Jonathan Isaby: Time for crime tsars to defend public interest

Their powers are not insignificant. They have the power to appoint (and dismiss) chief constables, setting out a Force’s strategy and – crucially – set policing priorities via their “Police and Crime Plan”. They hold the purse strings, setting out budgets and community safety grants, and are together responsible for some £8bn of spending on police across England and Wales.

Above all they would build a useful link between the public and the police, helping to ensure that the boys in blue are not – to borrow a phrase from across the pond - just protecting but serving the taxpayers paying their wages.

Unfortunately, public enthusiasm for the commis-sioners did not flourish as those who dreamed them up had hoped. The elections were a depressing affair: turnout was a historic low of 15.1 per cent, described by the Chair of the Electoral Commission watchdog as a “concern for anyone who cares about democracy.”

There has been precious little indication that, when voters go to the polls in November 2016 to vote for their next PCC, turnout will be much higher. That said, holding the elections not in the depths of winter might help.

Promises that Ministers made at the time, too, that PCCs would not cost any more than the police authorities they replaced look truer in some parts of the country than in others. While overall the cost fell by £2m between the police authorities in 2010-11 and the first years of the PCCs in 2013-14, it was not such a rosy picture at the local level.

Too many Offices of Police and Crime Commissioners saw their costs significantly increase in that first year than the Office they replaced. In 2013-14, if every OPCC had been as efficient as the best performing – in the Thames Valley – we could have saved £29m. That’s quite the prize, equivalent to perhaps as many as more than a thousand constables.

Reassurances have been offered, it should be noted, that those costs in the first year have significantly fallen. This is welcome. It is clear enough that not a single penny of taxpayers’ money should be spent unnecessarily.So while there is a clear reason to be transparent about the costs of these Offices, and to drive down on costs where at all possible, Police and Crime Commissioners must also take a far more active role as an oversight on Police Forces.

Right across the country, the past few months have seen some police forces get frankly carried away with themselves and Police and Crime Commissioners need to be alive to the consequences.

Take last week, when Wiltshire Police – acting on an allegation – held a press conference outside Sir Edward Heath’s house calling for witnesses to come forward if they had been abused by the former Prime Minister. Let’s be clear: child abuse is clearly a heinous crime, and we must do everything we can to investigate each and every allegation. But we also need to remember the basic premise of innocence until guilt is proven. It strikes me that the press conference, at the very least, was yet another example of Doing Something Syndrome: in which getting in the newspaper is seen as the same as solving a problem.

It wasn’t the first time, of course. How can we forget the televised raid on Sir Cliff Richard’s house, which turned out to be based on nothing more than hearsay?

And while the police seem to have endless resources for TV appearances and set-piece raids, just this month the new head of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, Sara Thornton, announced that the victims of burglary shouldn’t necessarily expect a visit from a policeman, rather that they should email over evidence – though presumably not if you’ve had your laptop taken in the burglary.

Leicestershire Police took this one step further, creating a kind of crime lottery: a trial in which only burglaries of only odd-numbered properties were investigated was rightly lambasted across the media.

The least taxpayers expect of the police is that things like burglary are investigated – policing might well be about prevention as much as punishment, but declaring open season on half the properties in an area seems to be taking the softly-softly approach rather too far. The police must be responsive to the public, and the outcry over some of these recent revelations shows that the public are wondering whether that’s still the case. We have just over a year until the public will have their say on their Police and Crime Commissioners. Being a louder voice for taxpayers, holding forces to account, would win many of them an awful lot of credit.

Jonathan Isaby is chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance.