Reports over the last week have suggested that several police forces are taking the first steps in an unprecedented exercise in outsourcing police functions to the private sector, supported by the Home Secretary.
Predictably this has resulted in alarm from groups such as the Police Federation, as well as howls of outrage from the Labour Party. Nobody should be fooled for a second by Labour’s crocodile tears: it is they who In 2002 pushed through the legislation that enabled this to happen!
But the fears of the Fed should be listened to and understood. After all, the tender document does include functions such as patrolling, incident response, detention of suspects and crime detection. And anyone who has ever worked with IT consultants knows what they are like in the case of a major IT incident….. (I certainly did in my two previous jobs)
So I’m calling for a debate at this weekend’s Lib Dem Spring Conference, which fortuitously is already debating policing. My amendment to that debate focuses on the principle of policing by consent. It calls for Lib Dems in Government to draw the line at services where accountability to the public would be compromised by the profit motive.
In my view, a number of these functions are not at all suitable for marketisation. However, transfer to mutual, not-for-profit organisations might be appropriate in some cases. A pity that Labour, hypocritically, failed to protect this in 2002 and is now attempting to blame others for this mess of their creation.
(I’ve categorised this as ‘Reading Labour Lies’ in anticipation of their coming election literature in Reading)
