Police Leadership Commission Report

My Lords, I thank the Minister for bringing this Statement to the House today, and I am grateful for the opportunity to ask questions on it. Failures of police leadership are all too evident. Police leadership failed when forces overlooked, ignored and actively downplayed the scale of the grooming gangs. Police officers and police leaders were too afraid of being called out for being racist, and, as such, they left vulnerable young girls to suffer while the perpetrators got away scot free. Police leadership failed when officers manipulated evidence to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from the football match in Birmingham over fears of “inflaming community tensions”. Police leadership is failing when we have officers spending more time trawling through social media posts than investigating and stopping burglary and shoplifting. When the policing of tweets and so-called diversity, equality and inclusion take precedence over the prevention and investigation of crime, we know we have a serious problem. In 1829, Sir Richard Mayne, the first commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, wrote: “The primary object of an efficient police is the prevention of crime: the next that of detection and punishment of offenders if crime is committed. To these ends all the efforts by police must be directed. The protection of life and property, the preservation of public tranquillity, and the absence of crime will alone prove whether those efforts have been successful and whether the objects for which the police were appointed have been attained”. Like all officers who joined Hendon Police College, I had to learn those words by memory, and they are just as relevant today as they were in 1829, so I welcome the statement in the report that: “Police leaders should be resolute in refusing to take sides, or to be diverted from the course of focusing entirely on the prevention, detection and prosecution of crime”. I agree wholeheartedly. Unfortunately, that is not what is happening. We might ask how we got here. Noble Lords might have different answers, but, for me, it is in large part because we took our eye off the ball. We allowed policing to focus, particularly after 2020, more on representation and identity politics than on promoting the best and most qualified people for the job. The report also acknowledges that nepotism has impacted progression at senior ranks, again challenging the notion that promotion should be based on merit alone. I must press the Minister to think seriously about these points. If the Government want to improve public trust in the police and restore robust but fair policing, we cannot have reforms that place greater emphasis on the identity of senior officers than on their experience and leadership qualities. Fundamentally, good police leadership is not hard. It is about cutting crime and having your officers’ backs. Those on the ground need to know that they can take action they deem necessary and will not be hung out to dry by senior leadership when they do so. Officers need to be able to exercise their professional judgment and common sense, and not be second-guessed by endless policies and guidance. Police leaders must stop prioritising public perceptions over robust policing. This all requires a significant cultural shift within police leadership. But to engineer that, we need to improve not just the quality but the amount of leadership training. The report highlights the striking disparity between military leadership training and the police equivalent. It points out that: “15 years after leaving Sandhurst, a colonel in charge of 1,500 people will have undertaken 72 weeks of leadership development. By comparison, chief superintendents in the MPS”— the Metropolitan Police Service— “who have had comparable progression are likely to have had two or three weeks”. The comparison with the military is particularly apt here, because British military leadership training is widely regarded as some of the best in the world—there is a reason why military officers from around the world flock to Sandhurst. I urge the Minister, when considering the work of this commission, to feed in best practice from our military academies into future police leadership training. I also ask the Minister to think carefully about introducing new direct entry schemes. I can say from my own experience that I do not think they had a positive effect on senior leadership. The report acknowledges that the total cost of the previous direct entry superintendent programme, which ran from 2015 to 2021, was almost £10 million. Only 33 people graduated from that scheme, putting the cost per graduate at around £342,000. I do not think that can quite be considered a success. Bizarrely, though, after pointing out the cost and low numbers passing through the previous direct entry route, the report goes on to recommend the creation of new direct entry routes. This is a somewhat bizarre situation. I wish to end with some simple questions to the Minister. The Government have this report, it is obvious to us all what is going wrong with police leadership, and it is not too difficult to figure out what needs to change, so how are the Government going to take forward these recommendations? What work is going on within the Home Office, right now, to implement leadership reforms, and when will be able to see the outcomes of the Government’s work? If the Government are serious about restoring trust in policing and fulfilling the aims of the commission, they must take swift action to overhaul police leadership training. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

