Police In Crisis

A cloud of controversy is hanging over police forces across the country as they face unprecedented change. While deep budget cuts force job losses and dent morale, damaging allegations about corruption and racism surface on an almost monthly basis. The scale of these problems has been played down by police chiefs – but critics are clear the forces are facing a crisis.

Figures published late last month revealed that more than 8,500 allegations about police corruption were recorded by forces in England and Wales between 2008 and 2011. Contained in an Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) report, the allegations included rape and sexual assault, perverting the course of justice, the provision of false statements, theft, database misuse and fraud. Only 13 police officers were prosecuted and found guilty.

The corruption figures came fresh on the back of recent disclosures about the rising level of racism complaints levelled against the police. Records published earlier this year under the freedom of information act showed an increase by more than 30 per cent in allegations of racism at forces across England and Wales. And if that news wasn’t bad enough for the country’s cops, at the same time, police budgets have been slashed – causing staff shortages and leading to fears about potential privatisation.

“I think we’re facing a crisis in lack of leadership,” says Simon Reed, vice chairman of the Police Federation, an organisation that represents 124,000 police officers in England and Wales. “We do not have leaders in the service who are standing up for the service, responding to these allegations and standing up to the government – that’s the view among the rank and file.”

Reed, a former officer with Bedfordshire Police, accuses the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) of “covering up” how hard forces have been hit by cuts by trying to “put a brave face on it.” He accepts that racism and corruption allegations are serious – but believes that they are being overplayed.

“Our police service is the most scrutinised anywhere in the world,” he says. “We’ve always had allegations, whether it’s racism or corruption, but the actual level is still very low. To put it in perspective, the number of complaints officers get is considerably less than we see made against banks. Banks will get hundreds of thousands of complaints a year.”

Over the three year period between 2008 and 2011, forces in the north had 1400 corruption allegations levelled against them – around 15 per cent of the total across England and Wales. West Yorkshire had the most of the northern forces – at 309 – followed by Greater Manchester (287); Merseyside (267); Lancashire (231); North Yorkshire (141); and South Yorkshire (165). London’s Metropolitan police, Britain’s largest force, came top of the overall list, with 1,487.

The most common allegation in the IPCC’s report – 33 per cent of all that were recorded – involved perverting the course of justice, followed by theft or fraud and abuse of authority. In one case, the chief constable of North Yorkshire police admitted gross misconduct at an internal hearing after “irregularities” were found in the force’s recruitment process. This was the first time in 34 years that a serving chief constable had faced such a hearing. The chief constable and the deputy constable, it emerged, had jointly assisted relatives in circumventing the first stage of a recruitment exercise.

The IPCC says that police corruption is “not endemic” but is “corrosive of the public trust that is at the heart of policing.” Of the 8,500 allegations recorded between 2008 and 2011, just 837 were referred to the IPCC, leaving individual forces to investigate their own officers in the vast majority of cases. The watchdog has vowed to take a more “proactive role” investigating corruption allegations as it has accepted that “the public is understandably doubtful about the extent to which, in this particular instance, the police can investigate themselves.”

Some campaigners, however, believe the IPCC is part of the problem. They claim that because a third of the watchdog's investigators are former police officers, it lacks full independence and the teeth to hand out serious punishments.

Val Swain, a spokesperson for civil liberties group the Network for Police Monitoring, argues structures set up to hold the police to account have “neither the will nor the capacity” to do so.

“The real-life experience of many is that the police are able to act with almost complete impunity,” Swain says. “The IPCC has recognised the need to improve public confidence in the complaints procedure, but it is far from clear how they are going to make the changes necessary to achieve this.

“The number of police officers who are found guilty of misconduct is very low. Of those, most will face nothing more serious than a written warning. Given the lack of sanction, the establishment of a culture of corruption seems almost inevitable.”

Complaints about police accountability over corruption also punctuate the debate about racism. Despite receiving hundreds of racism allegations, the police themselves have dismissed the majority of complaints against them by ruling that they are untrue or cannot be substantiated.

ACPO says a rise in racism complaints in recent years is down to more people now coming forward report alleged abuse. But critics argue racism remains an institutional problem within police forces and is not being tackled efficiently enough.

“Without the action it’s never really going to change,” says Sophie Khan, a solicitor who specialises in cases involving racial discrimination and the police. “90 per cent of my cases have a racist element to it. It happens time and time again, year after year.

