Home Secretary NPCC/APCC conference speech

It's a pleasure to be here this morning. It's not, of course, my first time at this conference, but my first time as Home Secretary.

So it is my chance to thank all of you for the phenomenal work that your officers and staff do each day to keep us all safe.

I've been in the job for just five months, but within five days of being appointed, I had already met officers from across the country who had shown the most extraordinary courage in the face of extreme danger.

Officers who ran towards men armed with knives, or guns or explosive devices when most of us would just run for cover.

Officers who had plunged into flood waters to save the life of a trapped motorist.

And an off-duty officer who had put aside all thought of his own safety aside to try to save the life of a nine-year-old girl.

Officers from across the country nominated for the Police Bravery Awards.

Awards that I've attended for more than a decade, but this time I had the honour of welcoming the winners to Downing Street.

What every one of them always says is as many of you will know is: “I was just doing my job.”

But of course, as we know, this isn't an ordinary job. It is a job where every officer sees those dangers and knows that tomorrow it could be them.

A remarkable public service calling that unites the longest serving Chief Constable and the newest recruit. So as we award the very first Elizabeth Emblems.

Something for which many of us here have campaigned for many years.

I want to pay special tribute today to Bryn Hughes, to Paul Bone, to all those across policing who have led the campaign, and especially to Bryn and Paul's daughters Nicola Hughes and Fiona Bone and to all the brave officers who gave their lives in service to keep the rest of us safe.

So those who put themselves in harm's way deserve our constant respect and support, and that's why it is a total disgrace that attacks on police officers in recent years have gone up.

We must never tolerate attacks and abuse against police officers and staff for doing their job, and we will always seek the toughest penalties for those guilty of assault against the police.

And, rightly, we talk about how the police run towards danger, when everyone else runs away. But we should also talk about how police officers, PCSOs, and police staff also walk towards the toughest of troubles when everyone else turns their back. How they step in and face the problems that the rest of us can't solve.

The forensics officers who walk towards a disturbing murder scene to find the evidence that might bring a killer to justice.

Or The PCSOs who walk towards an elderly man with dementia who needs to be taken home.

Or the digital investigation teams who have to examine the most horrific images of child abuse online to track down dangerous perpetrators.

And The family liaison officers who have the heart-breaking task of knocking on the door to tell a family that their loved one will never be coming home.

Those are the jobs that no-one else wants to deal with but, when everything else is broken, it's the police we turn to, to pick up the pieces and keep people safe.

And that is the dedication lies at the heart of policing in our country.

Our proud British tradition of policing by consent – a tradition rooted in our values of community, justice, respect for the rule of law.

It has been almost two hundred years since the development of Robert Peel's founding principles;

Premised on the belief that the police are the public and the public are the police;  preventing crime and disorder; policing without fear or favour; and maintaining the mutual respect between officers and the local communities they serve.

Traditions and values that we should never take for granted…

Because they underpin the rule of law, the very cornerstone of our democracy.

But it's because I believe so strongly in our British way of doing policing, and in the vital work that you and your forces do every day, that I am also clear we need to face some difficult truths about the way policing works today.

Because over the last decade or more, policing across England and Wales has started to buckle under the strain.

We've seen visible neighbourhood policing decimated in communities across the country, with fewer police on the beat, breaking the vital link between local forces and the people they serve. 

We've seen Crime evolving at breakneck speed,  policing struggling to keep pace, with fewer crimes solved and more victims let down. Officers increasingly burdened by bureaucracy and stuck behind desks instead of out on the frontline. Confidence falling, among victims and among communities, as too often people fear that no one will come and nothing will be done. Governance systems failing to maintain standards or prevent abuse by rogue officers. And outdated technology holding policing back. I mean the Police National Computer is now 50 years old. It was cutting-edge when I was 5.

While policing in our country has been through that perfect storm, forces have struggled to keep up because of cuts, conflict and fragmentation.

And instead of clear leadership from government to help you navigate those difficult waters, the opposite has usually been true.

Too often the Government just walked away or made the job harder. Too many politicians – including predecessors in my department – have stood on the sidelines shouting at the police when things have gone wrong…Instead of rolling up their sleeves and working in partnership with the police to tackle these challenges head on.

