Police and Crime Commissioners

Yesterday the government launched a review into the role of Police and Crime Commissioners, helping to give the public a greater say over local policing that affects them. 
  • Police and Crime Commissioners are elected to deliver on the people’s priorities, and we want the public to have confidence that they are doing so – including recruiting 20,000 additional officers, and making the most of the biggest funding increase to policing in a decade.
     
  • That is why the government has launched a review into the role of PCCs, focused on improving public scrutiny and transparency in their work, and ensuring the views of the law-abiding silent majority who voted for them are always at the centre of their decision-making.
     
  • This will ensure that voters can better hold PCCs to account for their performance – giving the public a stronger say in the issues that matter to them.
Personally I am absolutely convinced that the PCC system is vastly more transparent and accountable - and cheaper  - than the system of police authorities which we had before.

I bet the percentage of Cumbria voters who could name Peter McCall as our Police and Crime Commissioner is an order of magnitude higher than the proportion who could have correctly named even two of the seventeen members of the Police Authority which had exactly the same responsibilities before. And the salary of the PCC is less than half the total of the allowances which were paid to those seventeen people.

But it is right that as we approach the end of the second term of the elected commissioners, there should be a review of how the system has worked.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Inadvertent cut & paste job in first para. Anyway we won't need a P&CC when your mate Starkie becomes Mayor of Cumbria
5:56 pm
Chris Whiteside said…
Thank you for pointing out the accidental extra words which I have removed.

Personally

1) There is a precedent in the North West for an area having both a directly elected mayor and a directly elected police and Crime Commissioner (in Liverpool.) I would favour that option.

2) We won't select a candidate for mayor of Cumbria until the position is created, and

3) This is not an attack on Mike Starkie, it is a comment on people who would have something to offer. I am absolutely 100% certain that if the position is created there will be more than one, and probably more than two, strong contenders for the Conservative nomination.
9:43 am
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nick Herbert on his visit to flood hit areas of Cumbria

Please note that the post below was published more than ten year ago on 21st November 2009 Nick Herbert MP, shadow cabinet member for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, was in Cumbria this morning to see the areas affected by the flooding. He writes on Conservative Home about his visit. Here is an extract. I’ve been in Cumbria today to see the areas affected by the floods. I arrived early in Keswick where I met officials from the Environment Agency. Although the river levels had fallen considerably and homes were no longer flooded, the damage to homes had been done. And the water which had got into houses wasn’t just from the river – it was foul water which had risen from the drains. I talked to fire crews who were pumping flood water back into the river, and discovered that they were from Tyne & Wear and Lancashire. They had been called in at an hours’ notice and had been working on the scene ever since, staying at a local hotel. You cannot fail to be impressed by the
Read more

Quotes of the day 19th August 2020

Image
"Wise men profit more from fools than fools from wise men; for the wise men shun the mistakes of fools, but fools do not imitate the successes of the wise."  ( Cato the Elder , who lived 234 BC - 149 BC, quoted in "Lives" by Plutarch.) There is a similar saying by Germany's Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck: Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have put the same saying in a more humorous form: "Wise men profit by the mistakes of others, while fools will not learn even from their own blunders." See also this thread on the "Quote Investigator" website . Let us all be wise and learn from the events of the last few days.
Read more

Quote of the day 24th July 2020

Image
I was moved to put the passage below forward as a quote today when I saw a horrible post on twitter from someone writing that it was "excellent" that someone who took a different view from her about Brexit had died. I won't write which way round it was so that all the Remain supporters can assume the post was from a Brexit fanatic welcoming the death of a remainer and all the Leavers can assume it was a Remainiac welcoming one less Brexiteer. There's been plenty of nasty stuff on both sides but if you catch anyone of your own viewpoint  posting something like that who might listen to you, please do call them out on it - and point out that they're giving everyone on your side of the argument a bad name. Anyway, here's the quote from John Donne.
Read more