Clause 1 - National Policing Improvement Agency
Police and Justice Bill
9:15 am
Hazel Blears (Minister of State (Policing, Security and Community Safety), Home Office; Salford, Labour)
The national policing improvement agency is to be a police-owned and led organisation that supports self-improvement in forces, particularly on front-line policing. As such, it will not take direct control of the mechanisms for monitoring police performance, nor will it be responsible for police performance management at national level. Those functions should remain firmly with the Police Standards Unit of the Home Office. Of course, the two bodies will need to establish a close working relationship. All of us, on our constituents’ behalf, have an interest in making sure that police performance continues to improve, as it has done over the past few years. The Police Standards Unit has a good record in that regard, and I should like to give the Committee a little evidence of that.
In any event, the Police Standards Unit is not a statutory body and could not be abolished by the amendment—I accept that it is a probing amendment. The Police Standards Unit has a key role to play in identifying for the Home Secretary performance variations across the service, and the capacity to reduce those variations. Hon. Members will know that one of our key targets is to reduce crime generally, and to reduce crime further in high-crime areas. It is important to us to have a body that can spot the variations between low-crime and high-crime areas.
Since the unit was created in 2002, it has demonstrated its value. It has led on the creation of the police performance assessment framework, with which, no doubt, the Committee will become increasingly familiar as we go through the Bill. It is unbelievable that, until a few years ago, we did not have a national police performance assessment framework. In the past few years, that has been incredibly useful in driving up police performance.
The Police Standards Unit’s work enables it to spot performance variations. It can respond in a targeted way where necessary. The eight forces with which the unit has worked have reduced crime by twice as much as the average of other forces—11.4 per cent., compared with 4.6 per cent more generally. That shows that, once the unit engages constructively with forces, it can come up with tactics, strategies and ways of working that they can use.