“It impacts on a lot of people’s lives the way that they get treated. When they’re walking down the street or in the custody suite – they are treated differently depending on the colour of their skin.”

Uncomfortable issues were raised for police forces after the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993. A subsequent report into Lawrence’s death, authored by Sir William Macpherson, accused the Metropolitan Police of being “institutionally racist” over how it had handled the investigation. The report made 70 recommendations, many aimed specifically at improving police attitudes to racism.

But race scandals have continued to dog police forces across the country. In 2003, video footage emerged showing Greater Manchester Police (GMP) trainees and officers using racist language, with one filmed making a Ku Klux Klan-style hood and saying he wanted to “kill” an Asian colleague. Figures released earlier this year showed GMP received 351 racism complaints between 2007 and 2011, the second highest in the country behind the Met.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission says it is “seriously concerned” about allegations of racist police behaviour. “We hoped and believed that this sort of culture had been tackled by all the changes that followed the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry,” said a spokesperson.

Questions around the culture within the police service, though, are not likely to be addressed in the immediate future. Sir Hugh Orde, president of ACPO, has emphasised his priority is to deal with the forces’ financial problems. Police nationwide are facing 20 per cent budget cuts and an expected 16,000 job losses by 2015.

"For the first time officers suddenly feel vulnerable," Orde said in an interview last month, making it clear where his sympathies lie. "There is a sense they feel let down.”

Climate of Fear in the NHS

“The last chance to save the NHS” is how it has been billed. This Sunday thousands from across the country are expected to descend on London to launch a headline-grabbing demonstration against the coalition government’s proposed healthcare reforms.

Led by the anti-austerity group UK Uncut, the protesters plan to temporarily close down the iconic Westminster Bridge just days before a crucial parliamentary debate on the controversial Health and Social Care Bill. If the Bill is passed into law, campaigners say, it will open the NHS up to corporate interests, damage the standard of service and lead to the destruction of an equal and universal healthcare system.

But in the build up to the demonstration, an investigation by The Big Issue in the North has discovered frontline NHS staff across England are already enduring cutbacks that could be putting patient care at risk, with some surgeries being delayed due to tight budgets.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity, Dr Stephen Smith (not his real name), said at one hospital in the south west of England staffing was at a “dangerous level” after the ratio of nurses to patients in each ward had been reduced.

“There is a climate of fear and a feeling that everyone’s budgets are under heavy attack,” he said. “Working in A&E for example there are signs up saying ‘how can we save money’, with people asked to give suggestions. But the amount that’s having to be saved each month is just crazy, and consequently rotas are being designed with less doctors in them because it’s cheaper. Which clearly puts patients at risk.”

Smith added that he believed the Health and Social Care Bill would send things in a “very bad direction”.

“There isn’t anybody I know in the medical profession that thinks it’s a good idea. Everyone has said that this is going to destroy the NHS and is just an attempt at backdoor privatisation. The only people who are pro it are the GPs who are going to make money out of it,” he said.

Jacqui Moore (not her real name), a specialist practitioner who is also a union representative at a hospital in the north west of the country, described increased levels of stress due to a string of job cuts.

“I see alot of staff going off with stress at the moment. The minute you start cutting staff everybody else is just expected to work harder and a lot of staff react to that. They just can’t cope with it. Just about every person I deal with seems to have either been off with stress or has just come back after a period of stress-related illness. Everybody is feeling the pressure.

“I think it’s just symptomatic of what’s going on in the health service as a whole. The whole agenda is very cost driven, and every decision that seems to be made is a financial one, rather than one that’s got patient care at the end of it.”

Shortly after coming to power in May 2010, the coalition government gave an assurance that its cuts agenda would not impact upon frontline services. And in April this year the government launched a “listening exercise” to address concerns about the scale of its NHS reforms.

Launching the initiative, prime minister David Cameron said the government wanted to “safeguard the NHS for future generations”, but added that it was only through “modernisation that we can protect the NHS and ensure the country has a truly world-class health service.”

Months after the listening exercise, however, the British Medical Association (BMA), which represents around 141,000 doctors and medical students in the UK, called for the Health and Social Care Bill to be “withdrawn or at the very least significantly amended.”

“The clear view of BMA Council is that the Health and Social Care Bill remains deeply flawed,” said Dr Hamish Meldrum, the council’s chairman. “The BMA will continue to publicly and vigorously highlight the concerns of doctors and patients, particularly to peers who have a real opportunity to protect the NHS by addressing the damage that could be done by many aspects of these reforms.”

