Sir Mark Rowley: The cost of standing still is that criminals will win

On Friday 6 November, Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley delivered a speech on the need for police reform in England and Wales. A transcript of the speech has been released and is available below.

Good morning.

It is unusual for a Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police to deliver a major speech outside London.

The story I want to tell today is not really a London story.

But it does start there.

In 1829 when Sir Robert Peel established the Metropolitan Police he understood that the first duty of the state is the protection of its citizens.

That responsibility has not changed.

But the world in which we discharge it certainly has.

Peel understood something every generation eventually has to confront:

Society changes.

Threats change.

Technology changes.

And institutions must change to remain effective.

Because there comes a point when the world evolves beyond the ability of systems built to serve it.

British policing has reached that point once again and there is a real risk to public safety if we don't urgently reform to meet that challenge.

In short - and it hurts me to say this - policing will fail.

Over nearly four decades in policing, from Birmingham to Surrey and now London, there are some things that remain constant.

People want safe streets.

They want criminals held to account.

They want their children protected.

And they want confidence that when they need the police, the police will be there.

This speech is about whether British policing, as currently designed, is capable of delivering that, in the decades ahead.

Because when I look back across our history, I am struck by one simple truth:

The moments that define policing are the moments when we have had the courage to change.

The first great revolution came in 1829.

Britain was being transformed by the Industrial Revolution.

Growing towns and cities demanded a new model of policing, and Peel created one to tackle what he described as the

"increased mechanical ingenuity of the age, by which the committing of crimes was aided and the means of detection lessened".

A quote which resonates today.

The second came in the 1960s.

Crime was becoming more complex, communities more connected, and 117 small local forces could no longer meet the demands of a changing Britain. Forces merged, capabilities were brought together, and policing adapted once again.

Neither reform was driven by ideology.

Both were driven by pragmatism and the necessity to put communities first.

The world had changed.

So policing needed to as well.

Today, we face a moment every bit as significant.

Not because of industrialisation.

Not because of urbanisation.

But because we see on our streets and in our homes the impact that globalisation, technology, and connectivity.

For example:

• Children are groomed by predators on another continent.
• Fraudsters steal victim’s life savings without ever entering the country.
• Organised crime groups launder money through our local high streets, while directing operations from hundreds of miles away.

The victim remains local.

But increasingly the threat does not.

Today we face a choice, between the third revolution in British policing or the inevitable decline of our ability to protect the public.

Before I talk about our problems, I want to start with what is good.

There is an enormous amount that is exceptional about policing.

The greatest strength of British policing is not our structures.

It is not our technology.

It is not our governance arrangements.

It is not our headquarters.

It is our people – our 148,000 officers and 89,000 staff

• Their courage.
• Their compassion.
• Their determination.

Every day our officers…

• run towards danger,
• solve problems that never make the headlines.
• And quietly hold together the fracturing machinery of policing.

The reason policing succeeds as often as it does is because of them. //

Yet increasingly they are carrying a burden that should be carried by the system itself.

The public see professionalism.

They do not always see the pressure.

And perhaps that is part of our challenge.

Because policing has become very good at absorbing pressure.

Very good at absorbing risk.

Very good at accepting growing demand.

And very good at quietly finding a way or pretending everything is working.

The NHS publishes waiting lists to point to its shortcomings.

Policing …. has no equivalent.

So, I want to be frank today.

Despite our incredible people the service we provide is often not what is should be, and is at serious risk of degrading further.

We can see the impact on our streets.

We are solving less crime nationally. Positive outcome rates are now less than half what they were twelve years ago.

The public see fewer officers. Just 11 per cent report seeing an officer or PCSO on foot patrol each week, down from 39 per cent in 2011.

Public confidence has fallen.

Victim satisfaction has fallen.

And these aren't problems unique to a handful of forces. Even the best performing force solve only 22% of crimes, with only 58% of their public saying they do a good job, or better.

And because crime doesn’t fall evenly, and serious incidents don’t only occur where the capability exists to tackle them, forces can find themselves bent out of shape, or even overwhelmed, very quickly.

• Look at Cleveland.
• Look at Kent and Hampshire.
• Look at the disorder following Southport.

In each case, dedicated officers rose to the challenge.

But the strain on the system was visible.

In too many forces, local officers cannot easily access the support they need when they need it.

Critical capabilities sit elsewhere, requiring negotiation and coordination rather than simply calling on colleagues to help protect the public.

And so, communities feel the consequences.

So what is the root of this fragility in our system?

