Home Secretary tells police to ‘get back to basics’ in major speech

11 November 2022

The Home Secretary has urged police officers to get “back to basics” in her first major speech to senior leaders.

Speaking to Police and Crime Commissioners and the National Police Chiefs’ Council in London on Wednesday (9 November), Suella Braverman called for a renewed focus on putting officers on the beat, pursuing every crime, and using stop and search.

She praised Chief Constable Stephen Watson of Greater Manchester for doing exactly that. Under his leadership GMP is responding far faster to emergency calls and the number of open investigations has halved since 2021, Ms Braverman said.

“The way to ensure public confidence in the police is to focus on getting the basics right. What I call ‘common sense policing’. The kind of policing the law-abiding patriotic majority deserves and expects,” she said.

“Our police officers’ time is precious, and the public want the police to be tackling crime, not debating genders on Twitter.”

The Home Secretary urged police forces to be robust and confident in tackling what she called the “radicals, the road-blockers, the vandals, the militants and the extremists.”

She warned: “Scenes of members of the public taking the law into their own hands are a sign of a loss of confidence and I urge you all to step up to your public duties in policing protests. The law-abiding patriotic majority is on your side.”

Ms Braverman promised £130 million funding to tackle serious violence, including as part of this, £64 million for a network of 20 Violence Reduction Units.

Reacting to the comments, Nottinghamshire Police Federation chair Simon Riley said: “While I have reservations about some of the tone of the Home Secretary’s speech, I can tell you that my members in Nottinghamshire are already working tirelessly to deliver the type of frontline policing that the Home Secretary expects. This is all well and good as long as we are given the resources we need.

“We lost 21,000 officers in the last decade and also a reduction in police staff due to Government cost-cutting. This was a hammer-blow which we are still to recover from, even with the officer uplift.

“My plea to the new Home Secretary is – if you want results, you need to invest in police officers. We have officers who are struggling to make ends meet and are utterly ground down by the job. We cannot succeed as a force unless these fundamental problems are resolved. Police officers will always strive to get the basics right, but this is a two-way street and the Government has to concentrate on the basics – such as long-term investment in policing - as well.”

Read the full speech.