My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 176, 177, 178 and, tangentially, 178A. I am pleased to support the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, in his amendments. I want to underpin much of what he has said and, to use his words again, to identify what I think is a growing law of unintended consequences that has flowed over the last five or six years in policing. To many of our minds, there is a growing shortage of leaders as opposed to managers, which the noble Earl has already alluded to. I might take that a little further and say that in my view there is some sign that the quality is diminishing among the senior ranks, and those who are putting themselves forward for senior ranks, within the British police.
It might be helpful if I go very quickly through the history of selection for the British police service, without taking too much of your Lordships’ time at this hour of the evening. Prior to 1948—there was a Police Act around that time—there was a superabundance of police forces in this country, many of them very small and most of them not talking to each other. The powers that they could exercise in neighbouring forces were severely limited or indeed non-existent. The words “parish pump” come to mind. This did not matter too much in those days because society was largely static; the great mobility of motorways, railways and that sort of thing had not yet come, so it was more or less okay for the time.
However, by the middle of the 1960s, following the royal commission of 1962, things had begun to change. There was a huge wave of amalgamations, which helped to fashion police forces in such a way that the parish pump largely disappeared, forces were largely aware of what was happening alongside them, co-operation began to grow and the whole policing scene changed for the better.
Underpinning all that was the establishment in 1948 of the Police Staff College. It started off originally in temporary accommodation at Ryton-on-Dunsmore in Coventry but moved fairly quickly in 1960 or thereabouts to Bramshill House in Hampshire. I venture to suggest, having been there as a student and on the staff, that it was probably the Bramshill staff college experience that helped to co-ordinate and make a cohesive whole of the police service in a way that nothing had done before. It brought together officers of various ranks on various courses, opened their eyes and broadened their horizons. It broke down, if you like, the old fetter of local training that was still going on in those days.
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The college developed two senior courses: the intermediate course, which we need not bother ourselves with, and what was originally the senior staff course and later renamed the senior command course. I want to dwell on that because it is pertinent to what the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, said. The senior command course was geared to produce the top three ranks of
the service. To get a place on the course was highly competitive. One had to go through three days of extensive interviews, tests, exercises and so on. Having gone through the selection procedure, one had to go through the course for about six months—it varied a little as time went on. It was highly competitive, the evaluation was strict and it was a testing course. Following the evaluation was the selection process for senior command rank, and you could join the ACPO senior ranks only if you had gone through the senior command course with something like flying colours.
If I may, I shall weary the Committee with the detail, because it is important to what we are discussing tonight. If you were a candidate for senior rank, you had not only to go through the senior command course selection and the course itself but to attract the attention and support of the inspectorate—a very different animal then than it is now—and satisfy Home Office officials that you were worth entering the shortlist for selection to the police authority. The detail may be lost on some Members, but that does not matter. The point was that people could put themselves forward for senior rank in police forces only by going through that detailed process and getting all the right ticks in the boxes, as they say these days. Significant in all that was that you had to break away from your own force and go into another force to serve.
I pause because we now have police and crime commissioners and, with the greatest respect to many of them, the quality is variable. There are some very good ones, but most of them are preoccupied with keeping their position: they are locally driven and locally focused. I venture to suggest that there is a drift back towards the parish pump of the 1950s, which bothers me considerably. I see evidence of senior ranks being selected solely from the force concerned—I am getting nods around the Committee from those who know what I am talking about—with the PCC selecting officers who they know within their force and not looking beyond the force’s boundary for talent outside. We are going back to what one might usefully and easily call the parish pump as shorthand.
Added to that is the fact that Bramshill staff college was sold three or four years ago and has not been replaced. We have no staff college for higher police training in this country, and the Home Office has, as far as I understand it, no plan to replace it. The drift back to parish pump policing and localism is very pronounced indeed. Higher training takes place more in words than in the product. It is a pallid echo of what went on only a few years before, and there is no great rigour.
I do not want to be unduly critical, because I think this is the law of unintended consequences, but all the way through the Home Office has devolved responsibility to PCCs, but they are not picking it up, there is no staff college and no system and therefore the selection of senior officers is going by the board.
I pause briefly on Amendment 176 and overseas experience. I am not sure that I support every detail of the noble Earl’s amendment, but I certainly applaud the drift that goes with it. Overseas attachments were once integral to the senior command force. Everyone
went abroad to look at policing experience—not for long, but it was there. One can look at the quality of officers who have gone abroad, which is, as has been alluded to, by and large not as good as it could be.
There are exceptions. One comes to mind straightaway —Mr Richard Monk, who served in the Metropolitan Police, Devon and Cornwall and the inspectorate. On his retirement he helped to replan and then head up the police in both Kosovo and Bosnia, and collected an OBE for one and a CMG for the other. Note the point: he was retired when he did it.
There are quality officers who could contribute massively across the face of the globe in a fast-changing world but we are not making the best use of them—not in the same way as the Armed Forces, which almost insist that good-quality officers will serve abroad for part of their time.
I hope I have said enough to underpin what the noble Earl said in his introduction of those three amendments. A severe problem is beginning to develop that we are not selecting the right people, training them and posting them in the right way. I would advocate—I hate to say this—that we could well go back to where we were a few years ago with some advantage. As we are, we are standing on the brink of what I would call a steady drift towards mediocracy. That bothers me as an ex-police officer. I wish I did not have to say that. The amendments are integral and I support them.