"This is a pivotal moment in the history of policing in the United Kingdom. In almost every aspect, more change stares us in the face than for many generations. Our task is to grasp that moment and shape the future. Moreover, except for those of you who are soon to retire, I think this is in our time.
"Let me explain what I mean. For most of the last century, with the exception of the 1980's miners strike, policing and crime were largely uncontroversial issues. With the exception of the reporting of the most sensational of offences, crime and anti-social behaviour were not matters which engendered political debate or which particularly touched a wide majority of the British people.
"Of course there were exceptions, particularly in relation to race, showing the truth of Sir Robert Mark's observation that, 'The police are the anvil on which society beats out the problems and abrasions of social inequality, racial prejudice, weak laws and ineffective legislation.'
"In the last ten years, however, this position has fundamentally changed; crime and anti-social behaviour have moved to the very centre of politics; terrorism has made individual security a matter of extreme personal interest to all of us.
"The murders at Soham brought into the sharpest possible focus the police service's ability, as Denis O'Connor has just described them, to provide protective services. The enormity of the consequence management in London in July, let alone some of the difficulties apparent in government services in New Orleans, have only increased the importance of policing.
"A whole series of pressures and opportunities has thus now come to bear; the possibility of structural reform, a deepening political interest in citizen experience in public services, with crime and anti-social behaviour high on any list: the increase in complexity of many policing services - and hence cost.
"The government is signalling change; the police service has, particularly from the Superintendents' Association and the Association of Chief Police Officers, argued for much of that change, sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly. Now we must trumpet the need for change; we must demand change; we must lead change.
"That is well underway: in speaking here today I am building on the work of others, particularly Bob Quick, Chief Constable of Surrey, but also of many other colleagues.
"The headlines are dominated by structural change, which will provide a better way of delivering protective services. But by itself, that is not enough.
"True public sector reform must deliver new ways of serving the public which are better, faster and more cost effective: this means we have to examine how work and how people who undertake the work are organised, and if necessary, change it. The example staring at us is neighbourhood policing: we are close, at long last, to delivering a robust approach to neighbourhood policing across the whole country.
"We have only achieved that through changing the workforce involved, through the introduction of PCSOs. They have enabled that change, in terms both of aptitude for this kind of work and of cost. Neighbourhood policing will be delivered through workforce modernisation and that example should now be moved into as many other areas of policing as possible.
"We need to decide what constables can do which they are not allowed to do now: we need to decide what others could do now but only constables are allowed to do or only constables are available to do.
"Let me take you on my journey as the Commissioner over the last six months: obviously, it is a Metropolitan journey but I think it will have resonance for every force in the country. When I was appointed on 1st February, I used the expression that the Met had to "build on past success to reshape ourselves for the future".
"I was taking over an organisation which, on many indicators, was very successful; not only that, it thought itself successful. That is not always the easiest kind of organisation to change. Nevertheless, on my first day, I outlined a number of issues to which the Met had to face up.
"First was a widening mission, with an increasing concentration on serious crime and counter-terrorism but also on the provision of policing for reassurance at a neighbourhood level. I was concerned about inefficiencies within such a huge organisation; I was concerned about the way in which the Met was extremely good at the big events but much less good at handling routine encounters with the public. I was concerned that the organisation remained culturally very divided between those who carried warrant cards and those who did not.
"As a result, we set off on three routes: first, the building of a long-term corporate strategy which would be capable of driving all the change which we wanted to see introduced, secondly, a revision of the values of the organisation to try to overcome the insularity of the Met from its customers and the insularity of different parts of the Met from each other.
"Thirdly, we launched a full-scale root and branch review of the Service to try and find duplication and inefficiency which we could cut out in order to reinvest in first-line service. I thought these would be the three major influences on our thinking in the years ahead. However, those have most obviously been joined by a fourth matter, which are the implications of 7/7 and 21/7 for the future of the service, particularly in the light of the Olympics decision.
"Despite the events of July, we did manage to deliver something approaching a coherent combination of these issues at the beginning of this month and we will drive forward on them. However, what came out of all this work were three great issues, which I believe now combine into a doctrine of change which will underpin the future face of this service.
"First, what I described as a widening mission is better described as the need to handle both volume and complexity in policing services, both of which are increasing more and more rapidly. The second is that we need one workforce, not two, a workforce in which everyone is equally valued and can contribute to the maximum of their potential. Thirdly, we need to do everything in our power to stop this service being producer-shaped and make it citizen-shaped.
"As I said at the beginning, this is the moment for change. But if we are going to change in response to these three dynamics, then I think we need to do so along the lines of some principles. These seem to me to be the approach that might be necessary:-
"Principle 1 - The first principle is something I've wanted to say publicly for thirty years and I'm going to say it now. There is no greater absurdity in the world of policing than the word "civilianisation." The whole concept that lay behind Peel's reforms were that the police were civilians in uniform. If that is the case, then we need to do whatever we can to bring terms, conditions and training into sensible alignment across the whole of our workforce.
