By David Williams
19 October 2010
Proposals for directly elected police commissioners are at odds with plans for area-based budgeting, due to be revealed in tomorrow’s Comprehensive Spending Review, MPs were told today.
Richard Kemp, vice chair of the Local Government Association, told the home affairs select committee that giving police forces their own line of democratic accountability would isolate them from other local public sector bodies.
The Liberal Democrat councillor argued that the best way to make forces more accountable to their communities would be to strengthen links with councils. The government’s plans for elected police commissioners would make it harder for local agencies to pool resources and co-operate, he said.
He told the committee: ‘The government will support tomorrow the concept of place-based budgeting, which understands that to deal with any problem you need to bring a range of agencies to bear on them.
‘There is tremendous waste in the system – we want to bring budgets together.’
Kemp also expressed concern that the plans were being rushed on to the statute book. ‘Hurried legislation is almost always poor legislation,’ he said.
Sir Hugh Orde, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, who was also giving evidence to the MPs, said that police commissioners with a democratic mandate could make chief constables’ jobs unworkable.
‘If it is the will of this government to put chief officers into a position where someone elected on a pretty wide piece of territory will be able to say, “you will double the numbers of officers on the street tomorrow”, I see huge issues with that.’
Orde argued that stripping control from chief constables of staffing major operations such as counter-terrorism ‘would put the chief in an impossible position’.
Rob Garnham, chair of the Association of Police Authorities, told the cross-party committee the plans could create conflicts of interest where a directly elected mayor had responsibility for community safety. He added that there was no popular demand for elected commissioners.
Home Secretary Theresa May set out plans to introduce elected police commissioners last July in her consultation paper, Policing in the twenty-first century.
