Sir Hugh Orde Speech ACPO Conference 2014

Colleagues

Welcome to Harrogate. Thank you Julia and David for your warm welcome to what is I am told the happiest place in the UK, according to a recent poll!

In the last 5 years that I have had the privilege of holding this office there has been immense change. The scale and speed of some of these changes can hardly be overestimated, and they are placing new demands on policing all the time.

During this time the service has dealt with serious disorder on the streets of our country, the Olympic Games, threatened fuel strikes and floods. Currently we are preparing for a NATO Conference and supporting colleagues in Police Scotland during the Commonwealth Games.

It is worth reflecting for a moment on how chief officers, through ACPO, have embraced and positively influenced these challenges.

First, it is important to recognise that scrutiny focussed on getting the most accurate crime recording should not be allowed to obscure the fact that, whether measured by the police’s own figures or the independent survey of England and Wales: most categories of crime are down.

There can be many contributory factors to that achievement, and equally, there are growing challenges elsewhere, in particular in the world of cyber crime.

But fundamentally, through the efforts of the overwhelmingly professional, passionate, ethical and committed workforce we lead, we have continued to make improvements to the way we prevent crime and protect the public.

Our response to national threats of terrorism and cyber crime is better than it has ever been. What has been achieved is against an unprecedented backdrop of substantial cuts to our budgets, large scale reform and increasing burdens of inspection, review and historic investigation.

Following a 20% reduction in real terms from March 2011 to March 2015 the Chancellor indicated that further budget reductions would be required looking forward. That reality, together with restrictions

Council Tax precepts and top slices including £50million to the Police Innovation Fund, £18million to the IPCC, and £9.4million to HMIC, demonstrate the further funding difficulties ahead for police forces. The cuts faced by many of policing’s partner agencies compound the issue.

It is in the culture of British policing to deliver. That determination has carried us through and is why the Home Secretary dubbed policing: “The model public service in the era of budget cuts.”

And as Damian Green acknowledged at this event last year: the fact that the Government’s reforms are working is in large part down to the drive and dedication of the people in this room.

The national landscape is now becoming more settled, PCCs are working with CCs to deliver local policing bespoke to the challenges they face, untroubled by national targets and national policy. The work undertaken through ACPO, led by Sara Thornton to “clear the decks” of unnecessary national guidance has been critical and I am most grateful to her for her leadership on this issue.

It enabled us to hand over to Alex and the College a far tidier ship in terms of national standards and policy than ever before. It also has allowed us to focus on building consensus on policing approaches to the most critical issues: such as organised crime, terrorism, firearms and public order.

This work has run alongside growing regional capacity to ensure effective policing across the 44 force boundaries that are invisible to criminals and terrorists, and meaningless to the victims and citizens who we are charged with protecting.

PCCs are now properly embedded in the new national landscape, organised nationally through the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners (APCC). They are represented on the Board of Directors of the College of Policing, and on governance boards for the National Policing Operational Coordination Centre, and the ACPO Criminal Records Office, to name but a few.

Together with my Vice Presidents I also meet routinely with the representatives of the APCC. At the risk of being slightly controversial, I had hoped that by now the relationship would have matured to a point where we could all come together in a conference format to discuss critical national issues.

It seems to me that the best way of having an informed debate on, for example, the Strategic Policing Requirement (a concept for ensuring the effective national policing of serious threats which can only work if we all contribute to the greater good), is by way of informed discussion and debate on the operational impact such collaboration has on individual forces, and the consequential impact on (decreasing) force budgets.

It seems to me that one conference is better that two, and whilst acknowledging the need to respect our distinct roles in the public domain, our overriding shared responsibility is to protect citizens from national threats in the most cost effective way. I am sure that debate will continue into the future.

The College of Policing has emerged from a period of transition with our full support. It is the professional body for all who work in policing: our College, with its own space in the landscape, its own governance, and hopefully in the not too distant future the means and maturity to assert its independence from the Home Office. This is critical to success, as is a clear offer to the membership. It must be seen as the voice of authority on best practice, evidence based policing and on national standards.

We have been involved in the creation of the College from the moment it was announced by the Home Secretary at a meeting with Chief Constables. Indeed, I think it was a Chief Constable who came up with the idea of a College - a far better description of its broad ambition than simply a professional policing body. There is still much to do and Alex will have our full support to establish its credentials and its freedom.

The huge opportunity here is for the profession (in the most inclusive sense of the word) to develop itself, supported by others, in a proactive sense rather merely a piecemeal way in reaction to reports or events. We need to become an organisation with a culture that actively encourages discussion and challenge and is willing to learn when things go wrong. Rather than casting around to stick some individual’s head on a pole by way of retribution.

When I was the Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland we were the first UK service to implement a code of ethics in 2003. I am delighted that we now have a similar code for the whole service, led by the College of Policing. It is a clear statement about how we will deliver, non-negotiable in terms of including all within policing and it provides a benchmark for all to follow.

