Home Secretary criticises chiefs over red tape failings

The Home Secretary has accused some forces of not doing enough to follow the Home Office’s lead on fighting red tape in the service by reintroducing local targets and bureaucracy scrapped at a national level.

Theresa May said that while the Home Office was showing it meant business in “busting bureaucracy”, some chief officers continue to set local targets that have been scrapped by the Government.

Speaking at the Association of Chief Police Officers’ (ACPO) Leading Change in Policing Conference in Harrogate on Monday (July 4), she said it was a problem “up and down the country” which is wasting time and impeding on discretion and common sense.

And while she sympathised with the fact that many officers find the long-standing processes reassuring, she added they are not good for the service.

While Mrs May refused to give an exact figure of the number of guilty forces, she did say it was a significant number.

The Home Secretary announced a range of measures aimed at fighting bureaucracy across the service in May which it is hoped will save more than 2.5 million hours of police time a year. These included streamlining PDR and crime recording processes, improved handling of domestic violence cases and reductions in the amount of national guidance, in addition to numerous other pilot schemes.

“You can see we really mean business in busting bureaucracy,” said Mrs May. “I’m sending this message out loud and clear to Home Office officials and to every organisation across the criminal justice system – stop wasting police time.”

She added that all this work is aimed at freeing-up officers to fight crime. “But here’s the problem – not all of you are following my lead,” said Mrs May.

The Home Secretary told delegates that officers are continuing to record information at a local level that is no longer needed nationally, with local replacements brought in for defunct national regulations.

“That’s not right,” she said. “I know that change like this can be difficult. When something goes wrong – and in the real world things do go wrong – then showing you’ve complied with a process can be reassuring.

“But if those processes waste time, then they’re not improving public protection. If they’re impeding your discretion and common sense, then they’re not serving the public. So we need police chiefs to rise to the challenge. Your officers need to rise to the challenge.”

Mrs May said she has made this message clear to chief officers in the past and some have delivered the sort of change she is looking for.

The Home Secretary highlighted the work of Chief Constable Peter Fahy in Greater Manchester, who she said has “sent a clear message to his officers to use their professional judgement, to challenge accepted ways of doing things, and to focus on the genuine needs of victims and the wider community.”

West Midlands’ chief constable said it was unfair for the Home Secretary to accuse chief constables of blocking the reduction of bureaucracy and said there was more that everyone can do to assist.

Chris Sims said: “My argument is that it is a very complicated piece. It requires the alignment of government policy, force procedure, the governance of the service, the culture and style of working practice, and public opinion. Simply to point at one piece of that chain and say that is the area that is blocking I think underestimates the complexity of the changing process requirement.

“This is not one where you flick a switch and bureaucracy retreats.”

He added that Mrs May is being properly provocative to the service to make sure it pushes on and does everything it can to move forward.

“As ever with ACPO our job is to give a professional view of those issues and to properly mirror back to government the complexity of what we’re doing and to show that we are pursuing this.

“I think it is unfair that the Home Secretary has focused on police chiefs. This is a joined-up piece with shared res