Police Services in England and Wales

I am grateful for the opportunity to make a statement on the Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary’s report on police force structures, ‘Closing the Gap’, which was published on 16 September. The Home Secretary commissioned this report in June 2004 in response to growing concern from within the police service about an emerging gap in tackling serious cross-border crime.

The Home Secretary asked the HMIC to provide its professional assessment of whether the existing force structure is fit for purpose in the twenty-first century. As well as looking at forces’ capacity and capability to tackle serious organised crime, it also reviewed forces’ ability to provide a range of protective services in the fields of serious organised crime, counter terrorism and domestic extremism, civil contingencies and emergency planning, critical incident management, major crimes such as homicide, and public order and strategic roads policing.

The HMIC found a correlation between a force’s size and its ability to provide effective protective services. It considered that forces with fewer than 4,000 officers or 6,000 staff simply do not have the necessary critical mass to provide the necessary level of protective services. Only seven forces in England meet this threshold. None of the Welsh forces currently has this capability—South Wales Police, the largest force in Wales, has 3,268 officers.

The report explored a number of options for ensuring that the public has the necessary level of protection, but it concluded that the current 43-force structure is no longer fit for purpose and that, in the interests of the efficiency and effectiveness of policing, it should change. It suggested that the best way forward would be the creation of strategic police forces of sufficient size to provide both effective neighbourhood policing and protective services, and that this was not incompatible with the delivery of locally based neighbourhood police. The constabulary also concluded that disruption to basic command units, which are the key operating platform for the delivery of neighbourhood policing, can and should be minimised while protective services are reshaped. It is the basic command unit structure that, of course, underpins community safety partnerships in Wales. The HMIC is clear that mergers will not be sufficient on their own. The new strategic forces will need to reconfigure the way that protective services are provided in future in order to comply with minimum national standards.

Last week, the Home Secretary wrote to inform me that the Westminster Government will be endorsing the findings of the report. The Westminster Government’s view is that would be negligent to retain the current ineffective structure of policing. Charles Clarke considers that his first duty as Home Secretary is to ensure that the public is properly protected from a variety of threats to which the police have to respond. It is clear that he firmly believes that some reorganisation of forces and reconfiguration of protective services are necessary. The Home Secretary, as you are all aware, met the chief constables and the chairs of the police authorities last week, to discuss how to respond to the challenges set out in the report. They have been invited, in consultation with their criminal justice and local government partners, to come forward, by the end of this calendar year, with firm proposals for restructuring in each region. Although the timetable that will follow the consultation has not been announced, I understand that it is intended that agreed changes should take place within as short a time frame as possible, to avoid an extended period of disruption.

The Home Secretary wishes local discussions to be informed by the set of nationally determined criteria that were set out in the report, including such matters as the size of the force, crime patterns, consistency of boundaries with those of local government and criminal justice partners, geography, and local identity. He has made it clear that the starting point, in considering the response, must be that the strategic forces identified by HMIC are the right way forward, unless it can be clearly demonstrated that some other configuration would more effectively deliver the required changes.

In his letter to me, the Home Secretary clearly recognises that while policing is not devolved, any move to strategic forces will clearly have an impact on the critical relationship between the police and local government. He also recognises that there are issues that are particular to Wales, which will play a part in the discussions about the appropriate future structure for policing in Wales. The Home Secretary has said that he would welcome the National Assembly’s views on the report’s findings.

In order to ensure that the Assembly provides an informed response to the HMIC report, I wrote to the Chair of the Social Justice and Regeneration Committee, Janice Gregory, last week, to ask if the committee would undertake a review on this, taking views on the report’s findings and considering the different ways in which the aims set out by the Home Secretary might be achieved in Wales. I am pleased that the committee agreed, at its meeting this morning, to take that forward. Clearly, there are timescales involved, and I am grateful that committee members are prepared to give of their time to ensure that there is good evidence gathering on this issue.

I am sure that we all share an overriding priority for the future of the police service in Wales, which is to make sure that we support a structure that ensures that the police continue to work in partnership with other local agencies, to bear down on crime and anti-social behaviour and to enable communities in Wales to receive the quality of service that they have the right to expect.