – people flooded to cities like London, Manchester and Glasgow where the demand for cheap, unskilled labour was insatiable.
Overcrowded, squalid slums quickly became breeding grounds for violent gang wars as rival 'Scuttlers,' as they were called, terrorised people with their sustained and brutal street fights.
If the challenge was industrialisation in the 19th Century, then it’s globalisation in the 21st.
Terrorists and criminal networks pay scant attention to national borders.
On Monday, the three ring leaders of the airline bomb plot, who planned unimaginable carnage, were sentenced to 40 years, 36 years and 32 years respectively – sentences they fully deserved.
The success of Operation Overt is a salient reminder both of the unprecedented and international scale of the challenges we face.
It also highlights the fact that our police and security forces are a precious national asset that we diminish or constrain at our peril.
While the primary duty of the state, as exercised by the Home Secretary and the police, has always been to keep people safe, fulfilling that duty, under the threat of terrorist attack, has never been more complex.
The sustained nature of the threat we face today, has taken us into new territory, and demonstrated the extraordinary capacity of the police to adapt to changing circumstances.
But they need the right tools to do the job.
Having considered the House of Lords Judgement, I have had to decide whether control orders should be abandoned or maintained.
They are not and never were intended to be the first line of defence.
Where an individual is suspected of terrorist activity, our first objective will always be for that person to be tried and prosecuted in an open court, or deported if they are foreign nationals.
But there is a very small number of people who undoubtedly pose a substantial threat to public safety, and who for good reason, we can neither prosecute nor deport.
In handing down his judgement on control orders on 10 June this year, Lord Justice Scott said: 'The duty of the courts … is not … to protect the lives of citizens. It is…to apply the law.'
It is however, my primary duty to do both.
So while the courts are bound to be an impartial arbitrator of how the law is applied, it falls on police and security services to protect the public. In their efforts to prevent dangerous individuals from doing harm, they must use a range of measures which the law allows.
Control orders are a practical and proportionate legislative tool that can be applied in such cases. They are not perfect and one day, I hope they won’t be necessary. But for a handful of people, they remain the best option we have for ensuring the public is safe and our security services are able to do their work effectively. That is why I announced in a ministerial statement issued an hour ago that I have decided to maintain the availability of control orders within the constrains of the House of Lords judgement.
There are those who claim that a global sense of purpose sits uneasily with the renewed focus on neighbourhood policing and public confidence.
But every police officer knows that it is only through earning the trust of local communities, that their cooperation can be secured in tackling organised crime, gang violence, and yes, even terrorism.
We know that public confidence is at its highest in areas where the police are a constant visible presence; where they make themselves accessible to local people, and where they explain what they are doing to tackle crime whilst listening and responding to people’s concerns.
The surveys show that those who feel properly informed about the measures that the police are taking in their area are nearly twice as likely to believe that crime is being effectively addressed.
Having completed my first three months in this job, I am very clear from all that I’ve seen and heard that there’s no need for more central targets, radical re-organisations or eye-catching initiatives. We need to further consolidate that which is already in place, and we need to do more, much more, to tackle antisocial behaviour.
Petty acts of vandalism, fly-tipping, abandoned cars, intimidating or threatening behaviour are sometimes dismissed as 'low-level problems.' For the people who have to live with them on a daily basis, they are high-level and far from trivial - they have a profound impact on their health and wellbeing.
But in a lot of communities, there’s a 'why bother?' sentiment. They don’t raise these issues with the police or others because they think it won’t make any difference.
This is despite the fact that the police and local authorities have more powers to deal with antisocial behaviour than ever before and the statistics tell us that after any kind of intervention, two thirds of perpetrators desist. After 3 interventions, all but the most persistent 7% desist.
But if we can’t convince the public to come forward, because previous experience tells them their complaint will be passed from the local authority to the police and then back again, we will be fighting a loosing battle.
Tackling antisocial behaviour must be a priority for the police and local authorities and the public need to be confident that their complaint will be acted upon.
Last Friday, I spent some time with Merseyside Police. They have a taskforce dedicated to tackling antisocial behaviour. As well as taking tough action on the perpetrators, police officers regularly visit the victims of antisocial behaviour to check that they are satisfied with the action the police have taken.
It can be no coincidence that public confidence in Merseyside has increased from 50% in September last year to 56.9% in March this year. The Merseyside police say that being tough on antisocial behaviour is helping them to address other issues like gang violence and gun crime, because often those involved in antisocial behaviour are connected to more serious crimes.
The White Paper, which will be published shortly, won’t be an overwrite of the Green Paper but will embed its principles further and I hope resolve the issues which are making implementation more difficult.
I know that one of the Green Paper issues that is at the forefront of your concerns is accountability.
I’m adamant that there’s no case for elected members of police authorities, and neither this nor elected commissioners will feature in the White Paper.
Ian is wise to warn us to be wary of those who offer simple solutions to complex problems.
When the public say they want the police to be more accountable, that doesn’t mean they want the dubious delights of elected police boards. It certainly doesn’t mean they want politicians pulling the strings, or telling the police how to do their jobs – in London or elsewhere.
