The police white paper is a step toward accountability

On Monday the home secretary set out the government's vision for reforming the police service . It consists of a radical shift away from a centralised, top-down approach to raising performance towards a simplified, locally driven approach to achieving greater democratic accountability and, through that, better performance. But, as ever, the devil is in the detail. As with other public services, the government's main agenda is to secure major public service cuts while delivering better value for money. Will the introduction of elected police and crime commissioners address the democratic deficit at the local level and improve police performance, or will it lead to political self-interest trumping the most sensible allocation of increasingly scarce resources? There are many things to be welcomed in the new government's vision for policing. The end to the proliferation of new laws and new offences; the simplification of an opaque policing landscape; the reversal of the incipient rise of a risk-averse culture; and a shift away from framing policing policy in terms of inputs (bobbies on the beat) and towards outcomes (value for money) to name just a few. But how much will the reforms cost? Elections and police commissioners cost money, but the government has been careful not to say how much. And will the public bother to turn out to vote? There's a lot of "having one's cake and eating it"– cutting and improving the service simultaneously, as if the level of resources were irrelevant to the quality of the service provided. Nobody really believes that do they? And are all the reforms really necessary? The new police and crime panels look suspiciously like police authorities, with membership drawn from local councils and independent experts. The National Crime Agency looks suspiciously like the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) but just dressed in a new set of clothes (just as Soca was called the new FBI when it was introduced four years ago, so the new agency is being likened to the FBI). And the new role for Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary looks almost exactly like the old one – except that the white paper has made a mess of the rhetoric ("more robust", but "more light touch"). England and Wales spends a higher proportion of its GDP on law and order than any other member of the OECD. Research undertaken in 16 European countries shows that the greater the proportional expenditure on public order and safety, the lower the level of public trust in the police. The implication of this is both sobering and encouraging. Investing in public safety makes people feel more, not less insecure leading to further investment in public safety and more, not less insecurity. Maybe, above all else, the budget cuts will take us to a completely unexpected place where trust in the police service, and therefore its legitimacy, is considerably enhanced. And maybe, just maybe, the public will finally have a real say in how their police service is run. The coalition government's white paper is a good start.