The result is that at present, our police officers cannot do the job they signed up for in the way they want to, and cannot deliver for the public as they should. Leaving our precious tradition of policing by consent in peril. Leaving victims and communities feeling let down.

I'm not prepared for us to carry on like this. Our police officers deserve better, and the public deserve better. Which is why the Government has set out our mission for Safer Streets, with;

our unprecedented ambitions to halve violence against women and girls, and to halve the knife crime that devastates young lives in a decade and our essential task to rebuild confidence in policing and the criminal justice system, and to restore the public sense of safety on our streets.

Reducing harm, rebuilding confidence. A mission rooted not just in the responsibility any Government has to keep people safe but rooted in our values; that security is the foundation of opportunity. That families can't thrive if they don't feel safe. That communities can't be strong if they don't feel secure.

That is a mission for the whole of Government, for institutions across the country, and for every one of our communities.

But I am clear that policing must play a central part in that mission. In the coming weeks, in the normal way, we will set out the full funding settlement for policing, including the precept and government grants.

But I can tell you today that direct central government funding for policing will increase by more than half a billion pounds next year, including over 260 million pounds for the core grant and additional funding for neighbourhood policing, counter-terrorism and the National Crime Agency.

But we will need to go further to make every penny of new investment count.

That is why we have already begun working with you on a new collaboration and efficiencies programme.

Working across police forces, starting with energy contracts, IT contracts, fleet contracts – with the potential to save you hundreds of millions of pounds over the next few years to put back into front line policing.

And working with you on tackling the bureaucracy that drags policing down – including reforms on redaction, and use of new technology – to free up more time for officers to get back on the frontline.

But we all know funding and incremental change won't address all the challenges that policing faces.

Over many years I have heard calls from across policing for new and positive reforms – including from many of you in this room today.

So today I am setting out a new road map for policing reform across England and Wales, which I am determined that policing and Government must drive forward together.

An ambitious programme of change to create a police service fit for the future.

Next year we will publish a new White Paper on policing.

It will cover issues from technology to the future workforce, from how the policing system can work better to tackle fast changing crime, to leadership and culture.

But today I want to highlight four of the key areas for reform: neighbourhood policing, police performance, structures and capabilities, crime prevention

First, I am determined that neighbourhood policing must be rebuilt. Many of you warned over a decade ago of the damage that austerity was doing to neighbourhood policing. Ministers said you were ‘crying wolf'. Now we know who was right.

Even after the previous government reversed the reduction in the overall number of officers, policing has not returned to our streets.

There are still fewer officers in neighbourhood teams, the proportion of the public who say they never see an officer on the beat has doubled, and the number of PCSOs has halved.

Little wonder then that the types of crimes and conduct that neighbourhood policing used to tackle have soared.

Shop theft is up at a record high, street theft is up 40% in a year. Town centres are too often blighted with persistent antisocial behaviour, leaving residents feeling unsafe. Criminals – often organised gangs – are just getting away with it. We cannot stand for this.

The impact good neighbourhood policing has on local community confidence and business confidence should never be underestimated.

But local officers and PCSOs who know their patch are also the building block of every other aspect of policing too. Be it tackling domestic abuse, serious and organised crime or extremist and terror threats, having teams embedded in local communities who know what is going on is invaluable.

That is why the restoration of neighbourhood policing will be at the heart of our plans.

And that is why we've committed to delivering an additional 13,000 police officers, PCSOs and special constables in neighbourhood policing roles, and will set out further steps in the coming weeks.

Second, we need a new approach to raising performance and standards across every force.

Let me be clear – if you are a victim of stalking or domestic abuse, shop theft or street theft, burglary or car crime, you have a right to expect that wherever you are in the country, you will get a high-quality response.

And you have a right to expect that everyone – from local police leaders to the Home Secretary – is working to drive up those standards.

Too often that doesn't happen.

Too often Chiefs and Police and Crime Commissioners and mayors don't have the data to see how they compare to other forces, or what progress they are making relative to others.

Too often, important recommendations made by the Inspectorate or the College don't get implemented.

And right across the country there are pockets of brilliance or patches of serious failure, but we don't have a clear framework for showing what works or what needs to rapidly change.