Successive governments have allowed investment in policing to fall behind what the public needs.

Over fifteen years, police funding has fallen from around 0.9 per cent of GDP to around 0.7 per cent - that is over three billion in todays money.

And we have fewer police officers per head than France, Germany, Italy or Spain, in fact, fewer than most of Europe.

We have invested more in vital priorities such as counter terrorism and public protection. But that leaves less room elsewhere.

With 77 per cent of expenditure committed to officer and staff pay, the scope to invest in better tools, technology and training is already narrow.

Now let’s look at how we are struggling to keep the service going.

Last year, forces used £276 million from reserves simply to balance their budgets. They borrowed more than £630 million to fund capital programmes.

And too little of what we spend is helping us change.

Of our £2 billion annual technology spend, 97 per cent goes on simply maintaining legacy systems – the product of long-term under investment.

This is maintaining the past. Not building the future.

It took policing thirteen years to roll out body worn video. Just 0.02 per cent of central expenditure goes into leadership development - after decades of cost cutting to protect the frontline.

We cannot keep asking our people to meet new threats with ageing systems and too little investment in their skills.

The result is not just fragile balance sheets. It is a police service unable to protect the public as we should.

Criminals have adapted to the twenty-first century. The question is whether policing can reform and adapt quickly enough to keep pace.

When crime affects a high street, a neighbourhood or a family in their own home, people reasonably ask: why can’t the local police deal with it?

But behind what looks like a local problem increasingly sits a criminal enterprise operating across borders.

Three examples show why that matters.

The Criminal Economy Behind Britain's High Streets

• The vape shop.
• The nail bar.
• The second hand phone shop.

Many are legitimate businesses. But some provide cover for organised crime, becoming visible signs of disorder and criminality in the communities around them.

Behind the shopfronts can sit money laundering, counterfeit goods imported through international supply chains, stolen property, large scale fraud and the exploitation of trafficked workers.

Indeed, Trading Standards professionals report suspicions of organised crime operating through premises across the country.

The National Crime Agency estimates that at least £1 billion of criminal cash is laundered through high street businesses every year.

The Industrialisation of Child Abuse and Sexual Exploitation of women and children

A generation ago, many would have viewed these offences primarily through a local lens, one offender harming one victim within the same community.

Today this is far from the reality.

The horrific Pelicot case in France exposed how online networks can facilitate and encourage sexual offending on an industrial scale.

Its consequences continue to reverberate across Europe and the UK, with similar investigations involving hundreds of offenders and victims.

Technology has transformed the threat.

Criminals can now identify, groom and exploit children through gaming platforms, messaging services and social media, often reaching hundreds of potential victims without ever sharing the same physical space.

Online child sexual abuse continues to grow at an alarming rate.

More than 92,000 referrals were made by online platforms last year. //

The scariest indication of that is online-facilitated offending now accounts for close to half of all recorded child sexual abuse offences.

Reports of child sexual extortion, where young people are blackmailed using intimate images, increased by 127 per cent in a single year.

And we are increasingly seeing vulnerable children who are first criminally exploited through county lines networks later become victims of sexual exploitation by those same organised crime groups.

Again,

the victim is local.

But the threat often sits within national and international criminal networks operating online.

The accelerationof Drugs supply and violence through new technologies

Drug markets are increasingly international and technologically sophisticated.

Twenty years ago, forensic scientists routinely encountered around 30 different drugs. Today it is more than 300.

Global criminal networks supply illegal firearms, using encrypted communications to conceal their activity.

At the same time, 3D printed firearms present a growing threat. Teenagers can buy prohibited zombie knives through platforms such as Snapchat and have them delivered to their homes.

Criminal groups exploit children and trafficked people to move drugs and weapons. Cryptocurrency helps conceal and transfer the profits.

These are not separate threats.

Drugs, weapons, exploitation and technology come together in criminal businesses whose reach extends far beyond any one force.

These three examples are part of a much bigger change

And the scale of that change is stark.

• Fraud now accounts for around 45 per cent of all Crime Survey offences, with more than four million offences committed against the public every year.
• Cybercrime represents around one in ten crimes.
• At least 59,000 people are involved in serious and organised crime in the UK, costing our economy at least £47 billion annually.

And so strong local policing that I know we all believe in needs specialist support

That makes local policing more important, not less.

The neighbourhood team.

The response officer answering a call for help.

They remain the people the public turn to for protection.

But they cannot tackle these threats alone.

• They need digital and communications specialists who can examine devices and criminal communications.
• Financial investigators who can trace money across borders.
• Surveillance teams, undercover officers and firearms specialists.