My Lords, I welcome the report from the noble Lords, Lord Blunkett and Lord Herbert, which rightly starts with an uncomfortable truth: leadership across policing is too inconsistent and, for decades, we have failed to invest in developing leaders for the world they now face. We support clearer standards, stronger developments of all ranks, and more transparent senior appointments, but consistency must not become Whitehall control. Before creating a national police service and a national academy, the Government must explain how police chiefs will be protected from politicisation. A central appointments panel may help, but only if it insulates chief constables’ appointments from political influence and ensures a diverse candidate pool, including those with neighbourhood and safeguarding experience. We urgently need clarity about what we expect policing to deliver in the 2030s. Too often the police are left to pick up responsibilities that properly belong to other agencies, because those agencies are underfunded and lack the capacity to respond. But the police cannot walk away; they have a duty to the public, even when the work falls outside their remit. This results in police being increasingly drawn into non-crime work, spending hours in hospitals awaiting mental health assessments or caring for vulnerable children, leaving forces overstretched and officers shuttled from one crisis to another. Ethical leadership cannot be a values programme instead of the hard work that inquiries have already recommended. Delivering ethics requires legally enforceable vetting and misconduct standards across forces, a complete overhaul of the complaints investigations so that they do not drift for years, and transparent monitoring of disproportionality in discipline, including for BAME officers. The public will not judge us by how many workshops we run but by whether the Angiolini, Jay and inspectorate recommendations are finally implemented in full. Around 80% of crime now has a digital element, yet policing is still largely analogue, with 43 forces running separate IT systems and an obsolete police national computer. Outdated, poorly connected systems with multiple entry points heighten cyber security risks, given the high value of police data on the dark web. A lack of national co-ordination and the scrapping of ring-fenced capital funding means that most technology spending is now used just to maintain existing outdated systems. What is needed is a unified cloud-based technology platform and common procurement to enable seamless information sharing and good practice across forces. This will require very significant investments in IT and AI but offers the prospect of rapid returns in improved outcomes and would finally allow policing to exploit the wealth of operational data already at its fingertips. We need national training frameworks that prioritise digital investigation skills for every officer and proper professional pathways for cyber, data, digital and forensic specialists. But highly trained specialists are locked into the same nationally set pay scales as everyone else, and chiefs have virtually no flexibility to pay them more than an entry-level constable. That is almost unbelievable. Is it therefore surprising that these specialists are routinely poached by the private sector, after they have been trained by the police for many years, on salaries that are several multiples of their police pay? If we are serious about tackling AI-enabled fraud, deepfake child abuse imagery and complex online exploitation, we must introduce genuine pay flexibilities for shortage specialties and parity of esteem for police staff. I am deeply concerned that we are proposing a national academy and a licence to practise when there has been no independent national audit of police training since 2012. Officers need high-quality, regular, properly accredited refresher training to keep themselves and the public safe. If the College of Policing is absorbed into a new police service, we must avoid the police marking their own homework by ensuring that appropriate standards are set and independently audited. This report gives us an opportunity to transform how we choose and develop leaders. But those leaders will succeed only if we define the mission clearly, fix the broken funding and training systems, and give policing the technological tools and special staff it needs. I very much hope the Government are prepared to meet those challenges.

