UK: New Labour and the enemy within (feature)
01 January 1998
[FIGURES ONLY AVAILABLE IN PRINTED FORMAT]
Public Expenditure
At the beginning of December the Home Secretary announced that police forces in England and Wales were to get a extra £258 million - an increase of 3.7% in 1998/99. Once again the police continue to be more favourably treated than most other areas of public expenditure. He explained his generosity in an "extremely tight public spending round" in the following words: "We are determined that the police should have the resources they need to fight crime and disorder across England and Wales." At the end of January the Home Office announced that an extra 20 prisons will have to be built at the cost of £2 billion over the next seven years to meet the expected 50% increase in jail numbers. The figures suggest the jail population will be 92,000 by 2005, outstripping the rest of Europe.
Figure 1
New Labour thus appears determined to follow previous Tory governments and give top priority to the expansion of the Law, Order and Protective Services budget, which includes the police, administration of justice and prisons. Figure 1 shows public expenditure in real terms by selected area for the last fourteen years and it can be seen that expenditure in law and order area has risen more sharply than education, health, and social security. In the same period the amount spent on housing and defence has been drastically reduced. If the Labour government allows these trends to continue by 2005 more money in real terms will be spent on policing internal crime and disorder than on defence - an extraordinary dividend for the ending of the Cold War.
Police Performance Indicators
The Home Secretary in announcing the settlement for the police pointed out that it was only part of the story and as he graphically put it: "The process is a two way street. The public want to be sure that their money is being used in the most efficient way possible." To this end, the police, like so many other areas of public life, are now required to produce numerous performance indicators. Some of these are required by the Audit Commission (AC) under the Local Government Act 1992 and others by Her Majesty's Inspector of Constabulary (HMIC). They cover a range of police activities including number of calls and response times, the number of stop/searches and arrests broken down by ethnic group and outcome, the number of selected crimes recorded and detected and public satisfaction with, and involvement in, a range of police matters.
A selection of the performance indicators are now regularly published both by the HMIC and the Audit Commission. A significant proportion of the HMIC's annual report analyses these indicators for different police forces and the amount of information on other important aspects of policing has been considerably reduced. It appears that like so many current publications the image is more important than content. Dense pages of informative text on all aspects of policing printed on ordinary paper have been replaced by numerous graphs, figures diagrams printed on coloured paper with massive margins of space. Nearly one tenth of this annual report is taken up with the presentation of coloured photographs of each of the members of the Inspectorate together with a biography.
The Audit Commission's 58 page report published in January is similar. It is printed on high quality glossy paper with numerous tables and graphs. It was designed and typeset by "Ministry of Design" and published at the cost of £20. Few people, however, are likely to buy it at this price defeating one of the principal aims of performance indicators of enabling members of the public to make some judgment about the relative efficiency and effectiveness of their local service.
The Press Release announcing the HMIC's 1996/97 annual report focused on those indicators which place the police in the best possible light. It noted that the police responded to just under 19 million<