Those capabilities must be available when local officers need them, not sit beyond their reach in a patchwork of collaborations.

Yet too much of policing remains organised around boundaries too small to sustain the specialist support modern investigations require.

For example:

Eight forces carried out no basic undercover operations in the last year. That raises a serious question about whether these tactics are available wherever they are needed.

We cannot ask local officers to confront international criminal networks without the strength of a wider service behind them.

This is not a choice between neighbourhood policing and specialist capability.

Strong local policing needs both. Reform must deliver both.

(THE SYSTEM)

The cause of our current problems is that policing has tried to keep up, made do as best it can to patch over our broken model.

But the model is creaking.

We have 43 overstretched forces trying to do too much, with too little.

An incoherent national landscape of the NPCC, College of Policing, National Crime Agency and Counter Terrorism Policing.

Together with a patchwork of critical national services hosted by individual forces:

• Helicopters in West Yorkshire
• Ballistics Intelligence in West Midlands
• Vehicle Crime Intelligence Service in Hampshire
• And so the list goes on

And forces so hollowed out that we now rely on nine regional and many bilateral collaborations to provide capabilities such as major crime investigation and armed policing.

Across our 43 forces, the share of the workforce in support functions varies sharply, from around 9 to 12 per cent in the largest forces to more than 15 per cent in some others. Scale buys efficiency and keeps more resources on the frontline.

These functions are essential. But we do not need to replicate them across 43 separate forces. This inefficiency is costing us thousands of posts which could be reinvested in local policing.

WHAT POLICING NEEDS

So, if future funding is constrained

And our structures don't set us up to succeed, what is the solution?

Earlier this year the Home Secretary set out an ambitious vision for police reform.

And as we await Lord Hogan-Howe's report, we have an opportunity to shape what comes next. I believe this looks like:

One National Police Service.

Eight to ten Regional Police Forces.

Hundreds of Local Policing Commands.

We have to move from today's fragmented, bureaucratic, top heavy spaghetti model.
This simpler structure must deliver five things.

First, stronger local policing.

That means better resourced local policing commands, preventing more crime, solving more crime and delivering better results for victims.

Each would sit within one of eight to ten regional forces, giving local officers access to the specialist skills and capabilities they increasingly need.

Local policing at the heart.

The strength of a bigger force behind it.

Second, a leaner service with better technology.

A simpler model could free up resources for thousands more crimefighters.

But we also need to give them better tools.

We cannot keep pretending that 43 forces, with 86 legally separate decision makers, that we can deliver modern technology as effectively as one empowered national service working with a small number of regional forces.

Less duplication.

Better tools.

More capacity to fight crime.

Third, stronger partnerships at every level.

But policing cannot deliver safer communities alone. Local policing commands must work with councils to prevent crime and safeguard vulnerable people.

Mayors would set priorities for regional forces, shaping the response around the needs of their areas.

And police, prosecutors, courts and probation should work across common geographical boundaries, overseen by a mayoral board for the region.

This must mean more than another meeting. These partnerships need the authority to resolve problems and deliver a joined up service, going much further than today’s local criminal justice boards.

Fourth, clear national leadership.

Behind those local and regional partnerships, we need one National Police Service, equipping regional forces with the best technology and leading a coordinated response to organised crime and terrorism.

That means clear national leadership for fraud and cybercrime, replacing the fragmented responsibilities between the National Crime Agency and City of London Police.

And it means rebuilding investment in leadership development and training, so our people have the skills to succeed.

Finally, targeted investment.

None of this removes the need for adequate funding.

Continued disinvestment in policing is dangerous. Reform is essential, but it cannot substitute for investment.

Returning police funding to at least 0.9 per cent of GDP would put that service back on a stronger footing.

And a service designed for the future would ensure that money delivers the greatest possible protection for the public.

THE COST OF NOT ACTING

The alternative, choosing incremental action instead of the radical approach I suggest would mean.

Fewer officers in neighbourhoods.

Unprotected high streets.

An increasingly overstretched and frustrated workforce.

Less focus on prevention

Having to choose between complex or neighbourhood crime – when both is possible and essential

Victims being let down.

An inability to quash disorder

And communities unprotected from changing threats

Let me be clear

We’d be choosing the degradation of policing.

Or we can act now – putting communities first.

Our people deserve a system designed to help them succeed.

Our communities deserve a police service built around today's threats rather than yesterday's assumptions.

And most of all future generations deserve a policing model ready for the decades ahead.

Thank you.