One long-serving nurse at a hospital in south London, Mike Davey, told The Big Issue in the North the fear is that the standard of service – and ultimately patient care – will be severely compromised by the changes.

“There’s a nervous anticipation and a lot of staff are very concerned. It’s having a negative impact on morale,” he said. “This particular government is putting thumb screws on to the managers, the executives and the trust boards so they have to pretty much market test everything – which means services being privatised out.

“We’re told a private company can do things cheaper and better than our own in-house services. But previous experience, since the Thatcher government in the 80s brought in mass privatisation, has led us to see that this is not actually the case.”

At a hospital on the outskirts of Manchester, some surgeries may have already been rationed due to budget shortages.

According to Oldham and Saddleworth MP Debbie Abbrahams, a 33-year-old man in her constituency had an operation to fix his cataracts delayed because his sight was classed as "impaired" as opposed to "blind". The man, an engineer by trade, cannot work due to his condition and will have to wait until his vision worsens before he can undergo immediate surgery.

"Delays to simple and relatively inexpensive operations, like those for cataracts, can severely affect a person's life,” Abbrahams said. “I am very concerned about this situation as I have had several constituents come to me asking for help because they cannot get their cataracts treated in a reasonable time. Along with Michael Meacher and other Greater Manchester MPs I am asking Oldham's Primary Care Trust for clear answers about why this and other basic operations are being hit so hard by this government's ideologically driven cuts."

On 11 October the Health and Social Care Bill will be debated at length in the House of Lords. The Lords can propose amendments to the Bill, with some Liberal Democrat peers, led by Baroness Shirley Williams, expected to rebel against it. Writing in the Observer last month, Williams said that she had “huge concerns”, adding: “The battle is far from over.”

For Ben Jackson, a spokesman for UK Uncut, this Sunday’s protest will be crucial.

“It all depends on what they [the Lords] hear from the public,” he said. “So we need to take drastic action to make it clear that this isn’t going to be something we’re just going to lie down and take. This is something we really care about. It’s an emergency for the NHS."

This article first appeared in issue #896 of The Big Issue in the North magazine.

Outsourcing Accountability: Privatisation and Freedom of Information

Since it was introduced in 2005, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has helped expose a wide range of scandals. It has uncovered MPs exploiting their taxpayer-funded expenses system, child abuse in Northern Ireland as well as the scale of civilian deaths in the Afghan war. The Act, which is based upon the principle that the public has a “right to know” information contained in government records, has become an important means by which power can be held to account.

But freedom of information as we know it could be under serious threat. In towns and cities across the country, there are rapid, expansive changes taking place. As the government implements the biggest public spending cuts in a generation, many public services are struggling to survive. From Manchester to Devon, libraries, care homes, schools and even hospital wards are faced with a very real prospect of closure. What this means is that, almost inevitably, we are set to see control and ownership of public services being handed over to the private sector on an unprecedented scale.

The FOIA, in its current form, can only be used to gain information from public bodies “wholly funded” by public money, such as the police force or local councils. Private companies not owned by public money, even if they are providing key public services such as care provision, are not bound by the Act. Therefore, as more and more of our services become privatised, freedom of information is likely to diminish.

According to freedom of information campaigner, author and journalist Heather Brooke, this poses a serious problem for the future.

“We’re going to see increasing privatisation of what were public services, and there is a danger that because they’ll be privatised they won’t have the same accountability that they had when they were overseen by public bodies,” she says. “In principle I don’t have a problem with privatisation; my problem is when public money or policymaking or public decisions are outsourced, there’s no way for the public to hold that to account.”

The coalition government expects that as the public sector slowly disappears and the state shrinks, privately owned companies will step in to fill the void. Journalists and citizens will still be able to request information about specific private contracts if they have been paid for by a public body – such as when a council contracts a private company to provide a service – but they cannot make direct FOI requests to the company or ask for information relating to any other matters. The implications of this are potentially huge.

“It is a matter of concern where functions are being removed from public authorities to private contractors,” says Maurice Frankel, director of the long running UK Campaign for Freedom of Information. “A vast range of information is going to be lost from public access.”

