Could SNP bogeyman Boris be the saviour of Police Scotland?
By Graham Grant
IN the hit US crime drama The Wire, local police commanders are summoned to update top brass on their divisional performance.
But in one episode a snarling commissioner gives an order to airbrush the stats to make them look a little less unfavourable.
Naturally, in Scotland police are entirely free from political interference – though that doesn’t stop ministers claiming credit for any dip in recorded crime.
Last week the country’s Chief Constable, Iain Livingstone, appeared before the Scottish Police Authority (SPA) with a glossy new ‘performance report’, replete with colourful diagrams.
No amount of spin, however, could conceal the fact that the number of murders was up by nearly 40 per cent in a year, and sex crime had risen.
There are also disturbing indications that many of the boasts police chiefs and ministers make about driving down violent offending are beginning to unravel.
But the most remarkable disclosure during that lengthy SPA meeting in Stirling was Mr Livingstone’s bombshell warning that hundreds of officers might have to be axed to balance the books of the single force.
Precisely how many is a matter of debate, but it seems crystal clear that if the service is to save cash, as it must, it will need to be bailed out by the Scottish Government, in the form of ‘additional funding’.
The consensus by the end of the day was that the number of officers would be cut by more than 700; around 400 are of them are only in place because of Brexit – which led to the shelving of long-standing plans to scale down the workforce.
But on top of those 400, another 350 will have to go, leading to a loss of about 750 officers.
In addition, some 300 posts are paid for by local authorities, under an archaic arrangement, and could be vulnerable to town hall belt-tightening.
Among those representing frontline staff, the expectation is that the final reduction could be more than 1,000.
Until now, Mr Livingstone, like his predecessors – both of whom vacated their posts in less than ideal circumstances, one after a string of high-profile blunders and another amid a bullying scandal – has been, perhaps grudglingly, the public face of a brutal cuts agenda.
As former Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill once admitted, the single force was created back in 2013 because Westminster funding cuts, he believed, had made it a ‘necessity’, and ministers had ‘taken the view that we should make a virtue out of a necessity’.
From the beginning, the emphasis was on doing more with less, and there is little doubt that under the old system there was needless duplication and too many costly chiefs – though the unification of the old territorial forces was rushed, and even some of those closely involved in its formation believe it was botched.
But much of the rhetoric from the top of government, and the senior echelons of the force itself, was optmistic about a future with fewer officers: frankly what we really needed was more cyber-crime specialists, not old-fashioned beat bobbies.
That argument is now falling apart at the seams; as Mr Livingstone pointed out, there’s every chance of a major climate change conference in Glasgow next year, attended by 200 world leaders, and possibly another Scottish independence referendum. Well, police always have to plan for the worst…
There’s also the small matter of civil unrest as a consequence of a No Deal Brexit, as well as fuel and food shortages.
Juggling those challenges while trying to eliminate a £24.6million deficit, and without getting rid of officers, is impossible, and so SPA chairman Professor Susan Deacon said she would open formal talks with ministers about securing more cash.
It all seems a far cry from those heady days back in April 2013, when former Chief Constable Stephen House – shortly before he was knighted – said the single force had a ‘unique opportunity to become truly world-class’.
Only a few weeks ago, Community Safety Minister Ash Denham hailed figures showing the number of officers had risen by more than 1,000 since 2007 – but it’s increasingly likely that those gains will be undone.
Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf and his colleagues never tire of highlighting the deficiencies of English policing, in comparison with Scotland; for obvious reasons, it’s likely that in coming months those boasts will be indefinitely shelved, or will at least start to sound hollow.
In his inaugural spending splurge on taking office, Boris Johnson sought to re-establish the Tories’ reputation as the party of law and order by announcing ambitious plans to hire 20,000 officers, reversing some of the deep personnel cuts that had taken place in recent years.
That means Scotland is in line for a dividend flowing from so-called ‘Barnett consequentials’ – the share of spending we receive from UK Government expenditure – though it will be up to the Scottish Government to decide exactly what to do with it.
Fed up with years of relentless cuts which have seen officers complaining about creaking IT and decrepit patrol cars, Mr Livingstone appears to have come to the conclusion that enough is enough, and has called the SNP’s bluff.
He and Professor Deacon are seizing the opportunity to stake a claim to that Barnett money, presumably before the Nationalists pump it all into running the Clydeside shipyard they have just nationalised.
All of which gives the lie to the much-repeated notion that a managed decline of police numbers was possible, and indeed even desirable: with demands on Police Scotland piling up, it’s obvious that this was a dangerous fiction, now exposed by Mr Livingstone.
There was nothing inevitable about the SNP’s decision to select our most prized public service as the primary target for massive cuts, and after six years the force is still hobbled by budgetary constraints heaped on it by the Nationalists.
The legacy of these ham-fisted reforms is now well-documented, after Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland found most police in the country’s biggest division are ‘disillusioned’, with ‘insufficient numbers of officers to meet demand’ in the Greater Glasgow area one of the key ‘frustrations’.
Meanwhile soaring numbers of police and civilian staff suffer from ‘psychological illness’, taking nearly 40,000 sick days in the space of just three months – another finding of that revamped police report unveiled at last week’s SPA meeting.
Such conditions are now the ‘biggest reason for absence’ among officers, accounting for about 40 per cent of sick days, suggesting a mental health crisis that is spiralling out of control.
The pressure on SNP ministers to grant the extra cash is now acute, but the timing of Mr Livingstone’s plea was no accident – it was a direct result of the Tories’ decision to scale up police recruitment south of the Border.
It’s an irony that Nicola Sturgeon and Mr Yousaf will find hard to bear that Scottish policing may be rescued from the Nationalists’ financial quagmire by the party’s nemesis – the bogeyman Tory Prime Minister they want us all to hate.
*This column appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail on August 27, 2019.
