26 November 2015
Kevin Hurley speaks to the Shaw Sheet
John Watson talks to Kevin Hurley TD, Police and Crime Commissioner for Surrey about challenges facing the police.
Kevin Hurley has policing in his blood. Coming from a family which has produced three generations of police officers, no one can have been surprised when, despite his degree in Civil Engineering, he joined the Metropolitan Police in 1979. He rose to the rank of Detective Chief Superintendent and retired in 2011 as Borough Commander for Hammersmith and Fulham.
Quite apart from his broad career in civilian policing – he was from 2001 to 2005 the Head of the Counter Terrorism and Public Order Department of the City Police – he also gained experience of a different sort when, as a major in the Royal Military Police, Territorial Army, he served as CBRN adviser to the commander of 16 Air Assault Brigade in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. With such a strong policing background he was an obvious choice to be one of the new Police and Crime Commissioners in 2012 and the voters of Surrey thought so as well, electing him as PCC for Surrey.
A Police and Crime Commissioner is a political officer whose principal function is to secure the maintenance of an effective police force in the area and to hold the Chief Constable to account. Responsibilities also include the production of the Police and Crime Plan, which sets the objectives for the local police force to pursue. Out of the forty-one PCCs in England and Wales, only seven have a background in policing and five of those are independents. Kevin Hurley is one of them and he regards being an independent as an important adjunct to his experience. It means that his views are seen as being free of political bias; also that everyone, regardless of their politics, feels able to speak to him.
Surrey, as a policing authority, has advantages. Because it is such a wealthy area, an unusually high proportion of police funding (54%, the figure in neighbouring Sussex is 35%) comes from local taxation rather than government grant. That means that, when grant is reduced, it is less vulnerable than those areas which are more heavily grant dependant. Still, the reduction in police funding is a major worry and Hurley is particularly concerned about the effect on the capacity and the capability of the Surrey force. There are a number of issues which build on each other. The first is that Surrey will lose about 10% of its personnel and that will inevitably reduce what the force is able to do. Less officers means less visibility but it will also reduce what he describes as “the force’s footprint”, its level of contact with the community. That in turn limits its ability to gather intelligence and to prevent crime.
But it isn’t just the reduction of numbers which worries Kevin Hurley. Cuts undermine the quality of the force as well as its size. The package offered to policemen has reduced in value since 2010. Wage rises have been kept to one percent a year and mandatory contributions to the pension fund have hit the policeman’s pocket. Without retirement at thirty years service, the career has become less attractive and the result is that it has become harder to attract the best recruits. Worse still he sees good experienced officers leaving the force.
Unfortunately it doesn’t stop there. Training too has been cut back and a Detective Constable now gets four weeks training when he would have had ten. The Police Staff College at Bramshill has been closed and the six-month periods of training for newly promoted senior officers is a thing of the past. It worries Hurley that Surrey will have fewer officers, of lower calibre and less well-trained, and all at a time when the demands falling on the police service are growing.
Some of this growth is an indication of success. Hurley points to the increase in reported sex offences as showing how confidence in the force has improved. Now people believe that if they report such offences they will be properly investigated. Still it places further demands on Surrey police, as does cybercrime and the need to round up migrants who escape into Surrey. As he points out, if ten men escape it takes many times that number of officers to catch them. The terrorist threat following Paris is likely to involve more offices in firearms training and there are always the many functions the police carry out as the “helper of last resort” – some with little real link to enforcing the law.
How then can more resources be made available? Hurley points to the duplication of having forty-three separate police authorities, all with their own administration. What is the point? In his experience nobody cares what badges the officers attending an incident wear. They just want them to deal with it. He points out that McDonalds produce the same product across the country through a large number of outlets with a single central administration and asks why the police cannot do the same.
The answer, he says, lies in the funding. As long as much of the cost of policing can be met by the rate payer, it falls outside central government funding and is effectively hidden from the government’s financial critics. Local funding means local police. In his view savings worth maybe £2billion are being sacrificed to cosmetics.
Meanwhile, however, he and his Chief Constable, Lynne Owens, do what they can by sharing a number of functions such as dogs and firearms teams with neighbouring Sussex, an innovation which he is hoping to extend further. Quite apart from the reduction of cost, this fits in with Hurley’s general philosophy of working closely with other agencies – such as the local authority – to improve results.
The interview being shortly after the Paris attacks, I asked Kevin Hurley what lessons there might be there for British policing. He replied that what stuck in his mind was the sound of automatic firing as the French Police moved into the Bataclan Theatre to take on the killers. The old ideas of containing terrorists and then negotiating with them are simply no use against this sort of attack. Any soldier would tell you that it is crucial to have sufficient firepower to pin the enemy down and then destroy it. That means a revision in tactics. It also means new weaponry.
Kevin Hurley would love the opportunity to advise the Home Secretary on police policy. Until he gets that role, however, he will continue to press for the changes he believes to be necessary and to work with the Chief Constable of Surrey to deliver the best possible service.
Why does he do it? Well, there’s his interest in the subject of course but there is also something deeper than that; a belief that a properly policed and law-abiding society is essential to the way we live and that you cannot have prosperity without it. That is one of the lessons he took home from Iraq.
Kevin Hurley has always fought for his vision of policing, zero tolerant, linked up, community-related, practical. As PCC for Surrey he continues to do so. Will he stand again in 2016? I think he will.
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