The principles of modern inspection and their importance

Speech information

To:

College of Policing, Strategic Command Course 2019

By:

Sir Thomas Winsor WS, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary

On:

21 February 2019

Introduction

1. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for the compliment of your invitation and for the courtesy of your attention. It is a pleasure to be here.

2. As I understand it, you would like this session to be interactive. That’s fine with me; please interrupt whenever you want. We should have time for questions at the end.

A journey into policing

3. By way of introduction, I’d like to say something about my journey into this job. That’s one of the things I’m told you’re interested in: how leaders in the various policing institutions got to where they are, and what drives them.

4. I got to where I am in a very unusual way. As was said in the introduction, I’m the first chief inspector of constabulary who has never been a police officer. That was a development which was not universally welcomed in the police service; I don’t think anything I’ve said has been universally welcomed in the police service! But that did not deter me.

5. For me, it’s been a serendipitous route into this. As you will have gathered from the short account you’ve just heard of my professional career – 38 years as a lawyer, working the fields of complex commercial contracts, high finance, regulatory design and operations, and that sort of thing – there isn’t any criminal law there.

6. I did do a little criminal law at the very beginning of my career, in Dundee Sheriff Court. In Dundee Sheriff Court, all my clients were guilty, and one of them got off. This was up until that point my greatest forensic victory (I was 23); it wasn’t actually going to make the papers, but I remember it. My client had no fixed abode. And he was accused of a crime on the railway. He been arrested for not paying his fare, and having only half a ticket. These were the days of paper tickets; and his defence was that he did have a ticket, but it had fallen in a puddle and come apart. I thought that was at least a coherent defence, but the prosecutor didn’t think it was going to work. However, this was simply an application for bail; and much to my surprise and the even greater surprise of my seasoned client – who had far more experience of the criminal courts than I did – I got bail for him. As you know, if you have no fixed abode, you don’t get bail, because of course you are not going to show up for your trial and the police won’t be able to find you. But my client did get bail, and no, he didn’t show up for his trial. So that was my one great victory in the criminal courts. However, I have to confess it was not due to my forensic skills or my powers of great public advocacy. The reality was that the bench had turned over two pages at once, and thought we were on the next case. Not my fault; grateful client, legally-aided.

7. That brief foray into criminal advocacy in 1982 doesn’t mean to say I don’t know any criminal law; I just haven’t practised it for a very long time or to any appreciable extent. And never in England.

8. All my life, I have had a profound hatred of bullying. Bullying is another way of describing the abuse of superior power. The possession of superior power is unobjectionable, but the abuse of that power is objectionable. That detestation of the abuse of power, of bullying, is why I became a lawyer. That is because the law can protect the innocent, the weak, the vulnerable, those who are wrongly treated in all sorts of ways.

9. Even though for most of my career I was not working in housing or social benefits, I saw that the abuse of superior power can take place in all sorts of environments. Corporations can and do abuse their power. So can governments, local and national. And law and the lawyers are there to restrain and if possible deter those abuses.

10. It’s also why I became a regulator. Railtrack, the monopoly provider of network services in the railway industry, abused its superior power. Their handling of their dependent customers – the train operators – was extraordinarily tough and by far crossed the line of abuse of the power they had. They were subject, initially, to a weak regulatory regime. That regulatory regime was there to check the abuse of superior power. That’s what regulators are there to do. And if you are a monopolist or a dominant player, then the checks, the limitations, the restraints on the abuse of that power have to be all the stronger, both in their design and their use.

11. But the possession of significant power in the hands of the regulator, to check the abuse of the superior power of a company such as Railtrack, is useless if it is not used proportionately and in appropriate circumstances in a timely, efficient and effective way. That is the criticism I had of my predecessor as Rail Regulator. In too many respects he appeared to be looking the wrong way, or he was just not aware of what was going on, or he thought a light touch approach to regulation was the best way to get Railtrack to behave properly. That policy was failing very badly, and a much firmer approach was necessary.

12. And that is why I wanted to become the Rail Regulator, give up my law practice and go into public service – to check the abuse of Railtrack’s power. All the instruments to check that abuse of power were already there, they just needed to be understood and used. And Railtrack needed to know they would be used, fairly and proportionately.

13. John Prescott appointed me as Rail Regulator 20 years ago this July. I was then the youngest economic regulator in Great Britain. It was a considerable professional challenge, one I was eager to take on. I served five years in that post: 1999 to 2004.

14. In the middle of my term of office, in 2001, Railtrack collapsed in very violent and controversial circumstances. What was done to bring the company down, and eventually replace it with Network Rail, was extraordinary. And it’s part of the story I’ve been told you want to hear, because without those events of 2001-2004, I would not be the chief inspector of constabulary today.

15. It was an illegal attack on a FTSE 100 company. Railtrack was dreadful in all sorts of respects – I was one of its most severe critics – but the company did not deserve to be put to death without due process of law.

16. The then government had lost patience with Railtrack after the October 2000 Hatfield rail crash and the subsequent widespread collapse of the operational integrity of the network. Throughout the summer of 2001, the government planned in secret to “take back the track”, which was a union slogan of which the left-wing of politics was very fond. It meant renationalise.

17. The company was in financial difficulties because of the Hatfield crash and its late realisation that the condition of its network was such that it required from public funds – determined by me – much more than the £14.8 billion I had recently allocated to it (and that was a 50 per cent increase in what it had had before).

18. To force Railtrack into administration, and under the special insolvency regime in the railways legislation then to take the company’s assets into public ownership and control for nothing (no compensation for shareholders), the government had to convince a High Court judge that it was insolvent. And that was their problem. Despite its financial problems, it wasn’t. I also had the power to grant further public money to the company – without the assent of the Treasury – if I thought the company needed and should have more.

19. So, knowing that the company wasn’t insolvent, and in any case knowing also of my power to increase the company’s public financial settlement, the government realised I was the one entity which could have frustrated its plans. What to do? They had an extra plan to deal with me.

20. The Secretary of State for Transport at the time was a man called Stephen Byers. He was greatly attracted to the idea of forcing the company into administration and thereby effectively renationalising the railway infrastructure. And so a plan – a secret plan – was devised throughout the spring and summer of 2001 to engineer Railtrack’s insolvency, or at least to make it appear that the company was insolvent. And all of that needed to be kept from Railtrack, its investors, the outside world and of course from me.

21. During the summer of 2001, Railtrack was deliberately misled by the government into thinking that the government were going to give the company a free bail-out, suspend the economic regulatory regime for the next four years, guarantee a minimum dividend for shareholders, give the company an open government cheque-book, and all sorts of things. That was of course extraordinarily naïve on their part, because the government doesn’t give an open cheque-book to anyone. Railtrack should have known this all wasn’t going to happen, and that the government probably had something else in mind. But the senior management of Railtrack appeared to believe what it was being told, and that relief was in sight. How wrong they were.

22. By the beginning of October 2001, the government were ready to spring the trap. The bail-out discussions with Railtrack were to be abruptly terminated, and the company would be forced into administration. The shareholders would get nothing, and the assets would all come to the government, and the railway would continue to operate under new management and ownership.

23. On Friday, 5 October 2001, the Secretary of State’s office called me and asked me to come in and have a word with the Secretary of State, effectively on zero I asked what it was about, and they said he just wanted to chat. That had never happened before; there had always been some advance word about what was to be discussed. So I went to London and saw Mr Byers in his office, just as the London stock exchange was closing.

24. Mr Byers told me that throughout the summer the government had been looking in great detail at the financial affairs of Railtrack, and they had decided the company was bust, it had no hope of survival, and they were going to court on Sunday 7 October 2001 to put the company into administration. He thought he would let me know.

25. I was greatly surprised. I explained that I was the railway’s economic regulator, I had just awarded them an increased five-year financial settlement of £14.8 billion – that was the power I had to allocate public money to the company without the consent of the Treasury (after I left, they changed the law) – and so if the company was on the precipice of insolvency, I would know that. Mr Byers replied that what the company told me was a matter for them, the government had made up its mind, and applying to the High Court for Railtrack’s administration was what they were going to do.

26. I then asked whether the chairman of Railtrack knew what the government was about to do. Mr Byers told me the chairman was coming in straight after me, and he would be told then. I said to Mr Byers that if I were the chairman of Railtrack, upon hearing this I would immediately apply to the independent rail regulator to bring forward an interim additional financial review which he had already publicly announced (in the aftermath of the Hatfield crash) to restore the company’s solvency.

27. I knew Railtrack was not insolvent, but that was the way the government were speaking.

28. Mr Byers replied: “Yes, we have thought of that. If in the next 48 hours Railtrack come to you for an accelerated financial settlement, or if you intervene in that time, I have the authority of the prime minister and the Chancellor to introduce emergency legislation into Parliament to take you under direct political control.”

29. After pausing to consider whether I had really heard what I had just heard, I asked whether that would be in relation to all my powers, or only the power to do the financial review. Mr Byers said that the legislation would apply to all my powers, but its first use would be to prevent the financial review proceeding, to stop it.

30. I then gave Mr Byers a long list of all the reasons why this would be really bad idea. I told him it would undermine private investment not only in the railways, but in all the other independently regulated industries, namely gas, water, electricity, telecommunications and postal services. It would damage Britain’s reputation overseas, and much other damage would be done. They were not listening. They were going to do it.

31. The next day – Saturday – Railtrack’s chairman and chief executive called me from an emergency board meeting. They asked me if they came to me that night, applying to me to restore their financial position, would I do the financial review that I had already publicly promised. I said that I would be prepared to do so, but I needed to know three things. I needed them to tell me what would be the grounds of the review, how much money they needed, and when they would need it.

32. The company said its grounds for the review were what they said was the yawning gap between what it really needed to look after the network over the next five years, and what I had actually just given them.

33. How much money did they need? “Hundreds of millions of pounds”, said the chairman. “How many hundreds of millions?” I asked. He said he didn’t know. (It turned out to be £7.4 )

34. And when did they need the money? “Monday.”

35. That was what they said they needed, all to be done over a weekend. Well, of course, that was impossible. But I said what I could do straight away was give the company a letter which they could show to the judge on Sunday. It would say the review had started, and the company did have an alternative source of funds, and so was not insolvent. I explained that, shown that letter, the judge would not make the order.

36. Remarkably, the chairman of Railtrack rebuffed me; he said that if I could not do all the things he wanted by Monday, he didn’t want anything else from me. I pressed them: by accepting my offer, what did they have to lose? “They will overrule you”, they said. I said they couldn’t do that without emergency primary legislation. And whilst the government may perhaps be able to get the House of Commons to agree to the rapid passage of the legislation, they had no majority in the House of Lords. This was not a terrorism Bill which passes all its stages in three days. It would be ferociously fought in Parliament. And even if they were able to do it quickly, I would be able to do my review much faster.

37. Unfortunately, the Railtrack people were not really listening. And so Railtrack went quietly into that long dark night.

38. The next day and for weeks afterwards, there was ferocious criticism of what the government had done. The City of London protested that this was an unlawful expropriation of the assets of a FTSE 100 company, worth £6 billion, without due process of law. And that was true. Despite the day chosen for Railtrack to be put into administration being the same day the United States and Britain began the Afghan air war, the papers were full of adverse comment; the story was on the front pages of all of them.

39. The most disgraceful thing was that in order to get the administration order, the government misled the judge. They told him that apart from the willingness of the government to give Railtrack more money – which they were not willing to do – the company had no alternative sources of finance. That was simply untrue, and they knew that it was untrue.

40. I was very shocked when I saw that the government had failed to make full disclosure to the judge. The reaction from investors and others was severe. There were ferocious clashes in Parliament. The then shadow Secretary of State for Transport vigorously attacked the government, and had them on the ropes. Obviously, she could not unwind the administration, but it was a strong and sustained attack.

41. The government was very surprised by all this. They thought they were going to be popular with this effective renationalisation without compensation. They thought they would have the praise of the rail unions. And they did, until the unions realised that a high proportion of their members were part of the Railtrack share option scheme, and they had just lost a huge proportion of their savings, in some cases all of them. So the government’s insistence that there would be no compensation for Railtrack’s shareholders was quickly reversed.

42. The row went on for a very long time. Eventually, as a result of this and some other mishaps, the Secretary of State for Transport had to resign, the permanent secretary at the Department of Transport was demoted, and my powers as economic regulator were increased, and I saw out my full five-year term of office (it ended in July 2004).

43. In order to engineer all this, we had to engage in some fairly intricate back-channel communications with the Conservative opposition to make sure that Mr Byers would be asked in the House of Commons whether he had threatened the Rail Regulator; he answered no. And then we arranged for me to be asked the same question in the Select Committee on Transport two days later, and I answered yes. That was a pincer movement designed to ensure that Mr Byers’ relationship with the truth was fully and properly understood. The calls for his resignation became a great deal louder, and the Number Ten spin machine turned on me in a very aggressive way. But, as said, I survived.

44. So those were the unforeseen consequences of a significant and failed plan by government to extinguish the independence of an economic regulator in an extreme and unconstitutional way, in order to attain a highly controversial political objective.

45. Why am I telling you this long story?

46. It’s because regulatory independence is enormously important, and the integrity of the independence of some institutions in our national life – regulatory and non- regulatory – is equally important and must be protected.

47. Later, I am going to talk about your operational independence as chief officers, and your relationship with police and crime commissioners.

48. This episode is also part of my story leading to the job I have now, because the shadow Transport Secretary who was very effective in her public attacks on what the then government was doing, and in her defence of my regulatory independence, was Theresa May. And so I got to know her a little bit then, as my resistance to the attacks on my independence was devised and prosecuted.

49. Nine years later, in 2010, she phoned me and asked me to do the 2010-12 police pay review. If that is not serendipity, I do not know what is.

50. Now, back to the railways, because the aftermath of the collapse of Railtrack also has relevance to what chief constables and the criminal justice system face today. That is about money.

51. Two years after the collapse of Railtrack, Network Rail had risen from the ashes. In 2002-03, I carried out another financial review of the requirements of the company to operate, maintain and enhance the national railway network. This time, the Secretary for State for Transport was Alistair Darling.

52. And in December 2003, I increased the network provider’s five-year financial settlement from £14.8 billion to £22.2 billion.

53. When I told Alistair Darling what I was going to do – remember, my independence had not been extinguished – I got a severe and hostile reaction from him. He forcefully reminded me that he was democratically elected, and I was not. He, not I, should be taking the decision on so large an increase in the funding of the railway.

54. I patiently explained that I was doing what Parliament and the regime established by Parliament authorised and required me to do. I was exercising my authority according to economic and not political criteria, and the action I proposed to take was what the railway needed. My statutory duties led me this way.

55. I explained to Mr Darling that he had it in his power to reduce the amount of money the railway needed over the following five years – he could make that £22.2 billion a lower number – if he wished to. But he had to balance the equation. He was in charge of the franchising programme, and he could decide to reduce the intensity of the use of the network. As regulator, I could only set the charges – which the Government had to pay in higher subsidies to the train operators – to the level necessary efficiently to meet demand and the intensity of the use of the network. I could not set them any higher than that. So if the Secretary of State were to reduce the intensity of use of the network, he could end up with a lower financial settlement for Network Rail.

56. The Chancellor had decreed that Network Rail, the successor to Railtrack, must get no more money than Railtrack – the £14.8 billion. Mr Darling was facing a colossal overspend if I proceeded to do what I told him I was about to do. How could he avoid that?

