While the latest-published CPA results show a continuing improvement in local authority performance, that of the police force, together with its role in local governance, continues to exercise the attention of public service reformers.

To many, the police remain the last bastion of producerism. Think-tanks from the IPPR on the left to Policy Exchange on the right complain that productivity has hardly moved in the past decade. Local authorities want greater control over the police, even to the extent of elected police chiefs.

And what of the public, the customers? From their own experience, the police appear to have no interest in minor crime, regarding it as trivial and time-consuming, even though polls again and again show that ASB and ‘street scene' crime are what worry people. Is it possible that this combination of public dissatisfaction and  politicians' frustration could combine in an unstoppable momentum for major structural change of policing?

A report by the IPPR says police pay should be ‘radically overhauled' to reflect performance and skills, rather than length of service, and should reward specialist skills. The report is timed to coincide with this week's final Flanagan review of policing, selective leaks of which have already recently appeared, such as a return to stop and search. The IPPR says that police productivity, in terms of detection, is ‘flat', despite a real increase of 25% in funding since 2001.

The right-of-centre think-tank Policy Exchange also wades in, arguing that police spending ‘increased by one-fifth between 1998, but the impact on crime has been unimpressive'. Police cost inflation, it says, is running at twice the RPI level. It wants the Police Federation to reduce its producerist mentality and allow greater use of community support officers and private provision.

The police cannot ignore these cross-party criticisms. They need to be more responsive to community concerns, however apparently trivial, to allow councils greater scrutiny, and to welcome the addition of community support officers. There is even a case for dividing the police into two local forces, the one tackling serious crime, the other focusing on community and preventative work in league with their local authority.

 Michael Burton
 Editor, The MJ