By Keith Aitken in Edinburgh | 23 August 2011
A Scottish policing ‘summit’ today heard a string of speakers accuse ministers of railroading Scotland towards a single national police force without having made a convincing case that it can deliver benefits or answer fears about accountability.
Critics included Kevin Smith, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers of Scotland. He claimed that the projected savings, as set against restructuring costs, ‘simply don’t add up’.
One of the conference’s organisers was the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, which has spearheaded opposition to the government’s evident determination to replace Scotland’s eight regional police forces with a single national force. Plans to formalise this are expected to emerge in the autumn.
Almost all Scotland’s chief constables and police board conveners are opposed to the move, with only Stephen House, chief constable of Strathclyde and a candidate to take charge of the Metropolitan police, conspicuously backing the reform.
Smith claimed that the plan was being pushed ahead before important issues had been resolved. These included costs versus savings, accountability, the quality of local policing and safeguarding the key partnerships that modern policing needed, ‘the most critical of which, in my view, is with the local authorities’.
But a dissenting police voice came from David O’Connor, head of the Association of Scottish Police Superintendents. While acknowledging that real savings were likely to take five to ten years to work through, he said that the operational commanders he represented supported the ‘strategic direction’ towards a single force.
Dismissing the eight-force set-up as a leftover from an abandoned local government structure, he argued that Strathclyde already covered half Scotland’s population, yet preserved localism through a divisional structure: ‘It’s not as if we’re reinventing the wheel, and we don’t think it’s something the public will automatically rail against,’ O’Connor told the summit.
But other speakers accused ministers of failing to make the case for a national force. Mark McAteer of the Improvement Service warned against ‘the lure that there must be a simple fix’.
Dundee University’s Professor Nick Fyfe said recent force mergers in Denmark had generated public unease about local responsiveness, knowledge and commitment, while centralisation of specialist units had diminished police career ambitions.
Professor Jim Gallagher of Nuffield College, Oxford, called the government’s financial case for reform ‘disappointingly thin’. He said: ‘It looks like a set of material put together to support a conclusion, rather than worked up from the bottom.’