I place on record my thanks to my noble friend Lord Blunkett and the noble Lord, Lord Herbert of South Downs, for their work on this important report commissioned by the Home Office to look at the important issues of policing. My noble friend Lord Blunkett is a former Home Secretary and the noble Lord, Lord Herbert, is a former Policing Minister; indeed, I shadowed him for a while in a previous life. They both bring extremely important experience to bear and on a cross-party basis they have examined the future training needs of the police service. My noble friend and the noble Lord have made 27 recommendations and, in answer to the points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, we are going to consider those recommendations. We are going to examine them in detail. We want to give them a fair wind. We will report back in the autumn with our response to those recommendations. I will be able to provide further clarity and discussion at that time on the Government’s approach to the points that have been made. I begin in, I hope, a constructive way but also in a way of challenge to say that I do not accept the characterisation of the police to date by the noble Lord, Lord Davies. The police are doing a very good job in dangerous circumstances. Police officers at every level, from chief constables to ordinary police officers on the beat to police community support officers, do a very strong job. Our duty is to ensure that the recommendations that have been made by my noble friend Lord Blunkett and the noble Lord, Lord Herbert, help support those police officers to do a better job in the future. Crime is down: theft offences by 11%; vehicle-related crime by 14%; domestic burglary by 22%; shoplifting by 1%; personal robbery by 12%; knife-enabled offences by 10%; knife-enabled homicides by 21%; and knife-enabled robberies by 15%. Those are just some examples from the past 18 months of statistics of how the police are helping to tackle those issues. But that does not mean that there is not room for improvement. The noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, has pressed me many times to examine the issue of training; she is absolutely right to do so, and these recommendations form the basis of us examining how we can take those issues forward. I do not accept that we should not put diversity at the heart of our police service. I want to see diverse police officers representing their communities and representing the communities they police. But it is important that we secure training and support for all those officers, whatever their ethnic background. There is a need for reform. The noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, is absolutely right that we need to examine what policing is for and how to ensure that we have the back-room support for front-line police officers. She and the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, will know that we are in the middle of a radical programme of police reform. We are abolishing police and crime commissioners. We are waiting for a report from the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, on police force areas. We are establishing a national police service, which will encompass the very issues currently considered by the noble Lord, Lord Herbert of South Downs, as chair of the College of Policing, with national procurement and a focus on what national policing should do, which is, from the National Crime Agency’s perspective, serious organised crime, counterterrorism policing and other important issues such as economic crime. This reform programme is ongoing, but self-evidently—and this is where I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Davies, and the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey—we need to put in place support and training to ensure that police officers both meet the needs of the 21st century and have the support to do their job in an effective way. In their report, my noble friend Lord Blunkett and the noble Lord, Lord Herbert, have put great care and skill into the recommendations. I also thank the other members of the commission who took part. There is a particular emphasis on giving voice to those on the front line. It is right to say, as the report itself says, that “the policing profession has not consistently had the excellent leadership it needs”. The commission has highlighted the critical importance of leadership and we all know that. It will also ensure, I hope, that we maintain that principle of policing by consent. It is right that we take time to consider the recommendations in full. We welcome the commission’s proposals and the intent behind them. We are actively looking at the recommendation to create a formal senior constable rank and how that can be done. The commission also recommends a new professional digital passport for policing, along with other measures to put in place stronger supporting structures around professional development. The review’s recommendations on a fast stream for policing, on a targeted direct entry scheme and on the role of the forthcoming national police service in promoting ethical policing are all issues that we want to look at and respond to. We will do so in due course. The points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, about police conduct and ethical standards of policing are extremely important. She will know from when we passed the Crime and Policing Act recently, because we spent a gazillion hours dealing with it in this House of Parliament, that there is a strong emphasis in it on improving the performance of the ethical standards and on the ability to remove police officers who are not performing well. Again, that goes to the heart of the recommendations before us. In summary, the noble Lords, Lord Blunkett and Lord Herbert, will both know that I cannot respond today to the 27 recommendations, but I welcome them. They give us a strong foundation to examine how we can improve police leadership, police performance and skill levels to face the 21st century. It is a valuable piece of work. I commit to the House, on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, that we will report back in the autumn on the recommendations and what we intend to do about delivering them. In the meantime, there are police officers and leaders out on the streets now, and they are doing a dangerous job on behalf of us all. They should have our admiration but they should also have our support in improving their performance, and that is what the recommendations are aimed at doing.