As leaders we have an opportunity to encourage our officers and staff and empower them to use that precious power of discretion to deliver meaningful outcomes for citizens. In a world of ever-decreasing budgets, success to a large extent will be a function of a greater willingness to manage risk, give responsibility to the frontline and allow them to make judgements.

If on occasions the outcome is less than perfect, we need our people to be secure in the knowledge that leaders will support those charged with making split second decisions without the power of hindsight. This will only work if those who oversee policing understand that new complexity and report accordingly.

Whilst we have achieved a welcome shift away from bean counting in the routine, I am yet to be persuaded that those who inspect us have caught up with a fundamentally different way of doing business. That is not a criticism, simply an observation.

Let me explain. Firstly, PCCs are specifically charged with holding Chief Constables to account locally against their policing plan. All of these are different, with different priorities bespoke to the geography and communities they serve. Secondly, policing is ever increasingly delivered in partnership, and while cutbacks across the public sector have without doubt strained those relationships - and on occasions shifted workload onto us as the service of last resort - success is a result of a combined effort across interdependent organisations.

Thirdly, chief officers are having to make choices in terms of resource deployment against an increasing demand curve, ranging from enforcement to safeguarding, where demand exceeds supply. To be clear, policing is not funded in a way to deliver everything, and any such assumption is deeply flawed.

Perhaps it is helpful to explain this challenge by way of example. The Home Secretary in her robust speech to the Police Federation recently raised allegations of “rigged recorded crime statistics”. Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary asserted “weak or absent management and supervision” and “significant under-recording” of crime.

As a service founded upon the notion of accountability it is the responsibility of all in policing to receive criticism and commentary with an open, rational and objective mind, then work hard to make improvements. Be in no doubt, that is what we are now doing.

But speaking to senior colleagues, I sensed a real frustration, not with those charged with inspecting us but with a process condemned to reduce the rich complexity of policing experience to a binary level. One Chief Constable told me that Her Majesty’s Inspectors had challenged him on a set of circumstances involving an officer who responded to a call where three young boys (aged 8) had chosen to bare their bottoms to passing motorists.

He dealt with the matter by escorting the boys’ home, speaking to the parents and leaving. If my 8 year old had behaved in a similar way I would be entirely satisfied and indeed grateful to the officer. But apparently, (according to HMI) that should have been recorded as a crime.

I remain entirely unpersuaded, indeed when I attended Training School in 1977 I still remember learning that it was an irrefutable presumption at common law that a child under 10 is incapable of committing a crime.

In another example, two children (one of whom was ten years old, the other younger) took pick and mix sweets from a store, ate some and threw some around. Neither child had any money to pay, and they were taken home to their parents, an action that the security guards were happy with. Again, HMIC felt this should have been a crime of shoplifting.

The point is less around the individual cases than the impact of a process that obscures the detail and can deliver a false impression of policing that ill informs the public. The aim must be to improve policing and that is best achieved within a profession which has the maturity to discuss and learn, not condemn failures. Or react by skewing priorities towards the latest crisis and thus risk compromising service elsewhere.

I fear an emerging trend among the way audit and inspection is approached and reported that may lead to more public challenge by Chief Officers and possibly PCCs. We have already started to see some of this take place.

I now want to touch on the ongoing reforms to ACPO itself.

In his speech to us last year, the policing minister thanked us for embracing reform. He said “I know that change is never easy when it is this fundamental. The reforms that you have helped to implement have required you to work very differently”

It is with a sense of relief that I think we are now close to understanding the respective roles in the national infrastructure. Following the constructive and thoughtful report by General Sir Nick Parker on ACPO and the review undertaken by Sir David Omand and Sir Denis O’Connor into national deployment capability there is a clear understanding that to keep citizens safe from national threats, and to respond to national events the leadership must organise to deliver:

• oversight of coordination of operational policing at the national level
• national operational implementation of standards and policy, working with the College

This work has been carried forward by Mike Cunningham, Debbie Simpson and Craig Mackey, together with three PCCs, the College of Policing and MOPAC, under the independent chairmanship of Sir Bill Jeffrey.

I am deeply grateful to them all for their efforts, alongside the efforts of those supporting the transition and representing all chief officer ranks. I think we are nearly at the end of this journey, but don’t want to jump the gun by second guessing the debate we will have with colleagues later this week.

However, I am confident that the legally sensible vehicle of being a company limited by guarantee can be replaced with a different structure. National units that we adopted over time can be lodged within forces allowing us to focus on the critical operational coordination role that was the rationale for our existence in the first place. I was reminded of my evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee in my first month as President of ACPO, where I stated:

“Am I comfortable being a limited company? No I am not, frankly it is an awkward mix, but it allows us to hire people, to rent premises… to publish accounts so we could have transparency.....I am happy to have a debate with whoever it needs to be on is there a better way of structuring ACPO”.

Well, in the new landscape the right people to have that debate with were the PCCs, and that is exactly the debate that I have described.

The functions for the national coordinating body are now clear, and they complement rather than conflict with other elements at the national level. Indeed without each other we will collectively fail to keep citizens safe from the national threats. The leadership will not allow that to happen, but the greater the clarity the better the chances for success.