57. We had done a calculation. We all knew that £14.8 billion over five years was not enough; the question was how much more.

58. As said, we had calculated that in order to meet future growth as an efficient company, Network Rail needed an additional £7.4 billion to take it up to £22.2 billion over five years.

59. In its year in administration, Railtrack had been spending almost recklessly. The discipline of a new regulatory settlement was very much needed. Some time after my final settlement of £22.2 billion, I was taken to lunch by Gus O’Donnell, who was then the permanent secretary at the Treasury. He wanted to thank me. If the company had carried on spending as it had been, Mr O’Donnell said that the extra £7.4 billion I had decided on would have been £17 billion. He told me that no minister would do this, but on behalf of the Treasury he wanted to give me their thanks. Political gratitude is a rare thing; it’s not unknown, but it’s rare. I was pleased he did that.

60. Back to the dialogue with Darling. As regulator, I was only appointed; as Secretary of State, he was elected. He believed he therefore had a higher democratic legitimacy than I did, and he wanted me to do what he wanted. I replied that I would not. I was discharging the duties given to me by Parliament, and none of them had a political element. My democratic legitimacy came from the highest source of all, namely an Act of Parliament, primary legislation. If the Secretary of State did not like that, he should try to persuade Parliament to change the law (as Mr Byers had threatened to do, but had not done). Until then, I was not going to give way to Ministerial preference or pressure when my statutory duties pointed the other way.

61. So Mr Darling was faced with a choice: reduce the demand on the system, to make it cheaper to look after and operate, or face the higher sums.

62. We had calculated that if the Government wanted Network Rail to live within the £14.8 billion five-year settlement I had given to Railtrack, it would have to do a number of quite unpalatable things. They would have to close 25 per cent of the network; that would mean nothing in Scotland apart from Glasgow and Edinburgh, nothing in Wales apart from Cardiff, and there would be other severe reductions and closures. Then they would have to reduce by 25 per cent the number of train movements – reduce traffic – on the remaining 75 per cent of the network. This would of course lead to massive overcrowding and significant shifts of passenger and freight traffic onto the roads. The Government would also have to cut the enhancement budget by 100 per cent – so there would be nothing new on the railway. The renewals budget would also have to be severely reduced, leading to a significant rise in maintenance and a consequent large deterioration in passenger and freight traffic performance. And there would have to be a six per cent year-on- year increase in passenger fares.

63. Quite understandably, the Secretary of State was not prepared to stand up in Parliament and announce all that, and I received no decision from him on any reductions he was willing to make. And so I went ahead and increased the amounts Network Rail would get to £22.2 billion over the next five years. And as I have explained, because of the way the railways were organised at that time, the Government would have to pay all of the increase. My job was independently and objectively to assess what a competent and efficient network operator would require to run the network, and set the financial framework accordingly. The real facts could not be disregarded. That was what the network needed, and it was my job to see that it got it.

64. And so I did it, and the £22.2 billion settlement was implemented on my decision.

65. After I left office in 2004, the Government got Parliament to change the law; my successors could never do what I did. The Treasury took control, and I am sure it will never give it up.

66. After my departure, they replaced me with a board. The new board was twelve strong, with a non-executive chairman and a chief executive, and a mix of executive and non-executive directors. (It is good to know that in my five years, I was doing the work of 12 people!)

67. They created the board to make the accountability of the regulatory authority more diffuse; and they did it to reduce regulatory power.

68. Now that’s a long story I’ve told you, but it has a relevance here, and I’m going to come to that.

69. In appointing me in 2010 to do the police pay review, Theresa May knew me as someone who does not operate according to political criteria. Independence was what she wanted, and that was my public reputation.

70. She said the review would take 54 days part-time over nine months. It turned out to be 416 days almost full-time over 18 months. It was very interesting.

71. I decided I would do great deal of fieldwork. I met very many police officers, out on patrol and elsewhere. I wanted to talk to them, and ask them about their working lives. Of course I also saw the grandees of the police, ACPO President Sir Hugh Orde, the Met Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson, Sara Thornton, Lynne Owens and the rest of them, but I also wanted to talk to lots of frontline cops. I was greatly impressed by their commitment, their bravery, their public service ethos. And it is certainly the case that cops are not slow to give you their opinions, and explain their frustrations. There were many, many frustrations with the whole criminal justice system, and a deep frustration with the way in which they were being supervised and resourced.

72. I went on an 18-hour shift with the Commissioner’s Reserve, and out on patrol elsewhere. I spent time with response officers and neighbourhood officers, and on the river. I visited firearms officers and went out in the night-time economy in Manchester. I went to Wales and Scotland. I spent time with child abuse detectives in London, and so on.

73. At the end of all that, I concluded that if I had known at the age of 18 or 21 what I had just learned about policing, I would certainly have wanted to consider a police career. I have no idea whether I would have been accepted, or whether I would’ve been successful. But I learned that it is a much more interesting and rewarding professional existence than I had imagined. And that is so much so that my older daughter is thinking of changing her name and applying to be a police officer.

74. So I did the pay review. It was controversial, and it was severely attacked, mainly for what it did not contain. For example, I never said that police officers are blue collar workers who clock on and clock off. What I said was police officers are too often wrongly characterised as blue-collar workers who clock on and clock off. There is quite a difference. But when someone wants to make an attack, the truth is often the first casualty.

75. There grew up a campaign of hatred, and it affected my family. “Dad,” asked my 14- year old daughter, “why do the cops all hate you?” “They don’t all hate me”, I replied. She had seen a great deal of the very nasty material about me on social media, and you know how poisonous that can be.

76. I have two daughters. One Saturday, the three of us went up to London on the train for a day out. At the time, the girls were seven and 14. When we arrived at Charing Cross, I said: “Kate, hold Rebecca’s hand, I’m just going to the loo, and I’ll be back in two minutes”. Two minutes later, when I returned, I found both girls shaking with fear, my younger daughter in tears. “Dad, never leave us again like that; how dare you leave us like that?” “Why, what’s happened?” I asked. “Just don’t leave us like that,” Kate insisted. What had happened? They had seen an armed police patrol walking around the station, as they often do. My younger daughter thought that those cops were looking for their dad, and when they found him they were going to shoot him. That was because of what my older daughter had seen about me on social media.

77. My daughters do not fear the police any more, but it took a long time for the younger one to understand that if you are in a public position, the attacks and the unfairness can be severe.

78. I can take anything that they can throw at me, but don’t frighten my kids.

79. So that’s part of my story and how I got here.

The inspectorate

80. Now I’d like to tell you something about the inspectorate.

81. Established in 1856, we have been around for a long time. Our jurisdiction is enormous. With one exception, it covers everything the police do, from low-level antisocial behaviour right up to homicide, the worst offences against vulnerable people including children, and terrorism. The exception is complaints against individual police officers, which go to the IOPC.

82. In all essential respects, our statutory remit from 1856 is the same today. It is to inspect and report on the efficiency and effectiveness of the police. We look at systemic

83. We also do misconduct cases against senior officers. When a senior officer faces charges of misconduct or gross misconduct, the misconduct panel which considers the case has to have a legally qualified chairman and either the chief inspector of constabulary or an HMI nominated by him. I have done a number of these cases, but where the senior officer in question is a chief constable, I have nominated another HMI to sit on the panel. This is because a finding of misconduct could – and in the case of the chief constable of Avon and Somerset in 2015 did – led later to a decision of the police and crime commissioner to dismiss the chief, which I will explain in a moment. In such a case, I have to be involved at that later stage, and it’s important that I haven’t already considered it at the misconduct stage.

84. As chief inspector of constabulary, I have a role under the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011 – and this is a role only I have, not the other HMIs – when a police and crime commissioner wants to fire his or her chief constable. In such a case, the PCC cannot proceed with this until he has received from me a statement of my opinion on the proposed dismissal. The PCC must take that opinion into account when deciding whether or not to proceed; he can proceed against my opinion, if it’s adverse to his proposal, but he has to consider it properly before taking his next step.

85. Some of you will remember the case of chief constable David Crompton of South Yorkshire, where the PCC intended to dismiss the chief constable over his reaction to the Hillsborough inquest verdict. In my view, the PCC’s proposal was grossly unfair and completely misconceived.

86. In that case, the PCC proceeded with the dismissal against my views, which were that the PCC had no proper basis for doing it. Afterwards, there was a judicial review of the PCC’s decision. In 40 years in the law, I have never read a decision of the Administrative Court in a judicial review more condemnatory of a decision of a public authority than that one. It was ferocious. The PCC got everything wrong.

87. In that case, the Divisional Court also said that if, at the preliminary stage of obtaining the views of the chief inspector of constabulary on the proposed dismissal, the chief inspector is against it, the PCC may only proceed if he or she has very compelling reasons for doing so.

88. I might add that when the decision was published, the police and crime commissioners collectively were quite upset about it, because of the weight the court said had to be attached to the views of the chief inspector of constabulary. I heard that they were going to lobby the Home Office to get the law changed, to clip my wings in this respect. The Home Office did not do that.

89. The other thing I want to say about misconduct cases concerns the Simon Byrne case in July 2018. As you will know, before he became chief constable of Cheshire Mr Byrne had been DCC in Greater Manchester and then an Assistant Commissioner in the Met. Mr Byrne had arrived in Cheshire from London with a reputation of being a hard taskmaster, and not suffering fools gladly. Some in Cheshire didn’t like his management style, which was very different to the softer, more accommodating style of his predecessor. Not long after he became chief constable in Cheshire, he was facing 74 allegations of bullying, an abuse of superior power. And so the PCC laid against him 74 charges of gross misconduct, 74 instances of bullying and harsh treatment of people. The senior officer misconduct panel heard all the evidence, witnesses were examined and cross- examined, and there were extensive legal submissions from both sides. And it unequivocally acquitted him on all 74. In the decision of the panel, not one of them even remotely approached the classification or qualification of bullying.

90. This is an important case. The senior officer misconduct panel had important things to say about how leaders conduct themselves. It said there is a very great difference between bullying somebody, and firm management and intolerance of poor standards. You’re entitled to tell people that they’re not doing a good job and to require them to do better, and try harder. You have to do it in an appropriate way, of course; and you’re entitled to be annoyed in the circumstances. I encourage you, as future chief officers, to read that case. If you read nothing else that I have recommended to you today, read that judgment.

91. Returning to our inspecting and reporting on the systemic failures in policing, it’s important to bear in mind that we report to the public. We do not report to the Home Secretary, and we do not report to police and crime commissioners.

92. As I have said, we report to the public on the efficiency and effectiveness of police forces.

Regulators -v- inspectorates

93. We are not regulators. There is a big difference between a regulator and an inspectorate. Having said that, until you reach the point where someone has to put into effect a decision to change something, the techniques of regulation and inspection are very largely the same. We acquire information about the inspected entity’s affairs and operations. We analyse that information and work out what is happening and why it is happening, and we assess how it could be more efficient and effective. In the case of a regulator, once he has done all those things, he then makes a decision and gives it effect. That may be to set prices, or take enforcement action, or alter the investment conditions of the industry, or something else.  Regulators have hard power, the power of intervention, direction and enforcement. They can by their own hands give practical effect to their decisions.

94. Inspectorates do not have that hard power. We have soft power, the power of our voice, the power of the authority of our voice, the power to persuade others, through the quality of our work and the force of our reasoning. And then we make recommendations.

95. In the case of an inspectorate, it is for other people to do things; unlike regulators, we cannot by our own hands change things. The people who have to act are of course predominately chief constables. Sometimes we make recommendations to the College of Policing or the Home Office, but predominantly we are making recommendations to chief constables.

96. Each police and crime commissioner is under a statutory obligation to respond to our reports and recommendations within 56 days.

97. [Question from the floor: Do you find it frustrating that you don’t have regulatory powers? That as an inspectorate you can’t push through some things you’ve decided on?]

98. For this reason. If we were the regulators of the police, if we had the power of intervention and direction, if we could tell chief constables what to do, then we would have become the chief constables of England and Wales, because we would have powers superior to theirs, power to overrule them.

99. The operational independence of chief constables is of enormous importance. The police have a virtual monopoly on the internal coercive power of the state. That should not be in the hands of anyone but police chiefs. It should especially not be in political hands.

100. That’s not to say that chief constables should not be accountable to someone, of The model of policing that we have in this country does not spring from political power. It springs from the ancient obligation of every citizen to suppress crime, prevent disorder and apprehend defenders. They are Robert Peel’s principles; you know them very well. I will come back to that shared community obligation shortly.

101. Because of the essential nature of that operational independence, we should not be the regulatory authority for the police.

102. The nearest thing the police have to a regulatory authority is the College of Policing. The nearest thing to any kind of regulatory powers is in section 53A of the Police Act 1996. It’s not a well-known provision because for a long time the Home Office had a policy of standing quite far back and leaving the police and PCCs to do everything. They wanted the police service to be self-reforming.

103. Section 53A enables the College to come up with a draft statutory instrument in relation to the policies and practices of police forces. That is pretty wide. And if the College gives that draft statutory instrument to the Secretary of State, he must make a statutory instrument in the terms proposed by the College – there is no power to amend it – unless one of three conditions applies. The first is that it would be unlawful to make the statutory instrument in the College’s proposed terms. The second is that doing so would damage the efficiency and effectiveness of the police. And the third – a catch all, but not as big a catch all as it might sound – is it would be otherwise wrong to do so.

104. So the College working with the Home Office are the nearest thing to the regulators of the police. And they are the professional body of the police.

105. But let us remember that the principal regulators of the police are the criminal law and the rules of criminal procedure.

106. Having said all that, the work of the inspectorate is important, and the power of our authority is great. A chief constable who takes an inspectorate report containing a recommendation, and decides to disregard it, is taking quite a risk. If later something very bad happens – for instance, a child dies – and that wouldn’t have happened if our recommendation had been adopted, that chief constable is in terrible trouble. And chiefs do take our reports and recommendations seriously; I will come back to that a little later. This soft power that we have is not weak power; it is simply power of a different character to the power of regulators.

107. And sometimes it is a source of real resentment on the part of police and crime commissioners. I will come back to that, too.

Independence

108. We are independent of politicians, local and national, and we are independent of the police. HMIC used to be a bit like the House of Lords for cops. If you were one of the most prominent or successful chief constables, at the end of your police service you might become one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors, and one of you would be the chief inspector.

109. And for a long time, the HMIs were all former chief constables.

110. Things are very different now. Amongst the HMIs, we now have one former chief constable; I don’t want us to go any lower than one, for obvious reasons.

111. We have four lawyers: two former Chief Crown Prosecutors, one former local government lawyer, and me. Our fifth HMI is a former Admiral, the youngest submarine commander in the Royal Navy for 40 years. The first submarine they gave him to command was a nuclear attack submarine. So they had a lot of confidence in him, and he has been very successful in the inspectorate. So we have a very different make-up now.

112. We are independent of the Home Office, but not in all things. We are not independent of the Home Office in relation to the level of our budget, the things we inspect (in the annual inspection programme), our HR policies, our ICT systems and our procurement policies. We have got to follow Home Office rules on those things. Our staff are seconded police officers, seconded fire-fighters, or Home Office civil servants. However we, the inspectors of constabulary, are Crown appointees. We are not civil servants, we are not employees of the Government, and of course we’re not ministers. We are independent.