Frankel predicts that if the coalition’s plans to privatise elements of the NHS go ahead, GPs will have a right to access only partial information about the performance of contracted private healthcare providers. “If you want to know how many cases of reinfection occurred in the hospital, that’s not going to be covered by the individual GP’s contract,” he says. “The solution is to make the contractors themselves public authorities under the [FOI] Act.“

Across the housing sector, similar changes have already taken place. Private companies are now responsible for building most of the UK’s “affordable homes” – a role that up until the Thatcher era was carried out predominantly by councils using public funds. Often councils will now contract private developers as part of regeneration projects. Consequently, there has been a direct impact on transparency and accountability.

Researching a story on a regeneration project in New Broughton, Salford for Big Issue in the North earlier this year, I encountered firsthand the impact of privatisation on freedom of information. After a significant statistic was quoted to me by a public relations (PR) firm employed by private developer Countryside Properties, I asked to see its origin. Following a lengthy exchange of emails, however, my request was refused. The survey was “confidential and not in the public domain,” I was told. The PR firm would allow me to see snippets of the survey, but not the full thing; they wanted to reveal the favourable statistics, but nothing else.

The government’s plans to create new ‘free schools’ – schools that can be started by businesses, parents, teachers or other groups – have also caused transparency concerns.

Jane Eades, treasurer of campaign group the Anti-Academies Alliance, was refused information about free schools after submitting an FOI request to the Department for Education last year.She believes part of the problem is that a charity called the New Schools Network (NSN) has been set up to help fund free schools. The NSN has received £500,000 from the government, and anyone wishing to set up a school can apply to it for funding. But as it is a charity, it is exempt from the FOIA.

“The Government have been very cunning in the way they have set up the free schools process,” Eades says. “Unless the group [the NSA] publicise what they are doing, there is no local consultation or information. In other words, the whole deal seems to be very secretive.”

Such instances could become commonplace if privatisation is to spread across the public sector. Yet prime minister David Cameron maintains that the coalition government aspires to become “one of the most transparent governments in the world”. In recent weeks, for instance, the government has revealed plans to somewhat strengthen and widen the powers of the FOIA. Under the changes proposed in the new Protection of Freedoms Bill, some organisations previously exempt from freedom of information requests would be included. Bodies performing “functions of a public nature” such as the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) and the Advertising Standards Authority are among those who would be made to adhere to FOI legislation.

Freedom of information campaigners have welcomed these changes; however, although the Freedoms Bill widens the scope of the FOIA, it still fails to address the issue of privatisation. While on the one hand the government is strengthening the ability of citizens to gain information from public bodies, on the other, by privatising public services, they are reducing the amount of information that is freely available. Whether intentionally or not, the coalition is outsourcing accountability.

According to the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), the arm of government responsible for freedom of information policy, the FOIA will soon be reviewed to ensure it remains an effective means by which people hold the government to account. But the speed and scale of the government’s rapidly implemented privatisation agenda seems to have already caught the MoJ off-guard.

When questioned about the potentially regressive impact of privatisation on freedom of information, an MoJ spokesperson responded: “We have to strike a balance between our commitment to increasing transparency and that of reducing the regulatory burden on business. We do not consider it necessary to extend the Act to bodies that provide public services under contract at present.”

Meanwhile, the Information Commissioners Office – the independent authority set up to “uphold information rights in the public interest” – pointed to a statement made by Commissioner Christopher Graham in January.

“It would be perverse if by going for alternative provision of services – privatisation, contracting out, looking at new and imaginative alternative ways of delivering public services – we suddenly found that we are giving important public functions to authorities that are not within the FOI Act and they became less accountable," Graham said in an interview with the Guardian newspaper. “We've got to think through the implications; we can't be so starry-eyed that we can't see the downside. There is a potential for services to become less transparent and less accountable.”

For Brooke, who won a landmark High Court judgement in 2008 forcing the disclosure of MPs expenses, the only real solution is to expand the provisions of the FOIA further. “What I would like to see is a change in the Freedom of Information Act,” she says.

“A better situation would be if it was about the criteria, about how much funding does that organisation receive from the public or are they providing a public service. If they are doing one of those two things then they should fall under the purview of being a public body for the purposes of the FOIA. We’ve definitely got to see some kind of change to the law."

This article appeared originally in Issue No.871 of Big Issue in the North.

Clegg, Cameron and Privatisation

Deputy prime minister Nick Clegg was the opening keynote speaker at the the Guardian’s Public Services Summit in St Albans 12 days ago. A two day discussion of “structural challenges facing the country”, the summit was attended by “public service deliverers” including “forward thinking chief executives, elected members [and] civil servants”.