There will inevitably be tensions, indeed there should be. In most cases (as is currently the case) these will be resolved by mature quiet conversations. Policing is not black and white, it is every shade of grey you can imagine (more than 50) so it is predictable that on many issues there will be different voices in the debate. There is not and should not be a single voice of policing, whether that of chief officers or anyone else. Maintaining confidence with the public should be the backdrop against which a decision is made on who is best suited to deal with issues of the day raised in an open and transparent way.

On the subject of our relationship with the public, there is a quite legitimate challenge that confidence levels which have maintained stability at about two-thirds over several years, leave plenty of room for improvement. Everyone within policing who reflected on the long list of events detailed by the Home Secretary recently will want to work to change policing for the better.

But we have a significant advantage on others seeking a relationship with the public, including press and politicians, in that the work of the police impacts on people’s lives in a very direct way. What moves people in the end is direct experience: what really happens in their lives. So by far the most important thing we can do is just to focus on doing the job incredibly well.

While citizen confidence levels appear stable, I suspect within a zone drawn around Westminster and Whitehall they are far lower, and that feeling works in both directions. The so-called Plebgate case may be emblematic of that attitude.

I make no observations on the relative merits of this case which are a matter to be examined in the courts. But what I learned from my last job in Northern Ireland is that different interpretations of one event can be resolved amicably through dialogue and negotiation in a way that helps to build confidence and trust looking forward and without winners and losers. Of course negotiation requires a willingness to acknowledge different positions. I also learnt that it is never too late to talk, and I truly hope that every opportunity is explored before the final, legal option takes responsibility for its resolution.

I also think that there is a broader emerging challenge of dealing with contested events from the past that we should take very seriously. We are again seeing an increasing demand on current police resources to deal with past events. In Northern Ireland we created an Historic Enquiries Team to ensure victims’ families had confidence that we were determined to do our very best for them, but with a resource that was separately funded and ring fenced. This allowed me to maintain current capacity and protect citizens in the present whilst respecting the need to deal with the past.

Frankly, looking for innovative ways to deal with such incredibly difficult territory is risky for leaders. It makes us vulnerable to ill informed criticism, as of course different groups want different outcomes. It is easy to be critical of genuine effort in this area. My learning is that one size does not fit all. But none of these complexities are good enough reasons not to try our best to deliver some form of resolution, while acknowledging that some of these cases will ever be resolved to the satisfaction of the families concerned.

But as resources decrease, and specialists within policing become converted to generalists, we need to face up to this challenge and Government needs to give serious consideration to different approaches, focussed on how families can secure some degree of resolution from these awful cases. It is very hard not to fully resource a re-investigation. Some radical thinking is required here if we are to maintain capacity for the here and now and not create a vicious circle that ten years from now has seriously impacted on our responsiveness.

Colleagues, the Home Secretary’s speech to the Police Federation was not entirely controversial. It reflected upon the observations made by Stephen Williams in relation to officers who lost their lives during the past year. Every year there is a list. The circumstances range from tragic accident through to murder. Last year it was four:

PC Shazahan Wadud from the Metropolitan Police.

PC Andrew Duncan from the Metropolitan Police.

DC Adrian Grew from Kent Police.

And PC Mick Chapman from West Midlands Police.

These events bring into sharp focus what the job is about, and the risks our officers take each day in order to protect citizens. It is an acute reminder that the overwhelming majority of the staff we read are good honest individuals of the highest integrity, who exceed the standards of our code in the routine of their working day.

I am proud to be associated with a determined attempt to build a proper memorial at the National Arboretum. Not only is this memorial a much-needed place of remembrance, but working together with all the police charities we have the opportunity to instil in our national culture a sense of pride and appreciation for our police service. I am delighted to announce that Adrian Leppard has taken up the role of fund-raising chairman for this endeavour and I look forward to your support. This [see picture] is no way to remember our fallen colleagues.

So in conclusion, the next two days are important, and with one exception, they are open, which is also itself important. They are properly focussed on the key challenges we face. The ‘hard edge’ topics which include terrorism, organised crime, cyber crime and demands on local policing. On the organisational side, an economic look forward, providing support to our people in these demanding times and an examination of how we embrace the opportunities providing by digital information.

Exactly the topics the public would expect police leaders to be focussing on. I am deeply grateful to all our speakers, many of whom come from outside the service in recognition that these debates are far too important to be left to the police alone.

I am also reminded that the leaders of the service undertake all this national work on a voluntary basis. We have a truly unique model that is the subject of much admiration around the world. So while the current backdrop against which we lead the service forward is challenging, and we recognise that policing has much to do to improve, to face up to fair criticism and challenge, I remain confident. The people we lead are of great quality and without question, they are up for the challenge.

And as Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary has noted: “The men and women of the police service deserve to be led by people of integrity and intelligence, and in the main they are.”

I hope you enjoy the conference. I am delighted that we will hear from two distinguished politicians over the next two days and I now invite the first, the shadow minister for policing Jack Dromey, to address us.

ENDS

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