The Government has, so far, played it both ways on law and order. While Theresa May plays bad cop in the Home Office, Kenneth Clarke is playing good cop in the Ministry of Justice. This is an accident waiting to happen. If crime goes up as the cuts bite and the Government has a muddled response, it will be punished for the omission.
Yesterday, Tom Winsor published his review into police pay. He proposes annual pay cuts of up to £4,000 and the freezing of automatic progression. In an attempt to take £485 million out of the wage bill, two in five officers will lose out. Mr Winsor also recommends ending the payment of bonuses to chief officers and superintendents, along with payments for special priorities, competence (strange that should require special recognition) and overtime, which has spiralled even as there has been an increase in the number of officers.
The representatives of the police reacted with predictable fury. Although police officers do not have the right to strike, a protest march is still a potent weapon. In 1993, the last time a government confronted the police in any serious way, Mr Clarke backed away from his plan to change pay and conditions when 23,000 officers staged a rally in London.
The Government has no choice but to be resilient on the question of pay. But the changes required in policing go a lot wider. Though Mr Winsor acknowledges that policing is not the same as it was in the 1950s, the police force remains the least modernised of the principal public services. The performance of regional forces differs markedly. Pay scales do not. Pay reflects neither work done nor the success that is achieved. Meanwhile, criminals, the entrepreneurs on the wrong side of the law, have found devious ways to evade detection. Policing has not caught up.
That is why it is important that the Government uses the Winsor review as a departure point for more radical reform. At the moment ministers are making long-term noises on preventing crime, on reducing illiteracy and on stopping the revolving door that takes offenders back into prison soon after release. There is some good policy here, notably the payment-by-results scheme for getting ex-offenders into work, but these initiatives will be a long time in the fruition.
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The Government also needs more consolidation and more specialisation in policing. Contrary to the spirit of localism, there are too many regional police forces, each attempting to do jobs that need to be done by specialists. When policing was mainly about the detection of burglary, the local force was ideal. But regional police forces are left wanting, for example, when confronted with a murder, let alone with cross-border crime.
Structural change also takes time and it was therefore an error for the Government to have abolished crime reduction targets. Centrally set targets are a blunt instrument but that is better than no instrument at all. The Audit Commission used to improve performance by ranking forces according to how well they recorded crime. It has now been abolished. Until elected commissioners (opposed by the police) can be established, it is hard to see any effective accountability mechanism beyond the commitment of the police to the public service ethos. The danger is that without more radical reform of policing, officers will blame cuts when crime rises rather than see the failings in the forces themselves.