Vera Baird DBE KC

Chair Criminal Cases Review Commission. Member Women’s Justice Bd.
Ex Victims’ Commissioner, Solicitor Gen & PCC. Fellow St Hilda’s Oxford. Writer. Labour Party

Tag: policing

  • “PAY UP” says Police & Crime Commissioner, Vera Baird QC.

    Northumbria’s Police & Crime Commissioner, Vera Baird has insisted that Conservative Chancellor, George Osborne must pay back over £1 million pound to Northumbria Police.

    Mr Osborne has been reprimanded by an official statistics watchdog – after he cut police funding for Northumbria despite promising not to.

    The Tories also used the council tax precept by planning a budget that included an assumption local residents in Northumbria would pay £5 a year more for their policing with no consultation with local people, police & crime commissioners or council leaders.

    PCC Vera Baird, said: “All of Osborne’s bravado last year was hot air – we knew at the time he had cut police budgets and this has been confirmed by the UK Statistics Authority. The government manipulated the figures, assumed a council tax increase of £5 to just maintain the services. The Police Grant that we receive from government is less, it’s wrong that the government forced the police to keep services at their current level by imposing a £5 increase with no consultation.”

    Here in Northumbria, police funding is made up of a grant from central government and the police precept element of the council tax. The government put their funding package together including a £5 increase. Forces then have money taken off them through “top slicing”, this is where money is used to pay for national schemes.

    Vera Baird added: “In relation to the Police Precept, it is normally the role of police & crime commissioners to determine an increase, if at all. This time the government put in place the £5 increase – if this amount had not been included, our police force would have received even less funding. Northumbria has also had £1.2 million directly removed and I want it back. I want this money to invest in policing to ensure we keep bobbies on the beat and that Northumbria remains one of the safest places in the country to live.”

    Vera Baird will be meeting the Shadow Home Secretary, Andy Burnham and the Shadow Policing Minister, Jack Dromey, to urge them to keep the pressure on the Chancellor , to get him to correct the record and find the extra money to honour his promise.

    Since 2010, Northumbria Police budget has been cut by the Tories and Lib Dems by more than £100 million, this has resulted in the force loosing 861 police officers and nearly 1000 police staff.

  • Changing the Policing Landscape

    The Policing Landscape.

    Policing is at the heart of all communities, it creates safety and promotes confidence. However, the landscape on which policing in England and Wales is carried out has changed dramatically in recent years. Crime has been falling since the mid nineties but there has not been a corresponding reduction in demand for police work. Preventive and protective mechanisms have got on one hand more local and on another more complex and the type of crimes investigated, as well as the numbers of them, continue to change year on year.

    A report entitled \”Reshaping Policing For the Public\” has been published today, a joint piece of work from a group of individuals from the police, trade unions and Police & Crime Commissioners. It responds to the need for a national debate on the future of policing as recommended in last year\’s HM Inspector of Constabulary\’s report, Policing in Austerity, Meeting the Challenge and it will be a useful starting point for that discussion.

    Everyone agrees that the challenge is huge – the major one being finances. Currently police funding is based on a complex formula which causes very unequal distribution between forces, but basically there have been government cuts so far of a quarter of police funding and the plan is to cut another quarter by 2020. Some more affluent areas such as Surrey get more funding from local council tax than areas like mine in Northumbria, which gives them a great advantage in a time of national government cuts. Since 85% of Northumbria Police force budget comes from national government, when that is cut, it\’s a cut into most of our funding. We have lost 23% of our budget whilst Surrey, which gets 52% of its police funding from council tax has lost only 12% of its total. At the same time as my force takes huge cuts my colleague in Devon and Cornwall is arguing that his local taxpayers pay twice for policing, once as part of a large chunk of council tax and again to the inland revenue to fund the Home Office grant. Clearly it is not straightforward but the days of cuts along straight percentages have to end and more regard given firstly to the revenue, capital and reserves of each individual force and then to the demand they are responding to.

    Only 12% of calls to Northumbria Police are about crime; the national average is only 22%. The other 80-90% includes responding to missing people, dealing with road traffic incidents, stop and search, dealing with people with mental health issues and anti social behaviour. There is an additional, relatively new, tranche of work, which is not response policing but continues in the background all the time. It includes child protection programmes, Troubled Families programmes, participating in multi agency public protection teams which monitor known dangerous offenders to protect the public, MARACs which offer wraparound care to repeat victims of the most dangerous domestic abuse and Integrated Offender Management which is working with probation to stop re-offending especially of prolific known criminals. The role of a typical police officer has changed immensely through all of this, piling on new duties which are certainly in the public interest but which take up, according to the College of Policing\’s research, a significant part of the policing day and which simply hadn\’t been invented the last time any one looked seriously at how to fund the police.

    Further, crime may no longer be going down. The latest crime figures will show that there is no longer a downturn but a national increase of 2% in recorded crime,which is spread across 30 or more of the police forces in England and Wales. It is never easy to sort out whether increases in recorded crime represent increases in actual crime, more reporting or better recording. The problem is that the Home Office links its funding directly to levels of crime. Everyone has heard Theresa May saying that people have been crying wolf that if police funding is cut crime will go up. The first trouble is that she doesn\’t know whether it has or it hasn\’t. On the one hand police got into trouble from a Select Committee for not recording crime. That has led recently to the Police and crime Commissioner for Norfolk, where crime appears to have rocketed, but really what has happened as he makes clear, is that his force have felt obliged to record somebody throwing a biscuit at someone else, a child swinging his boxing gloves in a silly way and catching another child and a range of other events that the public would not call crime, to be recorded as offences. On another hand, Northumbria Police and their partners have pioneered a ground-breaking operation called Sanctuary which has unearthed considerable sexual exploitation where there was only a hint of it for them to go on. We have the biggest increase in reports of sexual abuse amongst all forces this year and we are, perhaps surprisingly, very pleased, It is not because there is more sexual exploitation most of which goes unreported it is because Sanctuary has made its mark and victims know they can report with confidence because our police and our victims services understand these crimes.

    It takes perhaps twenty times as much officer time and skilled resource to achieve 103 the number of charges of sexual offending in Sanctuary as it does to catch 103 phone thieves, people who damage cars, shoplifters and burglars. So, simply counting recorded crime as the basis for funding is like building a house on mud.

    The report goes beyond funding and looks at the bones of a new model for policing. This would leave local 24/7 response and neighbourhood policing capability, including safeguarding vulnerable people as now, resourced locally and linked even more closely than now with partners like local authorities, whose housing, social services, safeguarding, licensing and a score more functions are required if an all-round job is to be done on problem solving and tackling crime in communities. The emphasis should be on \’getting upstream of crime\’; through work such as Troubled Families programmes. There is a case for shared budgets and management to streamline and boost efficiency

    This would be supported with more collaborative arrangements across forces for
    Specialist investigative work, operational support such as public order resources, dogs, horses, firearms and, criminal justice support would be organised on a regional basis. Public surveys suggest business support such as legal, corporate communications and human resources should follow too.

    As a governance system, local PCCs would soon have insufficient reach to be responsible for all of these ascending layers and though they may not be ideal, they are better than the former unelected, unaccountable police authorities and restoring local government scrutiny would be equally inadequate.

    Recommendations are also made about the buy in from central government. If changes are being implemented locally and regionally, the speed at which Whitehall works needs to increase dramatically. There needs to be more coordinated funding streams and authority to budget, fund and commission jointly the new ways of delivering services.

    The report at least starts the debate and should not now make its way on to a shelf in Whitehall and collect dust. It says that there needs to be clarity on what the role of the police should be and then on how to organise and how to fund that role fairly and that it needs to have emerged by the end of this year and I agree. Nobody foresees forced mergers because the public remain very attached to their local forces and as much can be achieved by collaboration but apart from that if we are to ensure that our low-crime communities continue to be as safe as they are now, anything goes.

  • In response: Yvette Cooper’s speech to the Fabian Conference (28th June 2014)

    Yvette Cooper once again showed us why she will be an effective Home Secretary in 45 weeks time.

    Speaking at the Fabians Society Conference she delivered a speech which was compassionate, caring and reinforced why we need a Labour Government with Ed Miliband and Yvette leading from the front for a fairer country that speaks for all.