My Lords, I declare my interest as a former president of the Police Superintendents’ Association of England and Wales and as someone who submitted evidence to the police leadership commission chaired by the noble Lords, Lord Blunkett and Lord Herbert, who I see are in their places. Having served for 35 years in both uniform and the CID, I want to say that the report is a major piece of work on the leadership of the police in England and Wales, and I congratulate both noble Lords on its content and its clarity. It recommends major changes throughout the service and builds on the proposed creation of a national police service, the NPS, which should take a lead role in promoting ethical and inclusive policing and be responsible for building a community of good practice across the country. I have served under both excellent leadership and bad. The report tackles the problems, which are identified as poor training and supervision, a lack of resources and the culture of leadership across the service. The surprise is that the police service continues to deliver—remarkably, every day—to protect the public 24/7. You have only to witness the annual police bravery awards to witness this all the time. Like the armed services, the police are legally prevented from taking strike action, which was last witnessed in England in 1919. We have witnessed major problems in recruitment and vetting following the slashing of 3,000 officers a few years ago. That was followed by the murder of Sarah Everard by PC Wayne Couzens and the conviction of serial rapist David Carrick, both in the Metropolitan Police. As a result, the commission’s report recommends a root and branch modernisation of police recruitment and training, development, promotion, monitoring and appraisal. Scotland Yard is known throughout the world—

My Lords, I ask my noble friend if he could bring his comments, interesting though they are, to a conclusion with a question.

I support the provision dealing with senior constables, and I wish the implementation of the commission’s report every success.

I am grateful to my noble friend for bringing his experience of policing at a leadership level to the debate and this discussion. He will know that leadership is critical in delivering high performance and for the public. The recommendations intend to help generate that discussion and to focus on how we improve leadership. Last year, for example, we had significant levels of vacancy for chief constable positions and a relatively small pool, sometimes internal, of people applying for them. We need to encourage better use of senior leadership. I was a Member of Parliament for 28 years and my local police force probably had around 30 police superintendents during that time. That is not sustainable for continuity and performance. We have very strong leadership at the top of the triangle but a large pool of officers at the bottom end who need to be recognised for the work they do, and encouraged to have training and to have ambition to go through the system in a positive way. We will look at the recommendations and I give my noble friend the assurance that we will report back when we have had a chance to consider them in detail.

My Lords, I am grateful for the report and I see that the recommendations include the creation of a national academy of police leadership. I declare my interest, as the First Civil Service Commissioner, as a regulator for entry into the senior Civil Service. I argue that, at that level of leadership, the different professions—whether it be the Armed Forces, the police or the most senior civil servants—have a lot to learn from each other and would benefit from each other’s experiences. As the Government respond to that, I urge the Minister to look at other professions and top-level leadership so that they can learn from each other and exchange their experiences.

My noble friend brings great experience from her role in the Civil Service Commission to the matter of recruiting individuals at a senior level. It is quite clear—the report makes this point very strongly—that police officers at all levels must be able to develop skills earlier in their career to enable them to develop and progress. The commission’s report highlights the fact that policing needs a clearer and more coherent system that supports professional development at all ranks. As the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, mentioned, there are undoubtedly lessons and models that can be looked at in other aspects of society that will help support the development process.

My Lords, I declare my interest as the director of the Free Speech Union. I welcome this report, which contains many sensible suggestions. Gavin Stephens, the chairman of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, announced a review last month of guidance contained in the NPCC and College of Policing’s race action plan and its anti-racism commitment. That guidance suggested that officers should treat ethnic minorities differently in order to ensure what it described as equality of outcomes, defined as equalising arrest and charging rates between different groups. Given that some ethnic groups are more likely to commit crimes than others, that inevitably means treating some groups more leniently than others—aka, two-tier policing. Will the Minister give the House a progress report on Gavin Stephens’s review of this guidance? Can he also tell us when the independent review into hate crime and public order legislation by the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald of River Glaven, will be published? A couple of weeks ago the Minister said that it would be published before the Summer Recess.

On the latter point, we are hoping to publish the review as soon as possible. As the noble Lord will recognise, there are some things that the Government wish to announce but which they are not able to due to the upcoming change of Prime Minister. However, I intend to publish the document as soon as is practicable and will ensure that a report is made to the House in due course. With due respect, I do not accept the noble Lord’s contention that there is two-tier policing. The document to which he refers is designed to give guidance to officers to understand the various pressures and some of the diversity issues that exist. Ultimately, officers deal with crime, no matter who commits it or where it is committed. They need to bring people to justice and make arrests accordingly. I will reflect on what he said and will discuss the matter, via our offices in the Home Office, with Gavin Stephens of the National Police Chiefs’ Council but, from my perspective, the general contention is that crime is crime, the police are there to deal with it, and we must have an understanding of the diversity issues in order to have the confidence of the whole community when dealing with those issues.