113. What is the source of that independence? The statute – the Police Act 1996 – doesn’t say explicitly that we are independent; it doesn’t need to. Our independence comes from the absence of what the statute says. The Police Act 1996 has an absence of any power of direction and control over us on the part of ministers, police and crime commissioners or anyone else in relation to the content of our reports. That means the inspection findings we make, and the recommendations we make; and that is what matters most. There are no political criteria in our statutory remit. The powers of the Secretary of State – actually the Queen on the advice of the Secretary of State – to remove HMIs from office are very narrow. They are not quite as narrow as those applying to a High Court judge. We can be dismissed if we go bankrupt, take a bribe, are absent from work for a prolonged period, are convicted of a criminal offence, or are otherwise unable or unfit for office. But being unfit for office does not mean disagreeing with the Home Secretary, or where the Home Secretary just wants to appoint his own person.

114. Our independence matters because what we say cannot be criticised as being politically sensitive or expedient, or unduly close to or forgiving of the police. If we criticise the police or anyone else – even the Home Secretary – it has to be seen to be objective, based entirely on the evidence and a thorough analysis of that evidence. And now having a preponderance of non-police officers in the HMIs, we cannot any longer be thought of as the police marking their own homework.

115. Those things fortify and make conspicuous our independence and objectivity. It is precious, and important, because our ability to bring about improvements in policing depends on the respect which is had for what we say, the authority of our voice, how that voice is used, heard and heeded.

116. It is worthwhile noting here, also, that in terms of the political separation between us and central government, that there are five secretaries of state who are concerned with our reports. They are the Chancellor, because we inspect certain functions of HMRC; the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, because we inspect the Civil Nuclear Constabulary; the Department for Transport, because we inspect the British Transport Police; and the Secretary of State for Defence because we inspect the military police and the MoD Police. But our principal dealings are of course with the Home Office.

117. I have told you this story at some length – of being completely objective and not blowing according to the political or any other wind – because our independence from the Home Office is significant.

118. I told you that story at the beginning, about the Secretary of State for Transport, who was acting on the orders of the Prime Minister and the Chancellor, of the threats to my independence as rail regulator. And in those years, I came under constant pressure, because ministers and civil servants did not like the power which the regulator had. They were impatient and intolerant of that power.  In many respects, I believe they were jealous of that power because the regulators of the privatised industries in reality had more power over their charges than ever did ministers and civil servants over those industries when they were in public ownership. And those who lack power and want it, and see it in the hands of others, can become determined and even hostile. In railways, it became an incessant struggle.

119. So far, the Home Office have never done that. They have been respectful of our independence, and that is appreciated. I think there is an acknowledgement that we can achieve far more together when we respect our relative jurisdictions and work together towards our common objective of improving policing. I hope that continues.

120. In fact, when I was doing that police pay review, before I did this job, the civil servants in the Home Office were so conscious of my politically purifying ordeal when I was Rail Regulator, that, at first, getting Home Office people to talk to me at all during the police pay review was a major problem. This was because the civil servants appeared to think that if they spoke to me about the policy in the review, that might be seen as political pressure on me. Eventually, I persuaded them to lighten up, and talk to me. I said that I would make my mind up about what they were saying, but I did wish to hear what they thought. After that, things settled down and it worked quite well. But the Home Secretary did not know what was in my review until the day it was published.

121. So, political independence is important.

122. I mentioned the abuse of superior power. You have seen it throughout your careers. The superior power being abused might not be institutional power. It may be the power of a single person, perhaps an angry man who is armed, who is physically stronger than someone, who is beating the life out of someone else. It may be an organised crime gang. It may be someone exercising controlling and coercive behaviour over a domestic partner. It can happen in many situations. Checking and preventing that abuse of power is why we, all of us, come to work, to make people safe. And it is of enormous importance.

The compassionate role of the police

123. Dealing with the abuse of superior power is not the only thing the police do. They also have a compassionate role which I find very moving and very important.

124. I have a picture on the wall of my office in the inspectorate. It is a blow-up of a photograph which was once published in newspapers all over the world. It is a picture of a police sergeant holding the limp, damaged but not lifeless body of a young girl, about eight years old. He is carrying her away from the destruction of Pantglas Junior School in the south Wales village of Aberfan on 21 October 1966, when a coal tip on the hill above the village became unstable in heavy rain and slid down and engulfed the school, and killed 28 adults and 116 children. Most people in this room won’t remember that, but many of you will know of it. At the time, I was nine years old, exactly the same age as those children. Almost no-one could be saved, but there were some survivors. And that police officer, holding that child, getting her to safety, and saving her life, is a powerful and very moving image of the compassionate and safeguarding role of the police.

125. Last year I went to Wales – having a Welsh staff officer has meant I have been to Wales more times than anywhere – and we came home via Aberfan. I had never been to Aberfan. I wanted to see the Welsh valleys, the steepness of them, and I wanted to see the village. In the village, I saw the memorial garden where the school was, and the trees – mature, now more than 50 years old – which were planted when the ruins of the school were removed and the garden put in their place. I didn’t know where the cemetery was, and I asked someone, “where are the graves of the children?” And I was directed to a high point, up the hill, just outside the village. It’s an ancient cemetery, and the gravestones are dark and severely weathered, with moss and other attacks of nature, some standing at an angle, their inscriptions often almost indecipherable with the passing of the many decades and sometimes centuries since they were carved. And then you look a little further up the hill, and you see scores of white – pure white – tombstones, the tombstones of the children, their graves side-by-side in perfectly neat, sombre rows.

126. That catastrophe, that appalling tragedy was one of the consequences of regulatory failure, another instance of the abuse of superior power. The National Coal Board could not be bothered to ensure that the coal slurry tip, high up on the hill, was safe, even though its instability would threaten the village below. They knew it was unsafe, because many in the village had protested about it, but the Coal Board didn’t want to spend the money.

127. I remember as a child contributing my pocket money – as we all did, in school collections – to the Aberfan relief fund. Children all over the world did this. And £1.5 million – a great deal of money in 1966 – was collected for the families who had lost their children. And the Coal Board took half of that money, to spend on shoring up the remaining coal tips. This money was for the families, not the Coal Board. And this money was to do something to compensate the parents for the loss of their children. And they took it.

128. It was the Coal Board that decided on the system for allocating the remaining money to the families. The children had been eight and nine, in school just after morning assembly. They had their whole lives before them. For the purposes of compensation, the Coal Board decided each child was worth £500. But they didn’t just hand over those sums to the families; they interviewed every parent. And they required them in each case to prove that they loved their children.

129. The brutality and heartlessness of it all takes your breath away.

130. That is regulatory failure, the failure of a public authority and those responsible for the health and safety of the people who were at risk should their operations imperil them. And it was the cold indifference of that authority, of those with superior power, to the needs and the sensitivities of those over whom they had that power. It was wicked and it was heartless.

131. The public inquiry into Aberfan was chaired by an eminent Welshman, a law lord, Lord Edmund-Davies (the same Edmund-Davies who did the police pay review in 1978, my immediate predecessor in that role). At the end of the public proceedings, in his final submission, counsel to the inquiry, Sir Tasker Watkins VC QC, quoted George Bernard Shaw when he said: “The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.”

132. Indifference to the suffering of others, when in possession of power to prevent that suffering, that too is the abuse of power.

133. Regulatory failure and the consequences of abuse of superior power can be catastrophic.

134. If you ever go to Aberfan, go and see the cemetery; and I challenge you to come away unmoved by the sight of those tombstones, in perfect order, with their inscriptions to children who were eight and nine years old and who did not deserve to die. And reflect on what happened, and why it happened, to lay them in their graves so very young.

