Rupert Matthews is the Conservative Police and Crime Commissioner for Leicestershire and Rutland
So the Starmer-Swift Scandal staggers to its predictably unsatisfactory conclusion. Nothing much has been achieved, except to further besmirch the already rather tawdry reputation of the incoming Labour government.
Taylor Swift was provided with a blue-light escort by the Metropolitan Police when, strictly speaking, she did not qualify for one. We could debate the rights and wrongs of that escort, but what has raised eyebrows was that somebody senior in government had contact with the Met on the issue. And just days later Sir Keir Starmer met Taylor Swift and her mother backstage at Wembley.
All very fishy. But nothing terminal to anybody’s career.
However, the most arresting part of all this, from the point of view of a Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC), was that a politician apparently both tried and succeeded in influencing an operational police matter.
That is a big “no, no” for any Police and Crime Commissioner. I would no more try to tell the Chief Constable in Leicestershire and Rutland how to conduct a murder investigation than I would tell my dentist how to do a filling. And quite right too. It would be an action worthy of a banana republic if I were able to get a Labour councillor arrested because she had said something disobliging about me.
But we live in a democracy and “no taxation without representation” still holds true. As PCC, I am responsible for funding far more than the police force – Community Safety Partnerships, victim support, crime prevention and much more. Look to the local PCC for funding, governance and guidance.
The impact of the new Labour government on funding for PCCs is not yet clear, but I am assuming that it is not going to be good news. With so many demands on the budget that I have from local taxation and the central government, I am going to need some way to sort out which proposals and which recipients are going to provide the public with the most effective and efficient way of building safe and prosperous communities.
With that foreboding in mind, I had written into my manifesto for the election back in May a section on budget allocation. The key passage read:
“I will establish a ‘star chamber’ system under which the PCC is supported by qualified and experienced experts when agreeing and monitoring budgets, goals and performance. This will allow the scarce resources available to be targeted where it can be demonstrated that they will do the most good.”
I borrowed the concept of a ‘star chamber’ from Stuart England when a special court was established to ensure the fair enforcement of laws when one participant was sufficiently powerful that ordinary courts might hesitate to find against them. In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher revived the term to refer to a meeting to settle disputes between the Treasury and high-spending departments. As a historian, such a pedigree appealed to me – though I doubt I’ll go so far as to repaint my office with a starry sky motif, like the original.
I have no doubt that the Community Safety Partnerships will claim that they keep our communities safe in efficient and effective ways, and so deserve more funding. Our victim support services will say the same, and so (no doubt) will the Chief Constable. I fully expect that there will be more ways to spend the taxpayers’ money than there will be money to spend.
And so I will be inviting all those bodies that my budget funds to come to the Star Chamber and put their case. That includes – in case of concern – the Chief Executive of the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner. Just because a project is run out of my office does not mean it will be exempt from scrutiny.
I will expect the Chief Constable, my own Chief Executive and other bodies that I fund to to drive down costs and make their operations as efficient and cost effective as possible. I expect them to look continually for ways to refocus resources to where they are needed most – into the frontline.
I will expect them to “live within their means” and to continually look for ways to manage their operations so that they neither accumulate large budgetary surpluses nor find themselves in the position of imposing sudden and damaging cuts when a more gradual and sensible management of finances would have achieved the same end result.
And to be able to demonstrate to the Star Chamber how they are doing that.
Believe it or not, I inherited from the previous Labour PCC a system under which nearly everybody was guaranteed a set percentage of the total funds available. This meant that there was little incentive to demonstrate to me that their organisation was effective or efficient. They got their money anyway.
Those days are gone.
Using the Star Chamber approach I, as elected representative of the taxpayers, will have a firm grip on where the money goes and on what it is spent. All without interfering in the vital operational independence of the Chief Constable.
Pop stars can come to Leicester safe in the knowledge that they won’t get embroiled in political scandal.
