Time is up for the most pointless layer of officialdom of modern times
PAUL BIRCH
A version of this article appears in The Daily Sceptic
It’s not often that this Labour government can be said to have done something worthwhile, but in announcing the abolition of police and crime commissioners (PCCs) in England and Wales, we can at least point to something that is sensible, and which has come not a moment too soon. For it’s no exaggeration to say that PCCs have been one of the most valueless impositions of bureaucracy in the post war era.
PCCs were introduced in 2011 by the then Home Secretary Theresa May as part of the Police Reform & Social Responsibility Act to replace the old police authorities and ‘increase public accountability’. May herself has since gone on to say that she created a monster. It would be more accurate to say that she created a sloth.
The formal functions of a PCC are many. They are meant to set policing and crime objectives for their force area through a ‘police and crime plan’. This should allow for local priorities rather than national ones. It sounds noble in principle, but all too often PCCs are subject to the same vagaries of progressive thinking as are others in positions of governance.
They are also meant to hold chief officers accountable for the performance of their force and have the power to appoint and, if necessary, dismiss those same officers. But if we look at the most appalling dereliction of duty in the history of British policing, that relating to grooming gangs, we can see that not one chief officer was fired, when that really should have been the least of it. Indeed, the culture prompted by PCCs, in terms of targets, could be said to have exacerbated failures.
To the surprise of absolutely nobody in policing, the day-to-day reality of PCCs meant endless meetings and inertia. The nebulous concept of ‘partnership’ supplanted that most basic of policing priorities, the reduction of crime. Most police forces can list scores of partnerships, spanning many local authorities and involving hundreds of meetings annually, often comprising of the same people talking about the same things, only with different headings on the agenda paper.
One feature that most people know about PCCs (and possibly the only one) is that it is an elected position. However, this doesn’t mean that there was ever a massive enthusiasm for the idea. Turnout has always plumbed record depths of indifference, with the most recent elections in 2024 showing an average turnout of 24% in England and 17% in Wales, with some individual areas polling very much lower than that.
Any empirical evidence demonstrating improvements in policing performance or public safety due to PCCs is non-existent, while the introduction of party politics to policing has raised justified concerns regarding potential biases, short-term decision making, and the prioritisation of political ambitions over genuine public safety. Also, the PCC structure has resulted in an additional bureaucratic layer in a profession already notorious for red tape. PCCs merely duplicate responsibilities managed by others.
PCCs are due to be scrapped in 2028 with the resultant savings, we are told, going into local policing. If this comes to pass, then it can only be a good thing; the core of good, efficient policing in this country was always the connection between the police and the public. This should mean more officers walking up and down high streets rather than buying more cars to put them in – the origin, in the 60s and 70s, of today’s alienation of the police from the public.
It’s not before time that PCCs are being ditched. While they’re at it, they should abolish that most damaging of institutions also established by the Cameron government which has been largely responsible for turning the police into woke enforcers – the College of Policing.
See Related Article Below
Don’t sack the police commissioners, sack the regulator who makes the rules
DR TONY RUCINSKI
THE Government has announced that Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) will be abolished from 2028, with their powers folded into mayors and council leaders and at least £100million supposedly saved for ‘front-line policing’. Press coverage reports ministers branding PCCs a ‘failed experiment’, while senior officers quietly welcome the move towards a more centralised, technocratic model of policing.
Whatever one thinks of PCCs, the direction of travel is obvious. We are not moving towards more direct, single-purpose democratic oversight of the police. We are thinning it out into bigger, more remote structures. Yet the British model is still supposed to rest on policing by consent – the idea that the public allow themselves to be policed because they trust the system, not because they fear it. Consent requires clear, visible accountability. Instead, the one office most people could name is being scrapped, while the unelected bodies that really shape the culture and practice of policing remain untouched.
At the same time, anyone on the right who suggests firmer democratic control over policing is accused of wanting a ‘police state’.
The irony is that policing has already been politicised, but quietly and in one direction, through ‘professional standards’ set by unelected bodies. Nowhere is that clearer than in the saga of non-crime hate incidents.
The College of Policing, responsible for setting standards across England and Wales, is not a force and not elected. It is a company limited by guarantee and an arm’s-length body of the Home Office. The department’s own framework document states that ‘the Home Secretary is the sole shareholder and owner of College of Policing Limited’ and sets out ministerial powers to appoint its board, approve its strategy and give it directions.
On paper this sounds dry and technical. In practice, College guidance has had enormous influence on what officers do in the street – and what ends up on ordinary people’s records.
