TopOfTheCops.com

It was Douglas Adams who perhaps best captured the conflict between the jobsworth official and the British sense of fair play, when in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy he depicted the Vogon Constructor Fleet ready to demolish earth, and mentioning that any objections to the plan should have already been registered at the local planning office near Alpha Centauri.

As the Home Secretary has now announced the Reform Design Framework for police pensions, and as the staff associations limp away from the 'consultation' slightly battered, but with a 'we did our best' attitude, I have to say that I am reminded of the Vogons.

This is because police pensions may well be generous, expensive and in need of reform, but there is one aspect of the reform that is just plain wrong and I can illustrate this with a personal example, worked through with help from anonymous serving officers who I must thank.

I left the police some time ago, and have done most of my 'crimefighting' from the outside, but had I stayed I would just recently have completed 20 years service. I would have fallen in that band of officers who get tapered protection from the impact of the police pension changes. That is to say, with two-thirds of the anticipated length of my police career behind me, if I carried on for the remaining third I would not be able to retire on the deal I was promised at the start of my career.

There are other difficulties. I would not know how much of my pension I would be able to commute to create a lump sum, on which paying off my mortgage might depend, because normally I would need to complete 30 years in the scheme to commute 25%, but this tapering business would prevent me from doing that, and talking to serving officers reveals that tiny differences in length of service can lead to differences in commutation sums that approach 6 figures.

And if I'd had a period working part-time, as I have done in local government, it seems I would have pretty much no idea where I stood, and the effect on my 'protected' status.

For officers with less service than my hypothetical 20 years, the change in prospects is even more stark. Some may still have joined on the 30-year '1987' scheme and, I am told, may need to work up to 12 years longer to get a 'full' pension that still pays less than what they were promised when they joined.

Now I know we live in times when austerity is appropriate. For the record, I don't think we've even started on the road to austerity yet, but it is no solution to balance the books by doing things that are wrong. If someone did this with a private pension, even if the Vogons had hidden a clause somewhere that allowed the goalposts to move after the game had started, it would be mis-selling. It should be no different because the provider is some branch of the state.

So when police officers talk of stolen pensions I have sympathy with them and not just because a few years ago a certain Mr Prescott came up with something similar for local government workers like me. There are some things you just don't do, and wriggling out of the terms of a deal you struck once people have committed their lives, careers, mortgages and families to that deal is not made justifiable just because you can do it, or feel you have to, or just because times are hard and 'if these people don't suffer someone else will'. Morality is at its most useful when it is hard to do the right thing and easy to do the wrong. That's why we have rules. If you do this to the police, how can you ever again expect them to do the right thing when the going gets tough?

I suppose you may not need to. My personal decision to go and do something else instead looks a little better in the light of these developments, even though I have ended up with an even less generous pension. For how many of the best and brightest in our police force will the balance have changed such that they are tempted to put the unwelcome bits of policing behind them and give something else a go?

This election should be about policies, yes, but it should also be about character. None of the candidates will need to make the decision the Home Secretary has already made, but how many have the character to admit that moving the goalposts on pensions is wrong, whether it be this decision, or similar moves by the last government?

This article was first published in the Local Government Association First magazine – see here, where you can also find Dorset Labour’s PCC candidate Rachel Rogers giving her view that she doesn’t need a Deputy PCC, and Northamptonshire Conservative PCC candidate Adam Simmonds giving his view that having a Deputy PCC makes sense.

Even before a single vote has been cast, some candidates for the Police and Crime Commissioner role are already choosing their Deputies.

With the election in November and races in 41 different areas of the country it helps to give the election a little of the feel of that other election in the United States.

But a Deputy PCC is not a Vice-President. The winning candidate is not required to have a Deputy, though they are free to appoint one if they wish. Deputies do not hang around waiting for their boss to get shot, as any temporary vacancies for PCC will be filled by whoever the local police and crime panel picks.

While Vice-Presidents’ day-to-day jobs are pushed to extremes of being either very busy or completely ignored, Deputy PCCs are able to have well-defined chunks of the main role delegated to them, and have to suffer a confirmation interview with their local Police and Crime Panel, although technically they don’t need to pass it.

A Deputy will also not be elected, even though some candidates have been willing to reveal their nominees in advance of the election. Their name will not be on the ballot paper. Their contract may run out on the day of the next election but if things turn bad they may not last that long.

Candidates who have declared their chosen Deputy already have taken an important and risky decision. They have accepted the budgetary cost of the post, but also the political risk of ignoring any disagreement to the appointment from their local Panel and, while Deputies are not required to be appointed on merit, this does not mean that equalities and employment legislation have been thrown out of the window. Some PCCs may struggle to justify employment decisions that they have already predetermined for political reasons.

Yet these are political appointments in the sense that they will be the only senior members of a commissioner’s staff allowed to engage in politics. We are accustomed to Vice-Presidents being chosen because they represent a particular political, religious or geographic constituency. Will voters stand for that approach in a British election, or will they think it smacks of ‘jobs for the boys’?

