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While at worst any Home Office document like the Policing Productivity Review can be a dry blancmange of platitudes and whatever jargon is fashionable, any such publication is worth wading through for clues to official thinking; in this case how policing sees its business and might draw on private industry, writes Mark Rowe.

Consider alongside it, the speech by former Surrey Chief Constable Gavin Stephens, as chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council to the NPCC and Association of Police and Crime Commissioners’ summit in London earlier this month. A veritable blizzard of boxes were ticked: use of AI, facial recognition, automation and drones …. science and technology …. innovation. We’ve been here before; in the 1960s, faced by rising crime and a worrying sense that police could not keep up, police grabbed at the equivalent available tech, such as the first (not very effective) closed circuit television.

What’s changed since is the rise of private security, in terms of sheer numbers (far more are SIA-badged than are police officers and civilians) and responsibility and reach. In the late 20the century and into the 21st, some in private security had ambitions for more; to become a partner of police (and to get their hands on a fair chunk of police budgets. Despite the public sector austerity since 2010 and police shortcomings over prosecution of fraud – at last acknowledged statistically as the UK’s number one crime by volume – and a general failure to keep up with cyber, quite apart from one scandal after another that have led, as Alan Pughsley admits in a foreword to the Review, in the typical jargon of state bureaucracy, ‘significant challenges to trust and confidence in policing’: despite it all, at least arguably UK police have held the line against private security. As with any rearguard action, it has meant police not giving an inch when they have the choice. Hence in the Review you will have to search for any acknowledgment of the part that private security and stewarding plays in policing – in the title of the document, after all, significantly different from pure police: whether on big occasions such as coronations, Wembley football finals, or for evidence in the most basic case of shop theft or corporate fraud, or for the patrolling of any high street, by day or at throwing out time on a Friday night.

The talk is not only of productivity but of data, for ‘evidence-based policing’ (how else can you tell if an officer, a unit or a force is productive, compared with peers or the past?). The purpose; towards the freeing up of police, ‘police hours which could be used to attend more burglaries, more cases of domestic abuse, more incidents of antisocial behaviour’, Pughsley writes. It’s an agenda altogether more difficult (as the document acknowledges right away) than numbers of officers (the document is too polite to point out the Boris Johnson Conservative Government’s fixation with the quantitative ‘uplift’ in officers, regardless of the vetting, training, mentoring and indeed retention of those officers).

As for ‘barriers to productivity’, the document points outside the police service, to ‘unwarranted demand’: notably from mental healthcare. Police take an estimated 800,000 hours annually waiting with mental health patients: “This is time they could use more effectively attending 400,000 domestic abuse incidents, 1.3 million antisocial behaviour reports or 500,000 burglary reports,” the report states. Likewise, police are spending ‘unacceptable amounts of time safeguarding these [mental health crisis] patients, usually in hospital Emergency Departments’, or police are called unnecessarily about patients missing from mental health settings and hospitals. Perhaps other agencies have no equivalent gripes with police keeping them waiting; such as retailers who detain shop thieves and have to let the criminals go because police haven’t attended and might never. Hence, as the document has set out, in July (and as featured in the October print edition of Professional Security Magazine), ‘NHS England, the police and government signed up to the National Partnership Agreement: Right Care, Right Person. This sets the parameters for a police response to a mental health-related incident’.

The document does set out how crime types such as youth violence, cyber-fraud or neighbourhood safety ‘reach across sectors and partners’; quite how partners in the NHS are supposed to feel now that UK police are looking to set boundaries so as to accept fewer calls, doesn’t make it into the review. The document does mention what’s at the bottom of this drive for productivity:

‘Given the scarcity of resources (and difficult medium term financial outlook for many forces) and the complexity of demand, policing needs to develop a culture focused on approaches that have demonstrated their effectiveness, driven by delivering best outcomes to the public and value for money’ (page 56).

One way to save money would be to hire cheaper private security, where a uniformed security officer can do a job that doesn’t require a constable with powers of arrest, such as (to give a high-profile, recent example) when Met Police officers stood around the Cenotaph, to guard it from protesters before Remembrance Sunday. If those static police had needed to arrest someone, they could hardly have done it without leaving their place, making it most likely they would have called for other cops to do the arresting, which a security officer could have done as well.

Where the private sector overall, never mind just private security, gets a mention in the Review is in a proposed an endowment fund. That could (among other things) work with ‘businesses, local authorities and others to enable an effective policing of drugs, shoplifting, antisocial behaviour in communities’ – big volume crimes, note. It sounds as if, as with the recently announced Project Pegasus (featured in the December print edition of the magazine), businesses will have to pay twice, having already paid their taxes: such a fund might have charitable status, so it could ‘leverage funding from other partners (and private sector in particular)’, to tackle for example fraud. As for size of the fund, the Review proposes making a business case for the next Government Spending Review and suggests £40m-plus startup funding (with potential for scalability) that ‘would signal government’s longer-term approach to innovation and productivity’. That sum is dwarfed by the hundreds of millions a year of a metropolitan police force’s budget, but it may be something.

You can read the Review on the Home Office website.