Non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) began as a narrow device after the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, a way of flagging tensions that might escalate. Over time, national guidance expanded and hardened. The Home Office’s 2023 statutory Code explains how the original guidance was updated in 2014 by the College of Policing into a broader, perception-based system: any incident perceived by the victim or ‘any other person’ as motivated by hostility could be logged against a named individual even where no crime had been committed.
In Miller v College of Policing in 2021, Harry Miller, a former police officer, challenged how this guidance was applied to him after Humberside Police recorded a non-crime hate incident over a series of gender-critical tweets about proposed changes to transgender law. The Court of Appeal held that the police response, taken in line with College guidance, interfered disproportionately with his Article 10 right to free expression and produced an unacceptable ‘chilling effect’ on lawful political speech. In plainer language, rules developed under the College’s umbrella were helping to turn officers into thought-police on sex and gender.
The Government then stepped in with a statutory Code in 2023, tightening the thresholds for recording and instructing the College to bring its guidance into line so that NCHIs would be reserved for incidents involving a real risk of significant harm or escalation, not every hurt feeling. Policy Exchange’s detailed analysis shows how the regime had sprawled into a perception-based data-collection exercise that diverted resources from real crime and chilled debate on race, religion and LGBT questions in particular.
Most telling of all, the police themselves have conceded the point. A joint review by the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) and the College, sent to the policing minister in October, bluntly concludes that ‘the current approach and use of NCHIs is not fit for purpose’ and calls for broad reform so officers can focus on ‘genuine harm and risk within communities’.
So the courts, ministers and senior officers now all accept that the NCHI regime overreached and undermined free speech. Yet for years it was an unelected standards-setter that wrote and defended the rules.
A record of an NCHI is not harmless. The Home Office Code makes clear that NCHIs may be considered for disclosure on an Enhanced DBS certificate (criminal record check) if a chief officer believes the information is relevant and ought to be included.
In other words, an unproven allegation of ‘hate’ about your views on sex, marriage or gender can quietly shadow your working life, without any charge or trial and with very limited ability to challenge it. That is not policing by consent. It is policing by database.
All of this has unfolded under the chairmanship of Lord (Nick) Herbert. The former Conservative Minister of State for Police and Criminal Justice (2010-12) was appointed chair of the College of Policing Board in January 2021 and reappointed in 2024 to serve until 2026. His official government biography notes that he served as the Prime Minister’s Special Envoy on LGBT+ Rights from 2021 to 2024.
Herbert is not a neutral technocrat. The Global Equality Caucus records that he ‘played a pivotal role in advancing equal marriage in the UK, launching the Freedom to Marry campaign in 2012 and contributing to the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013’. His own profile notes that he launched that campaign, chaired the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global LGBT Rights, and ‘played a leading role in making the case for equal marriage’.
In February 2024 he spoke in the House of Lords in support of the Conversion Therapy Prohibition Bill, backing a statutory ban on so-called ‘conversion therapy’ for sexual orientation and gender identity.
He is entitled to these views. The issue is perception and power. The man who drove the political campaign for same-sex marriage, and who now demands a sweeping ban on ‘conversion practices’, also chairs the body whose guidance produced a national NCHI regime heavily used in precisely these contested areas and ruled by the Court of Appeal to chill lawful gender-critical speech.
Confidence in policing on these issues is badly damaged. It is not unreasonable to ask whether the public can trust a reset led by the same leadership, and whether Lord Herbert should at least consider his position.
Since the Blair years we have steadily handed genuinely important decisions to unelected institutions. Taken together, they have shifted real power away from MPs and towards quangos, courts and technocratic committees. The College of Policing and the NCHI saga are part of the same long march. Contentious value-judgments about speech, belief and public order are made by unelected bodies, then presented as neutral ‘professional standards’, while voters are told that democratic oversight is dangerous.
Meanwhile, the one clearly visible line of democratic accountability in policing – the PCCs – is being abolished. That is exactly the wrong way round.
If we want genuine policing by consent, we need the public to see and sack those who set the rules, not just those who enforce them. That means scrapping NCHIs in more than name, ring-fencing Enhanced DBS checks from non-crime allegations, putting College codes that bite on free speech under parliamentary control, and asking hard questions about whether the current leadership can credibly deliver the reset.
The real danger is not that elected politicians might one day ‘politicise’ policing. It is that we leave in place a quiet police state built by unelected hands, while congratulating ourselves on having abolished the only bit of oversight most people had ever heard of.
This article (Don’t sack the police commissioners, sack the regulator who makes the rules) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Dr Tony Rucinski
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