PSA President Nick Smart has responded to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper's address at the NPCC / APCC Summit held this week:

I attended the APCC / NPCC Summit this week and listened with interest to Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper’s address.

It was positive to hear the home secretary speak with such admiration about the work and sacrifices of police officers, not least with reference to their actions during the riots and unrest that unfolded over the summer. Police officers do incredible things every day, and it is right that we recognise and celebrate this.
 
She also referenced the first awarding of the Elizabeth Emblem – honours given to the families of police officers who are lost in the line of duty. We have campaigned for this for years, alongside Bryn Hughes, the Police Federation and others, and are so pleased to see this finally being presented to the families who deserve our recognition for their loved ones’ ultimate sacrifice.
 
The matters impacting on policing are significant, and the time for government action is now. It is right that government has recognised this need for reform, to address the myriad of issues facing policing today.
 
Funding is critical here, and we’re pleased to hear that half a billion pounds will soon be invested into policing. This is a long way from the £3.2bn deficit we face however. Good policing costs money and we need to be clear and transparent about the fact that we do not have the money invested in us to deliver everything that is expected. 
 
Going forward, we must begin to look at funding from a long-term perspective so that chief officers can make strategic funding decisions, based on the reality of demand both today and in the future.
 
We fully support the government’s intentions to bolster neighbourhood policing. It is at the heart of our Service and we hope it always will be. We will need boots on the ground to achieve this however, so we await the detail around the extra 13,000 officers, staff and PCSOs that have been promised. It is key that these are additional resources, or we risk moving police officers out of other service-critical roles. 
 
Moving officers to plug a gap has become the norm, continually taking from one area to backfill another. This has to stop. We need more people. Demand will not decrease, so we look forward to hearing more on the government’s plans to bolster neighbourhood policing numbers whilst continuing to service increasing calls for demand, including that from other public sector agencies.  

We must also stop avoiding the difficult challenge of defining the police mission, which has not been touched on today. The home secretary quite rightly said “when  everything else is broken, it’s the police we turn to, to pick up the pieces and keep people safe.” I couldn’t agree more – but often it is others who should be stepping in to deal with their own demand.  

Until our mission is clear and responsibilities are mandated through effective community partnerships, we will continue to pick up the demand from others, diverting us from our core services.   If we are not the right agency to deal with an incident, but must because there is no-one else, we run the risk of damaging trust and confidence in policing if things go wrong.  This must change.
 
We welcome the spotlight on the problems we face with data and the clear need for access to accurate reporting on the performance of policing, however we would caution against a return to league tables as a measure of performance. The postcode lottery on standards must indeed end, but we must not return to ineffective performance measures that have been seen to drive perverse behaviours and that do not serve communities.
 
It is encouraging to hear of the government’s promise to work with policing to drive through these essential reforms, but I remain concerned over the lack of reference to staff associations – the workforce representatives - and the complete absence of any comment on the wellbeing crisis that staff associations have evidenced for years. 
 
Standards of performance are of course critical, but so are the standards of occupational health and wellbeing support our people should expect whilst carrying out challenging and demanding roles. Our people are tired, over worked, and many are very unwell. Surveys covering every rank show this without doubt. A thematic inspection is needed to understand where the gaps in welfare support exist and how these must be filled. We also need funding and commitment to act on the Police Covenant, so that we can bring to life the promises this important piece of legislation made.
 
Going forward, the white paper described will be key, and we ask that this is not developed by the government, NPCC, APCC and the College alone, but also through consultation with the public to find out what they want from their police service, and with staff associations, who are the voices of the thousands of officers and staff out there every day, trying to get things done.
 
We sense a real desire on the part of government for things to be different – something everyone in policing will welcome and support. I hope that these plans will move forward with pace, that the workforce will be a central stakeholder in developing them, and that real change will be felt by police officers and communities.

The Home Secretary's full speech can be accessed here.