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for making this Statement. As he is in his place, I must also mention my noble friend Lord Blunkett, who brings experience and common sense to pretty much everything he does. There is a “but” coming, and it is this: I get slightly worried when I see phrases in a Statement such as “a new police leadership fast stream”, and “a focus on leaders from professions with transferable skills”. The first thing leaders need for leadership is respect from the people they are trying to lead. They will not get the same proportion of respect unless the police constables, in whatever force in the country, know that the leaders have been through the same traumas, challenges and anxieties that a normal policeman finds in his normal work, such as when he has to break up a fight in a city centre. I am not sure a degree helps a great deal with dealing with issues like that. I would therefore like my noble friend to assure me that police recruitment does not just need to be diverse, although it is important to represent the community; it also needs to be diverse in people’s professional and other backgrounds, just as much as it does in academic qualification.

I am grateful to my noble friend; it is good to see him in his place. The recommendations are looking at how we can significantly improve senior leadership. Some of the recommendations may mean that we need to look at how we fast-track individuals to leadership and, in doing so, how we give them effective training and support to understand the issues that they face. Ultimately, the core element of policing is the officer on the beat, male or female, who deals with the fight on a Saturday night, who deals with the shoplifter, who deals with anti-social behaviour, and who deals with all the issues that police officers deal with on a regular basis—including, as the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, said, issues that are not directly their responsibility but which they have to deal with, because they are the last, and first, port of call in many cases. With this whole package, we are trying to look at how we improve skill levels across the board, and that might well include looking at how we give greater skills, support and training to the front-line police officer. However, a clear issue has been identified: the failure of effective management at a senior level in some areas. It is equally important that that is addressed, and that is what we intend to do when we have a chance to reflect on the recommendations.

My Lords, I welcome the report and the sensible recommendations in it. It highlights the current importance of cliques and networks in promotions in the police. There are comments such as: “If you don’t have a network, you’re not going to get a promotion.” The Met has decided that membership of organisations such as the Freemasons has to be declared, and many hundreds have declared their membership, but has that made any difference, and do other forces go far enough? Does the Minister think that more needs to be done to rule out the sort of nepotism and networks that have meant that, in the end, the pool of talent is much reduced?

The noble Baroness makes a very interesting point on the discussions. I believe that promotions should be made on merit. They should be made on the skills and adaptations of individual officers to do the next job that they face—or, for an ordinary police constable, on the different types of skills that might be required, such as those that do not necessarily involve being on the beat. That should be done on merit. Going back to the recommendations that have been made, the commission’s report highlights that policing needs a clearer and more coherent system that supports professional development and, by that very mechanism, supports people being promoted on merit. When we have a chance to reflect on those recommendations, I hope that will be at the heart of what we do.

My Lords, I declare my interest as a non-executive director of the Metropolitan Police. I welcome this report, but a lot of it appears to be reinventing wheels that came off policing many years ago. For example, we had a physical, centrally located police staff college—a centre of excellence—as this report recommends, and by the time I reached chief superintendent I had had 18 months of full-time police leadership training, the same as an equivalent Army officer, on an accelerated promotion scheme as a non-graduate. Most of this was lost because of cuts to national police training budgets. Because of my declared interests, I am not allowed to ask for more money for policing, so I will put it like this: what will the Government do to make these recommendations a reality?

