The home secretary has promised to end a “postcode lottery” in policing, as she set out plans to overhaul the work of forces in England and Wales.
Yvette Cooper announced a new body which would co-ordinate specialist functions such as forensics, IT, and the use of drones and helicopters.
She also said forces needed to share more information with the Home Office to enable better monitoring of police performance.
Further details of the proposals are expected next spring, when the government is due to publish a paper on its plans.
Before winning the election in July, Labour had already set out plans to centralise the purchasing of equipment in a bid to save £360m annually.
Now, in a speech to local crime commissioners and police chiefs, she indicated she wants to see further co-ordination in certain areas, adding that the challenges of modern policing “cut across” the 43 forces in England and Wales.
She added that co-operation between forces during the riots this summer had occurred “in spite of, not because of, the system,” whilst data sharing was “slow” and governance of forensics “fragmented”.
She has set out plans for a new national policing body to offer support on deploying new technologies, and deliver promised improvements in the joint purchasing of policing equipment such as vehicles.
A new division within the Home Office, modelled on a Blair-era standards unit, will hope to drive up standards by tracking the performance of forces in priority areas.
These have yet to be defined, but are likely to include reducing knife crime and violence against women and girls – which Labour made high-profile promises to halve within a decade ahead of July’s election.
‘Effective intervention’
Cooper added that the new unit would draw up an “agreed performance framework” in consultation with police leaders for measuring how the success or failure of forces should be judged.
She added that forces currently lacked a “clear framework for showing what works, or what needs rapidly to change”.
“The result isn’t just a postcode lottery, it’s a blindfold one, where people don’t even know if they should have got a better response from their local force,” she said.
The government has promised “effective intervention” where forces are shown to be failing – although details of what this means in practice have not yet been set out.
Questioned after her speech about whether she was signalling a return to the targets-driven culture of the Blair years, she replied her proposals were “not about setting arbitrary targets” for forces.
But she said more evidence was required to ensure the “overall missions” of the Starmer government would be delivered, adding her department currently lacked “basic information” required to assess forces.
Cooper also reiterated the government’s desire to boost neighbourhood policing, adding that details of an election promise to boost street policing would be revealed in the coming weeks.
She also confirmed central government funding for police forces would go up next year by around £500m, including a £260m boost to core funding. Forces are also funded locally through council tax, which will be set in the coming months.
A detailed breakdown of the funding allocations for each force next year is expected to be published next month.