Will appointing a Deputy to address a PCC’s personal skills gap be seen as a sensible approach or as an admission of weakness? Will appointments to pacify parties or to secure electoral advantage from this or that voting bloc be thought excessively political in an election where many voters do not welcome party involvement?

So far the most noticeable things about Deputies has been the general silence from candidates as to the role, and few commitments to do the job without one. Is it possible candidates do not know whether they will appoint a Deputy, or have some deals already been done that voters will only be told about once votes have been cast?

One reason why there may be so many questions and so few answers is that the Deputy PCC role was added to the legislation on its way through the House of Lords. While the PCC post has had a long gestation, the Deputy post has not benefited from a similar amount of debate – so we will all learn about their good and bad points on the job.

Earlier in this election I was advised by one candidate to take care about what questions you ask, as it can reveal more about your plans than your actual statements. It was a fair point, and one that police forces and police authorities may need to consider. Some have taken to publishing the questions they receive from candidates, or at least the answers to them.

Some thought this was a wonderful idea, but I have significant reservations. If a candidate is bright or well-informed enough to ask the right questions, why should less bright or less well-informed candidates benefit from their work, when they can then pass off the results as if they were their own.

And there also seems to be a bias in what answers are published. Is it just the answers to written questions, or just the answers that are most interesting? At a candidates briefing we were told that we could ask what questions we liked, and could report them, but could not attribute statements to those who were present, so I'll not name the source of my favourite questions by a candidate so far in this election. They were at the end of a detailed presentation from the police authority and partners and related entirely to some basic matters:- “First of all, what is 'Lancon' and secondly 'what is a B.C.U.?'

The Police Authority has never to my knowledge published the response, that Lancon is short for Lancashire Constabulary, and that B.C.U. is a Basic Command Unit – often thought of as a Division, yet for many officers and other professionals these questions reveal a stark lack of basic knowledge that tell them just what they want to know about a candidate.

One tale I have heard this week makes the wider point. One candidate asked his force how many police houses they had on their books, which revealed there were quite a few, worth quite a bit of money. The answer was published and a rival candidate has thanked the person who asked, as now it has allowed the rival candidate a bit more leeway in their budget plans.

Authorities and chief officers need to respect the candidates who are better prepared, who ask them such questions, or who take time to check out the operational impact of promises before making them. If they don't allow these candidates to benefit from their natural advantage then they are much more likely to end up working with candidates who know and understand very little of what they need to, and will find their time consumed by endless fights to implement promises that should never have been made.

Roma Hooper is Director And Founder of Make Justice Work. Here she gives a personal perspective on the effectiveness of community sentences and how this is relevant to the role of Police and Crime Commissioners.

Prison has a poor record for reducing reoffending – 47% of adults are reconvicted within one year of being released. For those serving sentences of less than 12 months this increases to 57%. For those who have served 11 or more previous custodial sentences the rate of reoffending rises to 67%.

Locking up prisoners does not come cheaply. The average annual overall cost of a prison place in England and Wales for the financial year 2010-11 was £39,573. But it is not only the cost of prisoners serving their sentences which is so expensive there is also a price to be paid by society for a penal system which fails to rehabilitate offenders.

Without effective rehabilitation the revolving door of crime, courts and prison will continue to be a regular routine for many offenders. This is not only bad economics, it is also has a devastating impact on those communities which continue to face the daily impact of such criminality.

It is also important to focus on other ways to divert offenders from custody, with specific drug, alcohol and mental health courts well placed to ensure community orders address some of the underlying triggers of criminal behaviour.

PCCs will not exist in a vacuum and will have an important voice in the wider criminal justice system. In particular they will have a responsibility to work with a range of different partners such as local government, health services and housing to help reduce crime and tackle problems of anti-social behaviour.

Consistent with the Government’s wider agenda of localism PCCs will have a vested interest in wanting to reduce crime and reduce levels of re-offending. To achieve this there will need to be a greater emphasis on improving work with local partners. There are many examples of Probation Trusts working effectively with other agencies, such as in the field of employment support, with a clear focus on rehabilitation and reform.

Effective community sentences have a key role to play in reducing levels of reoffending, which is why they need to be robust, demanding and punitive. Court ordered community sentences are more effective by 8% at reducing one-year proven reoffending rates than custodial sentences of less than 12 months for similar offenders.

Make Justice Work campaigns for the more effective and wider use of community sentences as an alternative to short term prison sentences. Effective community sentences focus on the triggers of criminal behaviour, such as drug and alcohol abuse and mental issues and make offenders face up to the impact of their behaviour on victims of crime and the wider community.

Where there are good community sentences, PCCs can be champions of best practice which successfully reduces reoffending and work closely with Probation Services and others to ensure they receive the resources and investment they need to deliver excellence on the ground. Where there are shortfalls in the effectiveness of a community sentence, similarly PCCs will be in a position to ask some probing and difficult questions and hold those responsible to account.

Website: http://www.makejusticework.org.uk