Clegg, who had been greeted by protesters on his way to the summit, took the stage to fairly muted applause before setting the tone of his speech. “How can we reinvent and strengthen our public services at a time of anxiety and stretched resources?” he asked. “And how can we preserve the public sector ethos as we move to a more plural, diverse and personalised way of running our public services?”

He went on to propose that the answer was “modernisation”. Quoting from the Beveridge Report, he stated his belief that public services were about “co-operation between the state and the individual.” Health Secretary Andrew Lansley’s NHS reform would readdress an uneven balance between state and individual, he said, by putting power back “in the hands of those who understand patients, the GPs.”

Then after talking at length about scrapping the burden of bureaucracy and target culture from the public services, he came to a crucial point. He wanted to reassure those “anxious about the claims that what the government is doing is privatising for ideological reasons."

“New and alternative providers – from the private, community and voluntary sectors – have a vital role to play in our public services,” he said. “But I will also take a hard line against the kind of blanket privatisation which was pursued by governments in the past. Because replacing a public monopoly with a private monopoly achieves nothing but reduced accountability.”

Most of Clegg’s speech – about “diversifying” and “modernising” public services – was familiar, and his use of similar language has been questioned on ourKingdom before. However his claim that he would take a “hard line against blanket privatisation” was a significant revelation.

And here’s why. Just ten days on from Clegg’s speech, David Cameron wrote a piece in the Telegraph. In it, he explained how his government plans to implement privatisation on a level that even Margaret Thatcher on her wildest nights would never have imagined possible. “We will soon publish a White Paper setting out our approach to public service reform,” Cameron wrote. “It will put in place principles that will signal the decisive end of the old-fashioned, top-down, take-what-you're-given model of public services.”

Appearing to directly contradict the words of his deputy days earlier, what Cameron outlined was a radical picture of what can only be understood as blanket privatisation.
“The grip of state control will be released and power will be placed in people's hands,” Cameron asserted. “There will be more freedom, more choice and more local control.”

His words were chosen very carefully, with euphemism adopted to conceal the gravity of the plans. Instead of privatisation, he refers to “diversity”; and he makes no mention of capitalism or marketisation, rather “freedom”.

“[We have] a vision of open public services – and we will make it happen by advancing some key principles,” Cameron says. “The most important is the principle of diversity. We will create a new presumption … that public services should be open to a range of providers competing to offer a better service.”

At his summit speech days earlier, Clegg had said: “there will be no for-profit providers in our publicly funded schools system.” But not according to Cameron.

“Of course there are some areas – such as national security or the judiciary – where this wouldn't make sense,” Cameron says. “But everywhere else should be open to diversity; open to everyone who gets and values the importance of our public service ethos.”

The prime minister and his deputy, then, do not seem to share the same vision of the future under these plans. Clegg admits there will be privatisation, but not on the scale proposed by Cameron. And while the differences between the two are currently simmering under the surface, they will surely soon begin to boil.

In no uncertain terms, the Open Public Services white paper will, as it stands, tear down the last vestiges of the public sector. Almost everything will become fair game as the profit-driven interests of private enterprise gradually swallow up public services. With the implementation of market principles, services that ‘fail’ – including hospitals – could be made bankrupt. Oliver Huitson has argued elsewhere that the market relies upon such failure; it is simply an economic eventuality. Under similar plans, for instance, the government owned Forensic Science Service has already been made to close in 2012, as it runs at a cost not a profit.

David Cameron says that the coalition’s plans are not ideological. “We need a complete change,” he argues. Yet as far back as 2006, doctors were asserting that they did not want to see more privatisation of the NHS in England. Since then widespread dissaproval has remained prevalent across the health sector, and as Allyson Pollock has recently noted, the BMA, the Royal College of Nursing and the NHS Confederation have all opposed the coalition's plans. Privatisation is “not in the best interests of the staff and patients," said Karen Reay of the Unite union last week. This government, however, does not appear to care – and neither is it willing to listen.

But amid the cacophony of voices shouting about the coalition's proposed reforms, cuts and all the other tumultuous changes rippling across the world at present, Clegg has offered a quiet assurance that he will “take a hard line against blanket privatisation.” This time, unlike his renege on tuition fees, he must stick to his word. If he is to retain the waning credibility of both himself and his party, he should now step out from behind Cameron’s shadow and oppose the changes proposed in this white paper. Because public services cannot be bought and sold; they are not commodities, they are necessities.

This article appeared originally at: http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/ryan-gallagher/nick-clegg-must-oppose-his-governments-privatisation-plans