The result is not just a postcode lottery, but a blindfold one, where people don't even know if they should have got a better response from their local force.

The Inspectorate has called for a new national performance framework.

Police leaders support that proposal. But up ‘til now, it hasn't happened.

This government will make sure it does.

A new Performance Unit in the Home Office will work with you, and with the NPCC, the College of Policing, Inspectorate, and the APCC to draw up a clear agreed performance framework.

Modelled on the old Standards Unit introduced by David Blunkett – it will use high-quality police data to spot trends, and drive-up standards, performance and consistency.

Restoring public confidence and focusing on those key mission priorities – on neighbourhood policing, on violence against women and on knife crime. So communities feel safer, and more criminals pay the price.

Third, if we want policing to be more effective, we need better coordination across forces and more efficient, responsive support services.

The co-ordinated public order response we saw in August, between police forces across the country, was vital to showing that the criminals responsible for that violence would not get away with it.

But that was the result of the exemplary leadership and partnership shown by police leaders in this room, that operated in spite of, not because of, the systems we had in place.

When I asked during those weeks why data and intelligence sharing was so slow, and information so hard to obtain, the answer I got was: ‘it is like this all the time', and that is not good enough.

As crime becomes ever more complex; as threats cut across force boundaries, we need to look again at the capabilities provided at local, regional and national level and the way they are coordinated. .

Take forensics, where the adoption of cutting-edge forensic science across the board has been held back by uncoordinated funding and fragmented governance, resulting in duplication of effort and an inability to implement strategic plans.

Or police helicopters, where Police Chiefs and PCCs and mayors across the country are in continual negotiation on what next year's funding should be.

Or technology procurement where every force wrestles over and over again with the same questions about new software, IT changes or records management – wasting time, pushing up costs and creating systems that aren't even interoperable. Instead of technology driving great leaps forward in policing, too often it is holding policing back.

That is why we are determined to work with you on a new National Centre of Policing to bring together crucial support services that local police forces can draw upon, to raise standards, and improve efficiency.

As a starting point, I see this body taking on responsibility for existing shared services, national IT capabilities, and force hosted national capabilities such as the National Police Air Service and Forensics.

But looking further ahead, we will explore with you the opportunities to expand its remit, around those operational responsibilities where effective coordination is critical for success.

Finally, on crime prevention, if we are to halve knife crime and violence against women and girls, it can't all be done through policing and the criminal justice system, or by any agency or government department acting alone.

Police and Crime Commissioners and Mayors in different corners of the country have driven important local work on crime prevention. But we need a new partnership with you.

I was shocked to discover on arrival at the Home Office how little the Department itself had been doing on prevention. That has to change.

Already we are driving new action from curbing knife sales to tackling mobile phone theft, but we need to go much further both locally and nationally, for the mission to be met.

All of this can only be done together. The roadmap for reform only works as a joint programme.

Rebuilding confidence in policing and reducing serious violence can only succeed if it is a shared endeavour between Government and the police.

That doesn't mean there won't be scrutiny, accountability, challenge or disagreement. Because of course there will.

And it also means respecting the different constitutional roles that we respectively have to play.

From me, that will mean setting a clear strategic direction through our missions, and holding policing more robustly to account on performance – but it will also mean having respect for your operational independence and expertise.

This time last year, a Home Secretary had just been sacked for choosing to undermine that independence, for questioning the impartiality of the service and for stoking up tensions towards officers when they had a difficult policing job to do.

When it comes to the challenges you face and the reforms that I have set out today, you will always find me a fair and willing partner, ready to talk to you about what works and what doesn't, and how together we can best keep our communities safe.

This is a critical juncture for the future of policing. Reform is never achieved overnight, but nor can it be put off any longer.

To get back to those Peel principles, policing must now move forward. But amidst all the challenges, we also have a huge opportunity ahead of us.

An opportunity for a fundamental reset in the relationship between policing and the Government in place of political pointless blame games.

An opportunity to rebuild the confidence of communities in the vital job our police do each day to keep us all safe.

I believe in the British policing model. I believe in the men and women who work day and night in our police forces to protect the public.

And I truly believe that working together on this roadmap for reform, and on the delivery of our mission, we can deliver a fairer, safer country for all.

Thank you.