135. And that’s the sort of thing that drives me when we encounter and deal with superior power.

Inspection of the CJS

136. In the criminal justice system in England and Wales, there are four chief inspectors: for police, prosecution, prisons and probation. We get together every few months and talk about common techniques for inspection, and of course the interfaces between those for parts of the system which can often cause serious problems. We do joint inspections where the circumstances require. We also do joint inspections with the Care Quality Commission and OFSTED.

137. [Second intervention: I want to ask about these other inspectorates and the point made earlier about HMICFRS not having regulatory oversight of the public services in question. There is a perception in policing and in the public that the CQC and OFSTED have more bite. Is there merit in your having more of that kind of power?]

138. It’s true, they do have more bite. They are regulators, and regulators have teeth.

139. The power to overrule a failing chief constable ultimately rests with the Home Secretary, and it is a general and quite constrained power. The Home Secretary has reserve powers under the Police Act 1996 it, but it is far back in the process, and there is a great deal which must happen before the Home Secretary reaches for it.

140. 140. It is true that CQC and OFSTED are regulatory authorities, and as such they have hard power. And so schools and care providers are more in fear of them.

140. I will come back to the fear factor.

142. But I do not think we should have regulatory power, for the reasons I gave earlier.

143. As far as the criminal justice system is concerned, I say if only it were a single system. Instead, there are four parts, with the judiciary in the middle as the fifth part. There is a circularity in criminal justice which I think is intolerable. The circularity is the circularity of reoffending. Offenders are arrested and prosecuted, they go into prison, they often get worse when they are in there, and then they come out; probation is often inadequate, and the offending begins again. And they just go round and round in the system. That circularity has to be broken.

144. Has anyone read David Ramsbotham’s book Prisongate? He was Chief Inspector of Prisons. He was writing a long time ago, but I think every word he wrote then is just about as relevant today as it was then. The lack of rehabilitation in prisons just means that things will not get better.

145. Prevention is Peel’s first principle. If we’re going to prevent crime, we need to get to the ones who are going to commit crime, or who are liable to reoffend, and do something about it.

146. Prevention is the cheapest way of dealing with crime and disorder, by a country mile. And yet, so little is done by way of effective prevention.

147. It is very expensive to deal with things once the problem has become chronic. Think of mental ill-health. It costs £1 million an hour to close the M6. If there is a man or woman standing on a motorway bridge, threatening to throw himself or herself off, you have to close the road. They will almost certainly be there because of a mental health crisis. Would it not be better and of course cheaper if that person had got treatment and help much earlier? Let us remember that about 80 per cent of adults who have mental ill-health began their journeys into mental ill-health when they were children. Yet if you look at the state of the Children and Adolescent Mental Health Service, it is chronically under-resourced. And those children, and their families, are going through hell, and the children are getting worse before they even begin to get any help. It can take a year just to get a first appointment for an assessment. Some will improve, and some will not. Their educational opportunities, their life chances, and those of their siblings and the conditions of their parents, will be crashed. And yet so little is done to invest in prevention.

148. Every year, we, the four chief inspectors in the criminal justice system, intend to publish a joint statement on the state of the criminal justice system.

Super-complaints

149. I will mention super-complaints very briefly here. They are a new thing. Certain organisations are designated as qualified to make a super-complaint. A super- complaint is a complaint that one or more features of the activities of one or more police forces is operating or likely to operate in a way which will significantly harm the interests of the public. That is a very wide definition. It can cover very many things.

150. Once a designated body has made a valid super-complaint, it must be investigated by the relevant authority. The three authorities are the College of Policing, the IOPC and the inspectorate. Depending on the nature of the complaint, it might fall all into the lap of the inspectorate. We expect that 80 per cent of super-complaints will have to be done by the inspectorate. We estimate that hardly any will be done by the IOPC, because they deal with individual complaints against individual police officers, whereas the inspectorate deals with systemic complaints concerning the police.

151. When super-complaints were first invented for consumer protection, one organisation was made a designated body, i.e. the only body entitled to make a super-complaint. That was the Consumers’ Association. When super-complaints were introduced for the financial services industry, there were five designated bodies. But in policing, there are sixteen designated bodies. At the time the police super-complaints system went live, my concern was that we could be swamped. The Home Office could have taken small steps to begin with, and designated significantly fewer than sixteen bodies. Or it could have put an annual limit on the number of super-complaints which could be made. It did neither of those things.

153. We already have our first super-complaint, and it is a substantial one from Liberty. And we understand that it is likely there will be another eight in the next year or so.
154. It should be remembered that these designated bodies did not apply for designated status in order to be able to put that fact on their letterpaper. They applied because they intended to make complaints. And these things can be quite expensive. It is also the case that the designated body making a valid super-complaint incurs no costs whatsoever; for them, having a super-complaint investigated is a free good.

Accountability

154. Earlier I mentioned the importance and precious nature of the independence of chief constables. You’ll remember reading your police history, and how ferociously England did not want to have any policing system. The preference was to call out the military if there was a riot. Having an established standing police force was objectionable. People had seen what had happened in France, and they thought that police forces in England would too become the oppressive executive arm of the state. Eventually Peel persuaded them otherwise.

155. Has anyone read Tom Critchley’s book The History of the Police 800-1966? If not, I recommend you do. It is hugely authoritative and beautifully written. Tom Critchley was the secretary to the Royal Commission on the Police in 1962. He talks about the ancient obligation of all citizens to suppress crime and apprehend offenders. He explains the whole genesis of the police, including the system of public accountability, and the operational freedoms and the importance of these things in a democratic society. Our police service is very different from most others. This is because of the principle that the police are the public and the public the police. You are citizens in uniform.

156. I get mildly irked when people say that I’m the first civilian chief inspector of constabulary. In fact, I’m the 17th civilian chief inspector of constabulary. We are all civilians; you are civilians in uniform, invested with special powers on behalf of the community. You are of the community and from the community. That is where your office originated, where your authority comes from, not from some ministerial decision. And you are not under the direction and control of some politician who might wish to use you to oppress individuals or communities. The police are civilians; the military are quite different.

157. Why do people from other communities – for example, East Europe – not call the police as much as people in England and Wales? It’s because in many cases in their culture, there is a mistrust of the police. In many other countries, if there is a knock on the door from the police, you may be hauled off to interrogation or prison, and it doesn’t matter whether you are guilty of anything. The appearance of the police would always be a frightening and oppressive thing to happen to you.

158. Yesterday, I had a visit from a delegation from the Ministry of Public Security in China. And we were not speaking the same language. Their English was perfect; that’s not what I mean. I was talking about the operational independence of the police, and they simply had no idea what that meant. Their police force is two million strong. Interestingly, their density of police is 1.4 police officers per thousand of population; in England and Wales, it’s 2.1 officers per thousand. Police numbers are not an issue in China. Why? Because theirs is an obedient society; it is a fearful society, because unlike us they do not have the rule of law.

159. The operational independence of the police needs to be understood by police and crime commissioners. In too many respects, it simply is not. This is even though the Policing Protocol Order 2011 insists that the operational independence of the police must always be respected. And when police and crime commissioners take office, they have to take an oath of office. One of the things in that oath is a promise to respect the operational independence of the police.

160. And yet, do they all? Some of them do.

161. Police and crime commissioners – has the idea worked well? Perhaps in some places, but not everywhere.

162. And yet some of them behave as if democratic accountability for the police is a new thing, invented with them. That is of course very far from the truth. Democratic and public accountability of the police has existed for a very long time. It’s all explained in Tom Critchley’s book. There were the watch committees, and then police authorities, and all the rest. Police and crime commissioners are just the latest incarnation of an ancient essential of public responsibility and accountability in the maintenance of law and order.

