End of the road for crime commissioners
Government says 'experiment' with crime commissioners has not worked
It is rare for a politician to hold their hands up and admit to getting something wrong.
But let’s give the former Conservative MEP Dan Hannan one cheer for acknowledging that he is partly to blame for the introduction of crime commissioners.
The government has announced that it is to scrap commissioners after concluding that the idea has failed and they should be ended.
So, why has Dan done the equivalent of walking into a police station and asking to be arrested for the charge of bringing forward the idea?
Scroll back to 2020 and you will find his admission in the pages of the Daily Telegraph, for whom he was writing a column for the newspaper.
Hannan first pitched the idea in The Plan: Twelve Months to Renew Britain, a 2008 book co-authored with Douglas Carswell, a Conservative MP who later defected to UKIP.
So what was the problem? Actually, it was the first of several problems with the concept of crime commissioners, not all of which were immediately recognisable.
“When I asked what was wrong with ‘sheriffs’, the name originally proposed, I was told that Home Office focus groups had rejected it as ‘too American’,” he declared.
The idea of crime commissioners came about as a result of the perceived difficulties people had in identifying clearly who was ultimately the individual accountable for the actions of their local police force.
And the best way to resolve that was - according to the government - to have a crime commissioner, democratically-elected and charged with scrutiny of the force to ensure it was doing what it should
Unfortunately for the government, its blueprint failed to galvanise both the public or the force for which there are a multitude of reasons, not least the challenge of getting people engaged in discussing how best to tackle crime.
And there was confusion over exactly what powers commissioners had, with the general public inclined to be even more sceptical once they learned that they had no powers beyond strategic oversight.
The police authorities that were the non-political, non-partisan predecessor bodies - were, it is true - slightly more accountable but were also left with the delicate balancing act of meeting its main objectives.
These were to ensure the force was cracking down on crime effectively and, er, that’s just about it.
So, the government has acted and says they will be replaced. By what?
Well here’s the thing: their role may be absorbed by those areas who are moving to having an elected mayor and in those areas where there is no mayor, the role will fall to crime boards made up of council leaders.
There is a familiar ring to this but just can’t nail down what it is..