SCOTLAND YARD’S new boss wants his commanders to leave the police and work as senior managers in industry and commerce to improve their skills.

Officers would surrender their warrant cards and could find themselves in charge of a hospital or a key arm of a big corporation working for up to five years in outside life.

Then they would be able to return to the force without any loss of rank or pension rights and continue their careers boosted by their experience.

Sir Ian Blair, the new Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, told The Times yesterday that he is already in talks with the Home Office to find a way of changing police rules.

Sir Ian, speaking at the end of his first week in office, said that the police had spent five years recruiting thousands of extra officers. It was now time to “invest” in the officers the force already has.

The new commissioner, who has a reputation for lateral thinking and reform, said that superintendents or chief superintendents in their late 30s or early 40s would be ideal targets. “They would leave and go and do five years in the private or public sector and come back without the loss of pensions rights,” he said.

“I am not talking ‘secondment’. They would work somewhere else and get completely differrent experience and come back.

“Surely the gain of coming back if you have run a major hospital or you have been the operational manager in some major factory would be interesting. That would mean us getting another set of skills.”

Sir Ian said that the idea would be a “major innovation”, because now, when an officer reaches middle rank, his pension, which cannot be moved, had become a “golden handcuff”.

“I want people to move in and move out and gain experience, but I can’t do that because no one in their right financial mind will do that,” Sir Ian said.

Asked whether the public would be concerned that the fight against crime might be affected by the loss of high- flyers, Sir Ian said that highly specialised senior CID officers would have to remain with the police. Their skills would not be transferable to the civilian world.

He said that potential candidates could come from the several hundred middle-ranking commanders in charge of policing in boroughs with 1,200 to 1,500 staff.

Chief superintendents earn up to £66,000 a year, but the commissioner said he believed that many would return to the police, despite the sort of rewards that are available in the commercial world. “Most people I know are hypnotised by it, love it and would probably come back,” he said.

Sir Ian sees the changes as reform that will also encourage more support workers to be recruited, to allow officers to get on with essential police work.

He has announced a six-month review led by an assistant commissioner, but Sir Ian is committed to having 35,000 police officers — the present figure is just over 30,000 — plus another 5,000 operational staff, mainly the community support officers whose creation he championed. He believes that the vast majority of police will have to be fully trained, flexible officers but there are jobs “at the margins” that could be done by people who are specially trained for them.

Last year the Home Office suggested the use of outside staff such as former soldiers as armed guards to replace hundreds of police marksmen outside sensitive buildings, such as embassies. Sir Ian said that the idea had some logic to it.

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