163. But police and crime commissioners are different in a number of respects. They are directly elected, and for each police area there is only one of them. And their own accountability is pretty weak. That is until they reach the Administrative Court where, in every judicial review of the decision of a police and crime commissioner, with a single exception, the court has gone against them.

164. Some police and crime commissioners are resentful of the authority and the jurisdiction of the inspectorate. I can put it no milder than that.

165. I had a visit recently from one of the police and crime commissioners. I will not identify him. I think he wanted me to think he was speaking on behalf of all PCCs, but that wasn’t the case.

166. He was making a complaint about the jurisdiction of the inspectorate. The regime for the inspection of the efficiency and effectiveness of the police, even though it was enacted in 1856, and has not changed in 162 years; yet to some police and crime commissioners, it is an impertinence, almost a violation of their democratic purity.

167. He complained that the inspectorate and not the police and crime commissioners set the priorities for chief constables. He said that when we do an inspection and come up with a set of recommendations – for example on modern slavery and human trafficking, or child sexual exploitation, or organised crime – chief constables react by taking our recommendations seriously and putting them into effect. He complained that in those circumstances, the chief constable does not take equally seriously the contents of the police and crime plan established by the PCC. He said we distort the chief constable’s priorities in this way, because, he said, “they fear you more than they fear us”.

168. I explained that the relationship is not supposed to be one of fear.

169. What he meant was that chief constables take the inspectorate more seriously than their PCCs.

170. It is true that the inspectorate is in the DNA of the police. It has been around for 162 years. But it is not true to say that chief constables do not take their PCCs seriously. Some find managing the demands of PCCs take up a very significant part of their time.

171. This particular PCC complained that the inspectorate got his chief constable concentrating on things he didn’t think were as important as local concerns. He said: “You get the chief constable to devote resources to slavery and trafficking and so on, but my people [by which he meant the people who had voted for him], care most about fly-tipping, speeding in the village, and parking on market day.” I countered that I thought “his people” would care a great deal if the little girl down the road in the village was being raped by her stepfather, if her brother was being sold Fentanyl by a county lines organised crime gang, or her mother was being knocked senseless when her man got drunk. Crimes may not be visible, but they can be the most serious of all.

172. Just after the 2012 PCC elections, I got a visit from one of the newly-elected PCCs. I will refer to him as the PCC for Borsetshire. He didn’t want the inspectorate to do any inspecting in his police area. He wanted Borsetshire to be an HMIC-free zone. He said that if he wanted to know about the efficiency and effectiveness of Borsetshire Police, he would hire one of the management consultancies to assess that. He would write their terms of reference, they would report only to him, and he and he alone would decide whether and to what extent their findings would be published. He knew that HMIC can inspect whatever it likes, whenever it likes, and isn’t tied to the preferences of the PCC. And he knew that our reports must be published. He complained that if, perhaps in the year before the next PCC elections, HMIC said that Borsetshire Police were failing in something, perhaps burglary, the public would know that because the report would be published. And he thought the public might blame him, and not re-elect him.

173. I told him that was exactly the system of police accountability which Parliament had devised. It wasn’t a mistake; it wasn’t an oversight. The PCC holds the chief constable to account; the public hold the PCC to account (at the ballot box). In order to make judgments about these things, both the PCC and the public need information, and that is what the inspectorate provides: objective, impartial, expert information.

174. And so PCCs need to understand their proper role, and where the boundaries are. They need to understand the Policing Protocol, and the Strategic Policing Requirement too. I expect on this course you will be also hearing from Lynne Owens, the Director General of the National Crime Agency. I expect she will go into how PCCs approach serious and organised crime which of course does not respect police area boundaries.

175. And there is more that police and crime commissioners need to understand.

176. I regret to say that some PCCs think the police and crime plan is a set of orders. It isn’t. Under section 8(2) and (4) of the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011, you as chief officers have to “have regard” to it. That does not mean you have to obediently carry out whatever it says. But some PCCs behave as if their police and crime plans are orders. And that is important in the dynamic of the relationship between PCC and chief.

177. During the first round of the PCC elections in 2012, there was a candidate for PCC in Merseyside. This candidate stood on a platform that said that if he were elected, he would put in his police and crime plan a provision which said that the police in his police area would never go to a call involving domestic abuse because, he added, “what happens between a man and his wife behind closed doors is nothing to do with the police”.

178. Happily, he was not elected. But let’s consider what would have been the position if he had been. This objectionable provision is in the PCC’s police and crime plan. What then is the duty of the chief constable? Of course, he must ignore it.  And that is because the police have a higher duty to protect everyone, not just particular communities or sections of society, perhaps the wealthy people who voted for the PCC, leaving the sink estates where crime and disorder are chronic to rot and burn. But some PCCs appear not to fully understand that. And in such cases, the potential for tension and trouble is all the greater.

Police reform

179. Next, I’d like to say a few things about police reform.

180. The 43-force model has had its day. So how, in necessary respects, do we dissolve those black lines on the map, the lines which delineate police areas one from another? In too many respects, the boundaries act as barriers between police forces. Should we have mergers of police forces? The Home Secretary can do that by statutory instrument; there is no need for primary legislation. I recently spoke to Charles Clarke, who was Home Secretary in 2005. He had been on the verge of signing the statutory instruments to turn 43 forces into 17. It very nearly happened. But Charles Clarke lost his job as Home Secretary (over foreign national offenders not being repatriated) and his successor wasn’t sufficiently interested in police force reorganisations. And so the idea died.

181. Force mergers would be enormously disruptive. Sir Robert Reid was a wise man; he was the chairman of the British Railways Board in the 1980s. BR underwent many restructurings and reorganisations in its time. He had a saying: “When you reorganise, you bleed”

182. I do not think the police have the energy or the time to be looking inwards and engaging in all the trouble and upheaval of reorganisation.

183. But how else do you ensure that in the respects where it matters most, the police service operates as a single system? Those black lines on the map, which delineate police areas, are there for a purpose. They’re there for administrative, legal and public accountability reasons. They were put there a long time ago, in 1974, when policing was quite different and the technology which people have today did not exist. So very much has changed since the 43-force model was established.

184. I think the College has a considerable role in all this, especially if it were to use section 53A. But that is not necessary.

185. My background is in economic regulation. In the industries which are subject to economic regulation, including energy, telecommunications, water and transport, there are instruments which achieve integrated operation even though the constituent parts of the industries are in separate legal ownership and operation. In some cases – railways and gas – these instruments are called network codes. In the others, they’re called something else. But they do the same thing. They ensure that the things which have to be done the same way are done that one way, and the system works as a single system.

186. And so the proposition is we should have a network code for policing. It would be a 43-force collaboration agreement under section 22A of the Police Act 1996. It would be signed by the 43 chief constables and the 43 PCCs – and a number of others – and by doing so they would pool their individual sovereignties. The code would be a legal mechanism for the making of binding decisions about policing by qualified majority voting. It would apply to things which have to be done co- operatively and on a regional or national basis. Decisions would be made by the necessary threshold vote. For some things, that might be 55 per cent; for others, it might be 75 per cent or 85 per cent. But it would never be 100 per cent.

187. There would be some exemptions and exceptions, and transitional provisions which ensure that some things – such as common standards for police ICT – are introduced in a controlled and affordable way. And the Home Office would have to be a party, and would have at least a veto on some things, and perhaps even a golden vote for some other things.

188. The hardest part in all this is the method by which votes are allocated to chiefs and PCCs, and others. One approach would be to adopt the model used for the US Congress. As you know, the US House of Representatives is a population-based chamber, and the Senate isn’t. In the House of Representatives, each state has a number of representatives according to the size of its population. California has 53 representatives, whereas Nevada has only one. In the Senate, however, every state, large and small, has two senators. So California has two senators and Nevada has two. And legislation has to pass both chambers to become law.