    As a party we are right to oppose the bedroom tax, it hurts too many people – it is not right that people have to make the choice of whether to feed themselves or not because they can\’t afford the ever increasing heating bills and bedroom tax. It is only our party that is standing up and saying the bedroom tax is wrong.

    As Yvette states, Ed Miliband has kept Labour united, focused on what we should be tackling and building a vision for Britain. Ed has ensured that MPs, Councillors, MEPs, and latterly, PCCs are working in communities in every neighbourhood delivering for local people – we are united together in doing all we can to win the General Election. We have the determination, we have the policies and we all know what is at stake if the Conservatives win another term in 2015.

    During the Shadow Home Secretary’s speech she mentioned that prosecutions for domestic and sexual violence have dropped even though reported crimes are going up, 999 waits across the country are going up and fewer crimes are being solved. Here in Northumbria we have seen our budget cut by £67 million since 2010, we have had to look at every option available to protect neighbourhood policing – had the Tories had their way we would have seen frontline policing cut to the skeleton – as Labour Police & Crime Commissioner for Northumbria there was no way I was going to allow this to happen, so we are relocating police stations in to the heart of communities, looking at sharing premises with organisations such as the fire and health service to save money, this making our police bases more accessible to the public and keeping officers on the beat, we are then disposing of old properties, cutting tiers of management and have looked for savings at every level to protect neighbourhood policing. With the election of a Labour government we know that neighbourhood policing will be a priority on Yvette’s agenda.

    Theresa May really does believe that policing is only fighting crime – we need to put preventing crime back on the agenda as the last Labour government did. The Home Secretary declined my invitation to stop off and see excellent policing in action when she was coming through the force area to go to the Scottish Tory Party Conference earlier this year – she has still to accept my invitation to see first class police officers trying to deliver for communities despite massive budget cuts.

    I’m pleased that Yvette recognised that Labour PCCs have worked hard to collaborate with each other and with local councils and partners, this is what we were elected to do and we continue to urge Commissioners of other political persuasion to do the same.

    When delivering public services, it frightens me that the market is dominated by Capita, G4S, Serco, Sodexho and Atos – I don’t have have confidence in these companies, yet the governments commissioning process is pushing them at us and as Yvette rightly states they are crowding out smaller organisations, local voluntary groups and failing to deliver value for money too.

    Northumbria’s Probation service is recognised as one of the best in the country, now their future is uncertain as the government has cut up and privatised the service to the point were morale is rock bottom and the staff are working in a system with no direction from government apart from to cut costs at any measures. The services that are being dismantled are crucial to an effective rehabilitation process and getting it wrong now will have consequences for many years.

    Everyone is in favour of introducing aftercare to prevent re-offending by people sentenced to one year or less. But the coalition’s Crime Minister made clear, in answer to a question from me, in May, that this will “not happen soon” but after “we have waited for the cohort to build up” whereas if it had been given to local probation trusts, the best team to deliver it, no doubt it would have been in place by now, preventing more crimes and protecting more victims. It was a showpiece reason for making these changes but the best current estimate is that it won’t even start until 2016. This is worrying

    A Labour government knows that resources will be tight during the next Parliament, but public services will be more important than ever and it is Labour’s different set of values to the current government that will deliver a difference. As Yvette states “for the many, not the few; for social justice, not social fragmentation. Labour progressive values, not Tory prejudice”

    Labour PCCs will both inform and support the next Labour reforms in criminal justice. We say yes to services that are personalised, giving power to individuals, families and communities; Yes to creating partnerships and collaboration. Labour PCCs believe in this rather than fragmentation and enforced competition.

    Long term prevention is a Yes from us and we fully support raising professional standards.

    Labour values will make a difference to our country and as Ed Miliband said nearly a year ago “Britain can do better” I’m up for the fight, I have implemented many Labour policies since my election as PCC in November 2012 – one of the proudest being a Living Wage for all who work for Northumbria police. We brought the cleaning team back in house so we could pay them a living wage.

    Let’s make the next 45 weeks count and come May 2015 we will have a brighter future for our communities – with Ed Miliband as Prime Minister and Yvette Cooper as Home Secretary.