Crime and punishment in the Labour manifesto

The Labour manifesto contains some important commitments in the area of criminal justice. Recognising that there is no more money to spend on the police, the focus is on protecting neighbourhood policing while creating new pressures for service improvement. So (as with health and education) there are to be entitlements to a basic standard of service and mechanisms of redress if those are not met.

In policing, redress is to come via Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, which will have powers to intervene and replace the management team of either a police force or a Basic Command Unit if performance is poor over a prolonged period. This is to be welcomed: at the moment the Home Secretary has the power to sack a Chief Constable on grounds of poor performance, but these powers are never used. This is because ministers fear they will be accused of political interference in policing if they get too involved in firing police chiefs. This new proposal has the advantage of setting out clear criteria to assess performance, with an automatic ladder of intervention if matters do not improve.

There is now clear blue (or clear red) water between the Conservatives and Labour on policing: Labour favours takeovers by other forces or the dismissal of the management team adjudicated by the independent inspectorate, while the Conservatives favour elected police commissioners with powers to hire and fire. The reason the Conservative plan is so unpopular in the police service is because of the risk of politicising policing decisions through direct election. ippr has produced its own alternative elsewhere, involving a new role for local councils in holding the police to account.

A second interesting innovation in Labour’s criminal justice plans is in the area of punishment. Over the last decade Labour has talked a good talk on community sentencing, but community justice has remained under-funded and hence under-used by the courts as an alternative to custody. Hence there are many people in prison for relatively short periods who would be more effectively punished and rehabilitated by the use of community-based penalties. The manifesto contains welcome new pledges to strengthen forms of community payback and to ‘reduce the number of women, young and mentally ill people in prison’.

Rick Muir

Phoney debate on crime

As we head towards the general election, the debate about crime looks set to be one of the most misinformed.

First, politicians constantly speak as if crime is out of control – Chris Grayling famously compared Britain to Baltimore, even though that single city records around 200 fatal shooting a year, compared to just 39 last year for the whole of the Britain. The fact is that crime is lower today than at any point since records began in 1981. Since 1995 vandalism is down 18%, burglary 58%, vehicle-related theft 65%, other household theft 48%, bicycle theft 20%, and violent crime 49%. Fear of crime has also fallen and even people’s perception of anti-social behaviour in their community is less today than in 2002/03.

Of course politicians are responding to people’s anxieties – the public generally doesn’t believe that crime has fallen – what pollsters have called ‘the perception gap’. But the facts are the facts – and politicians should treat them as such.

Second, the knee jerk policy response to crime remains pretty much the same: more bobbies on the beat! So, this week the Prime Minister said frontline police funding would be ring-fenced. Chris Huhne went further and said that we need to recruit even more officers.

Again lets reflect on some facts here: spending on the police service increased by 19% in real terms between 1997/98 and 2008/09. Most of this money was spent on increasing the number of police officers: police numbers increased by 11 per cent or by 16,326 officers between 1997 and 2009, meaning that there are more police now than at any time in our history.

Was this most well spent? Well crime fell, sure. But the government’s own strategy unit has estimated that 80% of that fall was due to economic growth, rather than expenditure on the police. In fact the government accepts that its neighbourhood policing programme is more about public reassurance rather than reducing crime.

We could maintain and even increase the number of officers currently out on the beat – important to reassure the public – without increasing the police budget or recruiting more officers. The way to do that is by reforming the way the police service works. No one seems ready to grasp that nettle.

Rick Muir, senior research fellow