The PCC ‘Accountability’ Illusion

Picture the scene in Birmingham last autumn. West Midlands Police, charged with keeping the peace, submit intelligence so riddled with fabrication that it cites a football match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and West Ham United which never took place, an outright “AI hallucination” produced by Microsoft Copilot. On this flimsy foundation rested the recommendation to bar Maccabi supporters from attending a Europa League fixture against Aston Villa on 6 November 2025, a decision that promptly provoked accusations of incompetence, bias, and confirmation bias.

An interim report from His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary, Sir Andy Cooke, duly branded the intelligence “greatly exaggerated” and condemned the episode as a “failure of leadership”. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood rose in Parliament to declare she had lost confidence in Chief Constable Craig Guildford, while cross-party voices called for his removal.

Yet the one official vested with the power to act, the West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner, Simon Foster, chose instead the elaborate ritual of “due process”, scheduling a public accountability meeting for 27 January 2026. Before that gathering could occur, Guildford announced his immediate retirement on 16 January, departing with full pension entitlement from a salary exceeding £220,000 a year.

Foster greeted the news with approval, declaring in language of almost heroic euphemism, that Guildford had “acted with honour and in the best interests of West Midlands Police and our region”

The term “bullshit job”, coined by anthropologist David Graeber, describes work that the person performing it believes to be pointless or unnecessary, even if it is outwardly respectable and well remunerated. The PCC role fits this description with unsettling precision.

While ordinary taxpayers continue to fund this elaborate charade, £87 million consumed by the 2024 PCC elections alone, a senior officer slips away unscathed and the vaunted watchdog remains conspicuously idle. Imagine paying handsomely for a sophisticated alarm system that never sounds the alert and then being told, with perfect solemnity, that its silence proves how well it is working.

That, in essence, is your PCC. A role solemnly presented as the triumph of direct democratic oversight, yet one that consistently delivers procedural theatre, pension-preserved retreats, and the quiet, enduring certainty that real accountability will remain forever just out of reach.

The West Midlands affair is merely the latest and most vivid illustration of a pattern that has repeated across forces for over a decade. When the moment for decisive accountability arrives, the PCC model reliably produces procedural delay, euphemistic framing, pension-preserved exits, and no meaningful sanction.

The PCC role is not merely useless, it is a bullshit job, an expensive “failed experiment” that the government now intends to scrap by 2028, thereby saving £100 million overall and £20 million annually, enough to put roughly 320 additional constables on the beat.

When the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act received Royal Assent in 2011, the coalition government presented the creation of directly elected Police and Crime Commissioners as a bold stroke of democratic renewal. The old police authorities, unelected, shadowy committees of local worthies, were to be swept away in favour of a single, visible figure accountable directly to the electorate.

Here, at last, would be a champion capable of setting clear priorities, holding chief constables to account without fear or favour, and ensuring that policing reflected the will of the people rather than the whims of an insulated professional caste.

The rhetoric was seductive in the way all good political marketing is, power triumphantly returned to the ballot box, transparency dramatically restored, bureaucracy at last banished, except, of course, by the addition of yet another expensive bureaucratic layer.

Thirteen years on, the reality is less inspiring. The first PCC elections, held in November 2012, produced a turnout of barely 15 per cent, lower than almost any other poll in modern British history. Subsequent contests have scarcely improved matters.

Even in May 2024, when many PCC votes coincided with local elections, the average turnout across England and Wales stood at 23.2 per cent. Fewer than one in five members of the public can name their own commissioner, and two in five remain unaware that the office exists at all. What was sold as a direct line to the people has become, in practice, an almost invisible layer of local governance.

The financial ledger is scarcely more flattering, indeed, it borders on the embarrassing. The 2024 elections alone cost the public purse at least £87 million. Add the annual running costs of the 37 PCC offices, salaries that routinely exceed £100,000, together with staff, premises, travel, and communications, and the total burden runs comfortably into the tens of millions each year.

