Do you remember the great parliamentary battle over privatisation of police services? Me neither, which is why Theresa May, the Home Secretary, is proving a better minister than Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary.
The drive for savings in the police budget is leading two constabularies, West Midlands and Surrey, to outsource certain services. The Guardian has got hold of the tender documents and splashed with the story today.
Yvette Cooper is angry — but, crucially, there’s nothing she can do. Theresa May doesn’t need legislation to enact this reform; it’s not even being done under orders of the Home Office. This is two police forces who would rather save money by outsourcing back office functions than cut at the frontline. (Only sworn constables have power of arrest, etc). So it’s not really an issue for Yvette Cooper or any MP. This is an operational matter for England’s devolved police services, as it was under the Labour government.
The same is true for health. If Lansley had kept his head down and just gratefully worked with the very good NHS reform template his Labour predecessors had constructed, then precisely the same
type of steady, quiet reform would have be taking place now (viz Cumbria).
We have heard very little from Theresa May since she became Home Secretary, which is odd for a department that exploded every three months when run by John Reid. Given the scale of the cuts she has
to enact, the silence is all the more surprising — and impressive.
P.S. There’s an irony of the police subcontracting work out to agencies that can do the job cheaper because they don’t have to keep paying staff who retire aged 50 with a pension on two-thirds of final salary. The failure of the last government to reform pensions is pricing public sector workers out of the public sector. Policy Exchange has just produced a report on the subject, which you can read here.
P.P.S. It’s interesting to see how this story led today’s broadcast bulletins, given that — as Jonathan points out — the liberalization of police services has been going on for ages. But the enemies of reform, flush from their NHS victory and watching the government fold over A4e, have G4S in their sights. It has a website where it talks through the wide range of functions it is currently performs for police forces throughout England. (These are the services which the Guardian described as ‘astonishing’). Apologies if I riled some CoffeeHousers by describing them as ‘back office’: the definition of this, and ‘frontline’, is in the eye of the beholder. But private companies running prisons, forensics etc is something Labour actively encouraged — so if Cooper is ‘very worried’ now she must have been petrified while this was authorised by the Labour government of which she was a part.
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