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The voters do deserve more of a say over the reforms, but the checks and balances must be got right
Rarely have two letters made such a big difference. By striking the e and r out of "commissioners" on Wednesday night, the House of Lords voted to do away with all talk of elected sheriffs, and to hand back the reins of policing to collective commissions, which is of course what the existing police authorities are. The assault was led by the redoubtable Lady Harris, ordinarily a most loyal Lib Dem.
The most immediate questions, therefore, were for Nick Clegg. Had the newly muscular liberalism he is proclaiming stirred a mutinous spirit which will not merely smooth harsh Conservative edges, but scupper the government programme? Injecting direct democracy into the force was, after all, the centrepiece of the whole police reform bill, and an idea David Cameron has pushed ever since it was dreamed up by his favourite thinktank. Moreover, quite unlike those troubled health service reforms, this was all clearly flagged in the coalition agreement.
The truth, however, is that the defeat had less to do with big picture politics, than the specific proposal at hand. Lady Harris rallied an ermine-trimmed army of former police chiefs and bishops to her cause, and moved some Tories to sit on their hands. All of them fear the proposed form of elections could sacrifice the venerable tradition of keeping the uniformed arm of the law clear of the partisan fray.
Experience in the US is littered with cautionary tales, such as the resignation of the highly rated New York police chief Bill Bratton after he appeared a little too successful for the taste of his mayor on the cover of Time magazine. And in London, where city hall exerts a distinctive governance role, Boris Johnson's shunting aside of the Metropolitan commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, was a scarcely happier affair. If individuals with the right to hire and fire top cops were voted on strict partisan lines all over the country, then we could be set on a road where would-be commissioners would end up flashing party membership cards around.
To acknowledge this danger is not to deny that there is an accountability problem. The Home Office might have fared better in the Lords if it had acknowledged the progress that has been made both through neighbourhood policing and the growing role of independents on the authorities. Even so there is some justice in the caricature of the last great unreformed public service. The Labour proposal to elect authority chairs grapples with the exact same problems as the jeopardised Home Office plans, which may now take years to implement.
The voters do deserve more of a say, but the checks and balances must be got right. The government treated them as an afterthought, and it is paying a heavy political price.
