The appointment of Chief Constables is proving to be a huge challenge across the UK and it is clear that the challenge is caused by several aspects. These were outlined over the last few weeks with a meeting of the House of Commons, Home Affairs select Committee at the end of June attended by Tom Winsor, the Chief Inspector of Constabulary. He pointed out that when the Chief Constable for Greater Manchester was appointed in 2000 the number of applicants were between 6 – 8 all of whom were existing Chief Constables from other areas. When the successful applicant, Peter Fahy retired, his successor was appointed from two applicants one of whom was a Chief Constable and one of whom was at a lower rank. When the vacancy at the West Midlands emerged only one applicant applied and he was the deputy Chief Constable of that force, even though it is one of the largest police services in the UK.

According to Winsor “There’s always been a churn, but it does appear there is a higher turnover of chief constables holding that rank for a shorter period than used to be the case….I think that police and crime commissioners are a new factor and it is conceptually possible that people are being deterred because in some places they see PCCs placing undue pressure on chief constables and therefore the operational freedom and general professional freedom of a chief constable is rather less than it used to be”

An example of how this works out comes from an interview at the same time as the meeting took place with the North Wales PCC Arfon Jones who was in a position to appoint a new Chief Constable and stated “I am looking for a chief constable who has a similar vision to mine and an ability to think outside of the box” Arfon was recruiting at the same time as the PCCs for North Yorkshire, Cambrideshire and Northamptonshire and Cressida Dick was also recruiting for an Assistant Police Commissioner in the Metropolitan Police. According to one piece of research, over half the chief constables appointed in 2015 were the only people applying for the job.

It is clear that one of the major impacts of the second set of elections for Police and Crime Commissioners in 2016, 3.5 years after the first ones was the change of emphasis. In 2012 around 1/3 of the PCCs were Independent of any political party and the balance was more or less evenly split between the Tories and Labour. In 2016 the Political Parties utilised their resources and with the exception of 3 PCCs every one is now a party politician. This places the Chief Constables in a very difficult position, particularly when one reads the words from Arfon Jones, the only Plaid Cymru PCC. All their working lives, Constables in Police Forces are forbidden to identify with a political set of ideas. No doubt most will like many people outside of the police have personal views, but these cannot be displayed and indeed membership and open support for a party can lead to discipline for the officers concerned. To then have a PCC demanding that the person shares their vision may sound uncomplicated until that PCC is unsuccseful and beaten in the next election by someone from another party. The idea of political identification is not unique to chief constables. One only has to look at how many Chief Executives of local government and senior civil servants in central government are dispensed with when a new political party comes into power in the relevant area.

It is clearly time for party politics to be denied access to roles such as PCCs or for the party based PCCs to be prevented from making appointments on their own. After all that is what the Police and Crime Panel is capable of assisting with and they are by their very definition made up of a mixture of politicians from different parties and a minor involvement by Independent members which is clearly one of the failings of PCPs as the Independent members should be in the majority, not a tokenistic minority of two people.