Locally, they want a name and a number they can call about problems they see in their neighbourhood and they want that problem dealt with quickly, preferably by a police officer with a familiar face.
If they think that a police officer hasn’t followed up the crime they’ve reported, or failed in some other way, they want their complaint dealt with quickly and proportionately.
Most would rather have a speedy apology and an assurance that something similar won’t happen again than a lengthy investigation into the officer’s conduct
They also want to see the criminal justice system working for victims, not, as 79% of people believe, for offenders.
This is why Justice Seen, Justice Done is so critical. It is no coincidence that when people see criminals and perpetrators of antisocial behaviour being brought to account, their confidence in the police goes up.
Whilst as Home Secretary, I will advocate remorselessly on the public’s behalf, I would be doing them and the police a disservice if I thought that meant telling police officers how to do their job.
Similarly, I’m very clear that while centrally imposed targets may have once been necessary, that phase is over.
There is now only one central target on public confidence and there are no accompanying government diktats about how this target will be delivered.
I recognise your concerns that the single confidence target will somehow be undermined by more complex arrangements for monitoring police performance.
Simultaneously holding the police to account, while allowing for freedom and flexibility will be a difficult balancing act.
The policing pledge is not just another list of targets, and neither will it be monitored by the Home Office as if it was. The pledge sets out the minimum that the public can justifiably expect from their local police force, to ensure that consistent standards are applied across the country.
But I am clear, that whatever arrangements HMIC agree with you about how performance is monitored, it must not place unnecessary bureaucratic burdens on the police.
Over the last few years, we’ve made huge efforts to cut the laborious and unnecessary paperwork that chains police officers to their desks.
Thirty-six data collection requirements have either been removed or significantly reduced. Scrapping activity-based costing alone has saved around 260,000 hours of police time.
The foot-long stop and account form has gone – saving another 690,000 hours.
The hand-held devices which are steadily replacing the iconic bobby’s notebook mean that police officers can do on the beat what could once only be done back to the station, saving half an hour every shift.
Analogue radios have been replaced by infinitely more powerful airwave handsets, making it easier for police officers to communicate, even on the London Tube network and saving more time for officers.
In addition, we will explore whether we can reduce the requirements of the stop and search form. Currently, regardless of whether someone who is stopped and searched is arrested, police officers have to complete the form. It’s obviously essential to record the ethnicity of the person and the reason they were stopped, so that any complaint can be properly considered. But there should be no need for the police to record anything further.
In the forthcoming Policing, Crime and Private Security Bill, we will take the first steps towards radically slimming down the form for such incidents.
Despite these developments, I know the bureaucracy dragon has not yet been slain.
Central government may have been slashed, but we were never the only manufacturer of red tape.
Local requirements are often equally, if not more burdensome, and these need to be addressed too. To give one example, while the stop and account form has been abolished, I have heard of instances where neighbourhood police officers are still filling in the form even though it’s no longer required.
The confidence target was introduced to ensure that police officers could focus on what really mattered – that they were chasing criminals, not statistics, and so that they can exercise their professional judgement in making their communities safer.
We have rightly been challenged by you and others to go further in reducing bureaucratic burdens on the service. But making further inroads will require more action at force and authority level. It is on this element that Jan Berry’s forthcoming review will concentrate.
I want to end by saying something about a subject that I’m sure has caused much discussion during your conference – future funding.
I know it must feel like an uncomfortable squeeze between meeting rising public expectations and improving efficiency.
When we talk about greater productivity and efficiency, commentators find it convenient to interpret this as a euphemism for cutting frontline staff.
But when 43 police forces have between them, many hundreds of IT contracts, when many of those forces have separate arrangements for buying uniforms, vehicles and equipment, you cannot convince me that improving efficiency means abandoning neighbourhood policing.
We have not spent the last 12 years building frontline police numbers to record levels to see all these advances reversed.
I don’t believe that the way to respond to this tighter financial climate is to hang the sword of Damocles over frontline officers.
The three year settlement up to 2011 is a good one, and in contrast to our political opponents, we have no intention of cutting into it
The three year pay deal will be honoured, and because we recognise that we are asking you to deliver a challenging agenda, I can tell you today that the basic command unit fund will not be scrapped. It will continue in 2010/11, providing £40m for the police, working in partnership with local authorities, to improve public confidence in the communities they serve - whether that’s by tackling antisocial behaviour or investing more in neighbourhood policing.
I began by talking about the complexity of modern police work. How the challenges faced by police officers don’t just go from neighbourhood to national, but from local to global. From antisocial behaviour to terrorism. All are of equal importance to the public.
But the overriding principle is very simple.
Keeping people safe, providing them with security and serenity in their lives is the most basic duty that any government owes its citizens.
The principles at the heart of the creation of the modern police service in the 19th century are as relevant today. It is through greater engagement in neighbourhood policing, genuine accountability, collaboration and strong leadership that we can ensure that policing is carried out both with and for the public.
It is my role as Home Secretary to support the police in their difficult and dangerous work, and I will fulfil that role to the best of my ability.
Your association will be essential to my efforts.
