Katie Lam: If the Metropolitan Police teaches us anything, it’s that bigger forces are not always better

Katie Lam is a shadow Home Office minister and MP for Weald of Kent.

It’s a cliché picture we all recognise: the local police officer on his bicycle, managing his beat in the countryside, comes across a young troublemaker getting up to some sort of low-level mischief. Rather than referring his case to the Crown Prosecution Service, the good-natured bobby instead takes the child to his mother. He knows, because he’s seen it all before, that a stern talking-to from a parent will be much more effective at setting him straight.

Nowadays, at a time when shoplifting or cannabis are effectively legalised in much of the country, this kind of story can seem hopelessly idealistic – but the stereotype exists for a reason. For many decades, British police were the best in the world, in large part because they were afforded discretion on how best to keep the peace in their local area.

After all, no template or set of regulations can fully capture the range of situations that a police officer might find themselves in. Local officers will know who in any given community is a real problem, and who just needs to be scared straight by their parents. They’ll know when to leave somebody in a cell overnight for having a few too many drinks, and when to escalate things further. They’ll know the pubs where trouble is caused, which events are genuine flashpoints, and which areas need extra attention on a dark winter’s night.

Unfortunately, the Police Reform White Paper produced by the Home Secretary flies in the face of this time-honoured approach. As the Shadow Home Secretary, Chris Philp, made clear in his response to the White Paper, these proposals are wrong-headed for a number of reasons. The Government is still failing to properly enforce the law with the resources that it already has, and is actually cutting the total number of police officers.

But perhaps worst of all is the proposal to merge the 43 existing police forces down to as few as 10. These changes won’t be fully implemented until 2034, meaning that we’re set for nearly a decade of expensive, disruptive reorganisation – all to produce forces which span hundreds of miles, and which have precious little hope of cultivating the local knowledge that officers need to do their jobs properly.

If the sorry state of the Metropolitan Police teaches us anything, it’s that bigger forces are not always better. The desire for administrative efficiency at scale can often result in worse practical outcomes on the ground, particularly for institutions which can only succeed by relying on detailed local knowledge. Bigger bureaucracies will mean more time spent on administration, and less time spent on actually catching criminals.

This phenomenon is by no means unique to the police either. Wherever and whenever the state involves itself in providing services with primarily local implications, we see particularism stifled in the name of standardisation. Voluntary organisations, whether charitable or recreational, are now smothered by endless red tape, designed in Whitehall with a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach. The Government’s attacks on free schools are another example – the Labour Party has always been uncomfortable with particularism and local variation.

Of course, we must be realistic about the problems that police forces can face at the local level, particularly given the challenge that our country now faces with cohesion and integration. West Midlands Police’s shameful handling of Aston Villa’s recent match against Maccabi Tel Aviv is one such example; under the guise of ‘managing community tensions’, former Chief Constable Craig Guildford caved into the demands of Islamists, and banned Israeli fans in hopes of appeasing those who view the very presence of Jewish people in their community as an affront.

Even worse, it was exactly this appeal to ‘managing community relations’ which prevented the horrors of the grooming and rape gangs from being investigating for so long. A West Midlands Police report in 2010 explicitly noted that “the predominant offender profile of Pakistani Muslim males…combined with the predominant victim profile of white females has the potential to cause significant community tensions”. In the end, this focus on preventing ‘community tensions’ trumped the wellbeing of children, many of whom were subjected to horrific abuse as a result.

So as important as it is to recognise the value of particular local knowledge, ‘community policing’ must not be allowed to become a guise under which local forces are enabled to pander to particular religious or ethnic groups. Parliament should – indeed, it must – ensure that local forces do not provide favourable treatment to any particular group. Where Chief Constables are found to be doing so, they must be removed.

This will be a difficult tightrope to walk. We should never have reached a position whereby police forces feel the need to pander to certain minority communities, or to institutionalise that pandering through internal ‘support groups’ designed to manage relationships with particular groups. But now that we’re here, we must be realistic about the threat that this poses to our country; the Home Office must respond accordingly and decisively.

But while the state has a role to play in setting standards, and ensuring accountability for senior leadership, this must not be allowed to morph into an all-consuming drive for uniformity. Bigger is not always better, and the best intentions of Whitehall bureaucrats rarely deliver the best results. Our country has a long history of particularism – set a minimum standard, enforce it properly, and otherwise let people decide how best to manage their own lives, and their own communities. We will continue to oppose the Government’s police reform plans, which fly in the face of that time-honoured model.