When the government announced in November 2025 that it would abolish the standalone PCC model by 2028, it projected savings of at least £100 million over the current parliament, with £20 million a year redirected to frontline policing, enough, ministers suggested, to employ roughly 320 additional constables annually. Few announcements have been so eloquent in their indictment of the experiment they were closing down.

Over its lifetime, the model has cost taxpayers an estimated £400–500 million in direct expenditure alone, a sum that could have funded thousands of additional officers or substantial improvements in community safety, were it not for the greater priority of maintaining the appearance of democratic oversight.

Nor has the model delivered the improvements in performance or public confidence it was meant to secure. Crime trends, as measured by the Crime Survey for England and Wales, have continued the long-term decline that began in the mid-1990s, well before any commissioner took office.

Sanction detections and charge rates, however, have fallen sharply since 2013, with some categories showing reductions of more than 50 per cent. Public trust in the criminal justice system hovers around 48 per cent in recent surveys, showing no sustained upward movement attributable to PCC oversight. The vaunted “democratic accountability” has, in short, produced neither better policing nor greater legitimacy.

What the PCC system has introduced, instead, is a new form of politicisation. Commissioners, almost invariably selected as party candidates, bring electoral considerations into the heart of policing governance. Priorities are shaped to appeal to voters rather than to the cold logic of crime patterns; chief constables are appointed or eased out in ways that reflect political rather than purely professional judgement.

Yet when real accountability is required, when a chief’s leadership is found wanting, the same commissioners who promised decisive action retreat behind the very procedural safeguards they were meant to transcend. The result is a role that combines the worst of both worlds, enough political colour to compromise impartiality, but not enough power to enforce meaningful change.

In the end, the PCC was never a solution to a genuine problem so much as a solution in search of a problem. It promised to replace opaque committees with a vigorous, elected tribune, it delivered instead an expensive, largely anonymous office-holder whose principal achievement has been to demonstrate how little difference one more layer of bureaucracy can make. The taxpayer, meanwhile, continues to pay the bill.

The West Midlands episode is not a solitary blemish but part of a pattern that has shadowed the Police and Crime Commissioner model since its inception. Across England and Wales, chief constables depart under pressure from their PCCs, yet the exits are almost invariably framed as voluntary retirements rather than formal dismissals. Pensions are preserved, misconduct proceedings sidestepped, and the impression left is that the vaunted accountability mechanism lacks the teeth to bite when it matters most.

In South Yorkshire in 2016, PCC Alan Billings required Chief Constable David Crompton to retire immediately after the Hillsborough inquests verdicts. The decision was taken with conspicuous speed. Within weeks Crompton challenged it by judicial review and won, the High Court ruled the process lacked fairness and transparency. The irony is almost exquisite, a role created expressly to end the perceived timidity of unelected police authorities has instead produced commissioners who, fearing legal reversal or adverse headlines, routinely prefer prolonged consultation to anything resembling prompt intervention.

Gwent in 2013 set an earlier tone. PCC Ian Johnston required Chief Constable Carmel Napier to retire amid tensions over her management style and resistance to the new oversight regime. Napier contested the process, the departure proceeded as a retirement. Even when a commissioner exercises the statutory power, the outcome is typically a negotiated exit rather than a contested sacking.

Similar stories, presented as amicable, health-related, or planned, have unfolded in Bedfordshire, Nottinghamshire, Essex and elsewhere, usually coinciding with underlying performance or confidence issues. What unites them is the consistent preference for retirement over removal.

This recurring pattern is not accidental, it is baked into the model. The promise of swift, visible accountability collides with legal protections, political sensitivities, and the threat of litigation. Commissioners hesitate to wield the power they were granted, chief constables depart on terms that shield them from real consequences. The taxpayer funds the salaries, elections, offices, inquiries—and ultimately the pensions of those who leave under a cloud that never quite materialises into sanction.

The cumulative evidence is difficult to dismiss. The same sequence repeats, high-profile shortcomings, public pressure, procedural delay, honourable retirement. Each instance reinforces the indictment. The PCC role does not strengthen accountability, it provides the appearance of it while allowing serious lapses to conclude with minimal disruption to those in command. The taxpayer is entitled to ask whether the price of such persistent ineffectiveness has not been paid long enough.