Maybe I should also have declared an interest, because I have a very close relative—a daughter—who works as a serving police officer. The key thing is that, while 27 recommendations have been given to the Government and we have to look at and assess them, we accept the general tenor of what the noble Lords, Lord Blunkett and Lord Herbert, have said. We need to improve the basic level of training, look at the skills needed for the 21st century, improve senior leadership and the training for it, and make sure that we have a wider pool for people to reach the senior chief constable positions. There is a very limited pool for chief constables at the moment and, very often, internal candidates have been inoculated through the police forces they have worked in, generally without any examination. As part of wider reforms, as the noble Lord will know, we are looking at improving the College of Policing’s work by merging with it a senior level of activity. We are looking to shrink the number of police forces to give more effective local control and change the management structures from police and crime commissioners to mayors and other authorities, as part of a wider programme that the recommendations from the noble Lords, Lord Blunkett and Lord Herbert, fit into. I cannot give definitive answers now but, as I have said, we will report back on the recommendations and our responses as soon as practicable.

My Lords, I read this report from cover to cover. It acknowledges that ethnic-minority officers have a poorer retention rate and slower progression because they continue to face discrimination within their organisation. Some 20 years ago, when I was on the West Mercia Police Authority as a councillor, I raised this issue constantly, yet here we are and ethnic-minority officers are still leaving at a far higher rate than white officers. This report acknowledges this issue, yet it offers no tangible or practical solution to this problem. Does my noble friend agree?

I am grateful to my noble friend. It is important that the police reflect the communities they serve. Many parts of this United Kingdom have populations with a level of ethnic-minority British citizens who will want to see people who look like them in the police service. The point he makes is extremely important. Once we have recruited individuals, we need to value them, retain them and train them for the future, not lose that skill to outside businesses or because they are facing discrimination inside the force. The recommendations highlight the problem; we need to examine how we improve that. I want the police service to reflect the community it serves.

My Lords, the Minister has explained over and over again the number of changes that are occurring. I welcome them all, just as I welcome the noble Lords’ report. However, there are various ways in which these changes can be implemented. Can we have in the autumn a broad strategic overview, pulling together leadership, governance and the changing of the police forces? All of these interlock, so it would be of immense assistance to this House if someone could be asked to produce an overall strategic document, dealing also with the very real issues of technology.

I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord. I will take that suggestion away and discuss with my right honourable friend the Home Secretary how and whether we can do that. We had a police White Paper which has led to the changes that will see legislative approval, as announced in the King’s Speech this May. He makes a valid point. At some point we will have to pull these strands together. I can commit only that changes to senior levels of activity at a national level and to local policing will be put into the potential police Bill announced in the King’s Speech. I will respond to these suggestions in due course. There are a range of issues that we are continually dealing with, so I will take his suggestion away.

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for his generous response. With the House’s indulgence, I want to say what a great pleasure it has been, and how much I appreciate the tremendous collaboration with the noble Lord, Lord Herbert of South Downs, the 10 other commissioners who generously gave their time, the secretariat from the college and my own employee, Joanna Firth. On the response in the autumn, if anything is going to happen quickly, it will be fundamental that recommendation 27 to set up an implementation group be put front and centre, because without immediate steps to bring these recommendations to fruition, they will languish on a shelf until another report some years hence will come back with the same recommendations we are making today.

I assure my noble friend that when we have agreed the recommendations, we will make sure that we include the very point he mentioned. If I sit down now, it gives one other Member a chance to ask a question.

My Lords, it is an honour to follow my noble friend Lord Blunkett. I congratulate the noble Lords, Lord Blunkett and Lord Herbert, on an outstanding report. Does the Minister agree that police leadership is at its best when police leaders feel they can confidently take on crime, and have the skills they need, the backing they deserve from Government and the active support of the other public services involved in tackling crime in our country?

Absolutely—that is central to what the Government seek to achieve. I again pay tribute to both noble Lords, their staff, the commission members and the voluntary staff who supported them. They have tried to identify the challenges in leadership, and that the policing landscape and crime are changing—some 45% of crime is online fraud. The police will face a range of new challenges, and we need effective, strong leaders who reflect their communities, understand the levels of crime and have the strategic skills to tackle them. At the same time, we are still going to rely on the support of the everyday police officer working on the street. We need to recognise those who have given long service and the skills they need. In closing, the noble Lords’ recommendations are valuable and welcome, and I thank them for their assistance. I assure the House that we will reflect on the recommendations and bring back a coherent plan of action.