"Principle 2 - Secondly, it is a logical, organisational and strategic absurdity to judge the effectiveness of policing in the United Kingdom by the number of police officers employed, in the same way that it would be equally illogical to judge a health service by the number of beds or nurses or an education service by the number of schools. Policing, health and education need to be judged in terms of outcomes, not inputs. The numbers involved in some inputs can be important; the decline in the number of beds in the health service has apparently coincided with the rise in individuals needing long term care and some of the NHS reforms and processes are actually being blocked by that input position. Police numbers are very important but they are not the outcome of policing which the public desire. Locking the service into political machismo around officer numbers constrains the way in which the outcomes of policing can be delivered. The Association of Chief Police Officers said, in what I thought was a very wise statement in the debate around force structures and organisations, that "we are the guardians of the service we offer, not the structures we inhabit". Surely, we remain the guardians of the service we offer, but we are equally not the guardians of the delivery mechanisms or the demarcations in the delivery mechanisms which we use.
"Principle 3 - is an acceptance that the type of interactions with the public in the 21st Century and the kind of duties that the police undertake in the 21st Century, as required by increasing volume and complexity and deepening customer expectations, require a different and widening skill-set and aptitude than those normally possessed by those who are drawn to be police officers. Police officers are professionals working in a field which straddles many other professions. They need high levels of legal, procedural and technical knowledge, complex problem solving skills, leadership and emotional intelligence. Police officers are not necessarily the best people at customer relations; police officers are not necessarily the best people to work in communication service centres; police officers are not necessarily the best people at carrying out repetitive tasks; police officers are not necessarily the best people as intelligence analysts. There is room for change.
"On that basis, we could sweep away the office of constable and dramatically reduce the number of fully trained police officers. I think not. Because there are some other principles.
"Principle 4 - is that the office of constable is valuable. The famous judgement of Denning in the Blackburn case in 1973 made it clear that a police officer retains the widest possible discretion in criminal investigation. Although perhaps expressed in slightly eccentric language, this principle remains very important. We need to be in a position of operational independence, we need to be in a position of having officers who have the power, the responsibility and professional ethics to investigate any person or any group, without interference or being in any kind of direct employment position. Holding office under the Crown is to be much valued.
"Principle 5 - is the significance of multi-competence and flexibility of deployment in any one individual. One of the unique attributes of police officers is that they are deployable in a vast range of situations. From the Metropolitan Police point of view, I need to be able to put tens of thousands of officers, if necessary, on the street at the same time. I need them to be deployable in anyway that their commanders believe appropriate and, when, for instance, the President of the United States and the Countryside Alliance decide to appear in London on the same day, I do not need people to tell me that they cannot police the situation in a particular way because it is not in their job description. Some of the suggestions around workforce modernisation produce too layered a workforce, with many different types of employees, which decreases rather than increases the flexibility of deployment.
"Set against principles 1, 2 and 3, principles 4 and 5 therefore limit but do not overturn the concept of workforce modernisation. However, we need to go further.
"Principle 6 - is to recognise, however, that the way we pay police officers and staff is wrong because it does not take account of three things: the skills they need to deploy, the hours they work and where they live.
"Let me unpack that a bit. I think that a number of police officers and police staff are insufficiently rewarded for the extraordinary jobs that they do and the extraordinary skills that they possess. At the same time, I think that we require some police officers, probably more than police staff, to undertake tasks for which they are over-skilled. This is, of course, first, because police officers and most police staff can only be paid more or less on the basis of the time that they have served or the rank that they hold and, second, because of the concentration on officer numbers, we are unable to deploy enough people to do work - necessary work - which is below a police officer's skill set. We need to move away from these position and be able to reward people for skill rather than just for rank and we need to be able to employ more people in auxiliary positions.
"Secondly, the 1979 Edmund-Davies agreement made clear that all police officers, up to a certain rank, now constables and sergeants, were expected to undertake shift work and all these officers' pay should therefore reflect it. This is just absurd. This does not happen in any other institution.
"If officers wish to work term-time day-time only, then that is absolutely something the organisation should try to accommodate, in order that their skills do not leave the service. It does not mean that officers seeking such hours should be paid the same as officers who work earlies, lates and nights, seven days a week. The last set of pay reform around priority payments has not addressed this properly.
"Thirdly, I fail totally to understand why central pay and conditions machinery continues to exist and covers such a breadth of matters. Among the many idiocies of the Sheehy Report was the abolition of housing allowance, which was a blunt but effective method of making allowance for the variances in regional cost of living.