The pattern is too consistent, the evidence too cumulative, and the official verdict too explicit for any serious defence of the Police and Crime Commissioner model to hold water. What began as an ambitious attempt to inject democratic vigour into policing governance has, after more than a decade, been formally pronounced a failure by the very government now dismantling it.

The Home Office’s November 2025 announcement did not mince words, the standalone PCC structure is a “failed experiment” that has weakened rather than strengthened local accountability, depressed public confidence, and produced perverse incentives that deterred the recruitment and retention of capable chief constables.

This conclusion rests on hard data, not political rhetoric. Successive Home Office surveys and public opinion research have shown awareness of the role languishing below 20 per cent in many areas, with two in five people unaware the office even exists. Voter turnout has never risen above the low twenties in standalone elections, even when bundled with other polls, participation remains embarrassingly modest.

The National Audit Office and independent analyses, including those from the Police Foundation, have repeatedly highlighted the absence of measurable improvements in key policing outcomes attributable to PCC oversight. Sanction detections and charge rates have declined markedly since 2013, public trust in the wider criminal justice system has shown no sustained uplift linked to the model, and the long-term downward trend in crime volumes, as captured by the Crime Survey for England and Wales, predates the introduction of commissioners by many years.

The financial case is equally unanswerable. The projected savings from abolition, £100 million over the current parliament, with £20 million annually redirected to frontline policing, are not speculative. They derive from the documented costs of maintaining 37 separate PCC offices, funding salaries that frequently exceed six figures, and staging elections that routinely consume tens of millions. The 2024 contest alone cost at least £87 million.

These are not trivial sums. They represent resources diverted from putting officers on the street at precisely the moment when forces are struggling to recruit, when complex crime continues to rise, and when every pound is said, by the same politicians who once championed the PCCs, to be desperately needed on the frontline.

Independent scrutiny has been equally damning. The Police Foundation described the PCC era as “one failed experiment after another”, pointing to inconsistent scrutiny, variable effectiveness, and a tendency toward politicisation without corresponding gains in performance. The Royal United Services Institute and parliamentary committees have noted the same shortcomings, legitimacy undermined by low engagement, authority diluted by procedural constraints, and a persistent gap between the model’s ambitions and its delivery.

Even the Police Federation of England and Wales, traditionally cautious in its commentary on governance reform, welcomed the abolition, characterising the PCC structure as an “expensive experiment which has failed”.

Dig deeper into any of these sources, Home Office reviews, audit reports, inspectorate findings, academic studies in journals such as Policing and Society, and the conclusion remains unchanged. The model has not enhanced democratic oversight in any enduring sense. It has not driven better policing outcomes. It has not commanded public confidence or justified its cost.

Instead, it has introduced an additional tier of elected politicians who, in practice, wield limited influence over day-to-day operations while enjoying the appearance of authority. When that authority is tested, the outcome is almost invariably the same, procedural delay, negotiated retirement, preserved pensions, and no meaningful sanction.

The taxpayer funds this apparatus, elections, salaries, offices, inquiries, while receiving little beyond the illusion of accountability. The government’s decision to abolish the standalone PCC by 2028 is therefore not an act of ideological vandalism but a belated recognition of reality.

The numbers, the turnout figures, the inspectorate reports, the pension-protected exits, the persistent public indifference, all point in one direction. The PCC role was never the solution it was presented as being. It was an expensive addition to an already complex system, one that promised much, delivered little, and now stands formally condemned by those who once championed it. The evidence is overwhelming, the verdict is inescapable.

The PCC job was always a bullshit role, expensive, ineffective, and structurally designed to protect the powerful rather than serve the public. The government has finally acknowledged what the numbers, the turnout figures, the pension-protected exits, and the persistent public indifference have shown all along. The role is being scrapped because it never worked. The only remaining question is why it was allowed to waste public money and erode trust for so long.

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