Fed Chair gives his views on proposed policing reforms

20 November 2024

The Home Office’s proposed policing reforms threaten a return to the bad old days of performance targets, the Chair of Sussex Police Federation has warned.

Raffaele Cioffi was commenting after Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced major policing reforms at the National Police Chiefs' Council and Association of Police and Crime Commissioners' annual conference.

These include a new Police Performance Unit to “track national data on local performance and drive up standards”; a Neighbourhood Policing Guarantee to “get policing back to basics and rebuild trust between local forces and the communities they serve”; and a new National Centre of Policing to harness new technology and forensics, making sure policing is better equipped to meet the changing nature of crime.

Raffaele said “This feels like a return to police performance targets, which risk narrowing the focus of policing and causing important, unmeasured aspects of the job to be overlooked."

He said:  "I urge the Home Secretary to reflect on the years before 2010, when performance targets forced officers to alter their approach to the public in order to meet monthly benchmarks.”

“Officers would concentrate on the targets for arrests, stop search, and detections. But there were many unmeasurable areas that officers should also have put their efforts into, rather than just simply key performance indicators for statistical data.”

“What the Home Office did back then was drive officers to narrow their focus on areas the Government was looking at, rather than policing in the wider context.”

“Focusing solely on statistical data overlooks the critical qualitative insights that are essential for effective policing.”

Raffaele said there needed to be more information about the areas of policing the Government wanted to focus on, and how it aimed to measure and fund this work.