189. So, we could adopt that approach in the policing network code. Each force and PCC would have Class A votes, which are based on population, with the Metropolitan Police having most and Warwickshire having least. And every police area would have two Class B votes, whatever its size. Propositions would have to pass the necessary voting threshold in both Class A and Class B. That threshold would not necessarily be the same in Classes A and B. But that is how it might work.

190. We will finalise the position soon, and put it out to consultation shortly.

Force management statements

191. The last thing I want to talk about is force management statements.

192. In all the other essential public services which I’ve mentioned, under their regulatory regimes, they have to produce a network management statement. The infrastructure operator has to look a number of years ahead, and make a number of assessments and have their adequacy assessed by their industry regulators. In railways and water, it is a ten-year look forward. In gas and electricity, it is seven-year projection.

193. They have to assess future demand on their systems. They need to assess where are populations rising, where is the next phase of economic development going to take place, where are industrial and commercial operations going to spring up and have a requirement for energy or other public services, and so on.

194. They must assess the state of their assets, their condition, capacity, capability, serviceability, performance, and security of supply. And they have to work out how much money they will need efficiently to meet that future demand. In the light of these projections and other information, every five years the regulatory authority makes a determination of what an efficient network operator would need in income from customers efficiently to meet that demand. And then it sets the maximum prices which the operator is allowed to charge for the use of its network. The regulatory authority can also take pre-emptive action if it believes that the network operator is not being a competent and efficient steward of those assets.

195. That is a very considerable simplification, of course, but those are the basics.

196. If these techniques and disciplines are necessary in these other safety-critical, asset- intensive, monopoly essential public services, why are they not necessary in the most essential safety-critical public service of all, namely law and order? Without law and order, nothing works.

197. And so we, at the inspectorate, have introduced force management statements, which are essentially doing the same thing as network management statements. For the police, they are annual statements made to the inspectorate by the chief constable; they concern the future demand on the force, the state of its assets and how they will be improved over time, and the force’s projected future income. In the case of each police force, the projection is four years ahead.

198. In policing, this is much harder to do than in the other essential public services.

199. The inspectorate requires each force to assess future demand in all its respects: crime and non-crime, latent and patent. Of course we do not expect perfect predictions; all estimates are wrong. But they must be the best that the chief can do.

200. In the other public services it is relatively – I emphasise relatively – simple to measure future demand because of the economic data available to them. It is also relatively easy to assess the condition, capacity, capability etc of the assets, because they are physical assets – cables, pipes, wires, railway lines and signalling systems.

201. In policing, it’s not so simple.

202. Demand is difficult to measure, principally because the police will never know how much crime and disorder there will be, and nor will a force know to what extent other public services – such as those concerned with health, education, housing and social services – will fail to prevent things going wrong in people’s lives, allowing problems to intensify and become chronic and then land at the feet of the police.

203. In the case of the assets of the police, it is equally hard. That is because the principal assets of the police are the most complex assets of all, namely people. And measuring their condition, capacity, capability and performance, their productivity and efficiency, is not an easy thing to do.

204. The chief constable must also answer the question how he or she intends to replace those assets over time, to ensure that they are the right assets, with the right capabilities to meet demand of the future. For example, because of the growth of cyber-crime and cyber-enabled crime, a police force may need more data scientists and fewer front-line police officers, although there will always be a need for both.

205. However difficult making these assessments may be, these things have to be done. A chief constable who does not have reliable information about these essential things will make poor decisions, and the force will be operating at lower than its available efficiency and effectiveness; that is unacceptable. In fact, it’s an abuse of power because for the available money, the public could be better protected, and there would be fewer victims of crime and disorder, and overall the police would be able to do more.

206. What else is the value of a force management statement?

207. The inspectorate’s legal power to require them is in the Police Act 1996, as long as they’re reasonably required for the purposes of inspection. But there are other beneficiaries. Force management statements are not just for the inspectorate.

208. The first beneficiary is of course the chief constable. That is because the force management statement brings onto the chief’s desk a sound and reliable statement of the things the chief needs most to know. One chief officer in a northern force recently said to one of my staff: “Before we did our force management statement, I thought the alligators were around my ankles.  After we had drawn up our FMS, I realised they were around my waist.”

209. It’s information, bringing everything together in a standardised format, which enables the chief constable to make better decisions.

210. Force management statements are of enormous use also to the police and crime commissioner. The PCC has his or her priorities in the police and crime plan. In the FMS, the PCC can see whether those priorities are going to be met, whether they will be late, or come in below standard or above budget. And if something looks like it might go wrong, it is far better for the PCC and the chief to see that problem coming and do something about it early, rather than waiting for the inspectorate to come along later and criticise a failure of some kind.

211. And then there is the Home Office. FMSs can produce a picture of the aggregate demand on the police and the Home Office can then see where difficulties may in future arise on a regional and national basis. The Ministry of Justice can use FMSs to assess where will be the future pressures on the Crown Prosecution Service and the courts, prisons and probation. And soon.

212. In the next few weeks, we will publish a document explaining what we made of the first generation of force management statements. In essence, what we say is that too many forces are not very good at predicting demand. Some are much better than others, but it is not an especially encouraging picture. There was even one force which appeared to think that there would be no change whatsoever in the next four years.

213. In the main, a great deal of work has gone into these force management statements, and we are very grateful to you for that work.

214. FMS-2 will be more specific, and FMS-3 will be even more specific.

215. And as standardisation increases, the ability to make valid comparisons will be enhanced.

216. Once force management statements have reached their full maturity, they will expose an essential truth. And that is that, with the assets forces have, improved to the greatest practicable extent over time, the police will not be able to meet all predicted demand with the money they have been told to expect.

217. This is the same conversation I had with Alistair Darling in 2003 when he was Secretary of State for Transport. I told him: “You can’t have 100 per cent of network demand met for 60 or 70 per cent of its efficient cost.” Something has to give. You have to either reduce demand or increase resources, or come up with a balance of the two. The system has to come into equilibrium. Ignoring essential truths is not sustainable.

218. So think of this in a policing context. There should be a mature conversation with the public, through their police and crime commissioners, about what the people want from the police and what they’re prepared to pay for it. Given that the police cannot meet all future demand – properly understood – the essential question is what does the public want the police to do less. What should the police de-prioritise? Provided the police reach the maximum practicable level of efficiency, something has to give. If resources are not to be increased, there has to be a reduction in the demand which the police will be required or expected to meet. Or perhaps the public will be willing to pay more.

219. This is the dialogue which is had in all the other essential public services. The difference with the economically regulated industries is that they have a legal obligation – known as a universal service obligation – to meet all reasonable demands for their services. There is and can be no universal service obligation with the police.

220. The political dynamics are different in policing, but the essential truths are just the same.

221. Thank you for your help with force management statements. Please remember this is something we are doing with you, not to you.

222. The FMS document we will publish in a few weeks will have three logos on it – those of the inspectorate, the College of Policing and the NPCC. That underscores the collaborative and co-operative nature of this work to get FMSs into good shape, serving everyone.

Conclusion

223. In this session, I have covered quite a bit of territory. I hope I have been able to explain the continuous bright line of my own career – as I was asked to do – from deciding to be a lawyer to deal with the abuse of superior power, through legal practice, the economic regulation of one of our safety-critical essential public services, the review of police pay and conditions, to heading the inspectorate and promoting significant police reform.

224. My motivation has been a single one, and it has taken me from private practice into public service twice. I believe it is the same motivation of many public servants, including brave and dedicated police officers who are determined to do what they can to keep everyone safe, even when it means taking sometimes severe personal risks.

225. I wish you well in the rest of the strategic command course, and I look forward to dealing with you as chief officers when the time comes. Together, we can improve policing and so make everyone safer.