Did our political overseers turn a blind eye to failings?
Greater Manchester Police was placed into special measures last month and the Chief Constable swiftly quit. But what had politicians been doing? JENNIFER WILLIAMS investigates
“MI S TA K E S have been made in the past,” a Labour councillor from Rochdale told Greater Manchester’s police and crime panel on Friday.
“We don’t need to look backwards, we need to look forwards.”
Hmm. Focusing solely on the future is certainly an appealing narrative for those politically charged with overseeing policing here, given that our force has spiralled into special measures under their noses.
Sadly, though, an eye on the horizon is only one part of addressing failures at Greater Manchester Police. An inquest is needed too.
Britain’s second-largest police force didn’t reach crisis point overnight. Its problems – including those with its culture – date back years and many have been repeatedly highlighted by whistleblowers, a handful of vocal MPS, the Rochdale Observer, other news outlets and victims of crime, as well as the policing inspectorate in a whole series of reports spanning nearly five years before, finally, at the end of 2020, it lost patience.
So questions to those who have been accountable locally for overseeing the police during that time are worth posing. The political temptation to a irbrush, ignore or rewrite history can be powerful.
But nearly three million people depend on GMP protecting them and catching criminals; thousands of officers are dedicated to serving it.
It matters whether the oversight system is fit for purpose.
To start at the top, the mayor’s office – which holds the police and crime commissioner role – has been on something of a journey in recent times where GMP is concerned.
If you go back even just a handful of years, some in the system here used to joke darkly that the fire service was the ‘naughty kid’ of the organisations under the mayor’s remit, frequently subjected to criticism for poor leadership and the state of its budgets. Arguably most significantly, it bore the brunt of the conclusions in the Burnhamcommissioned Kerslake Review into the emergency response to the Manchester Arena attack.
GMP, by contrast, rarely suffered much of a public cross word from the mayor until much more recently. It’s a distinction clearly still irritating the former county fire officer, Peter O’reilly, who was eased out of post in the wake of the
Ke r s l a k e
Review’s findings. Commenting on the GMP situation on Twitter this weekend, he queried whether the force’s failures were ‘proof that the police and crime commissioner experiment has failed’.
The mayor could have reviewed the culture and leadership of the police back in 2017, he remarked, but chose not to.
Peter O’reilly is no fan of Andy Burnham’s, clearly, and the circumstances of his departure make his antipathy unsurprising. But after the Kerslake Review there was a sense of unease more widely among both senior figures and the frontline here that it had not attributed the emphasis of criticism equitably.
There is an even more widespread expectation that the force will not fare so well in the ongoing public inquiry into the atrocity.
As recently as summer 2019, the mayor’s office was sufficiently satisfied with the Chief Constable to extend his contract until the end of October this year, branding his performance ‘outstanding’.
That raised eyebrows, not least because it was just a few weeks after Her Majesty’s Inspectorate found the force’s performance had declined to ‘requires improvement’, expressing – not for the first time, or the last – particular concern about its crime investigations and protection of vulnerable people.
These days, the mayor’s office is quick to point to a defensive culture within GMP as a key source of recent ills. But that same defensive culture was very clearly in evidence in the force’s response to that May 2019 HMI report. When inspectors said things had got worse, senior command flat-out refused to accept it.
There are many other examples of lengthy, argumentative essays issued by senior officers in recent years in response to news articles that raised legitimate questions. Those of us covering the force started to treat it as a feature rather than a bug.
Fast-forward to December 2020, however, and HMI were now royally kicking off. Andy Burnham no longer praised Ian Hopkins’s performance. Instead he criticised a ‘defensive’ high-level culture within the force.
The narrative has subsequently been fleshed out further. Friday saw a lengthy mayoral statement to Greater Manchester’s police and crime panel about the crisis, featuring a barely-veiled attack on the same Chief for ‘deliberately’ withholding information from the mayor’s office, turning access to facts into a ‘war of attrition’. The mayor had only been able to take action in relation to GMP’S failures once HMI revealed the scale of the problems last month, he argued, because he hadn’t himself had the information he needed until then.
The mayor’s office has definitely found it hard to get information from the force at times. There have been occasions where we have reported big problems within GMP – the suspension of nearly two dozen officers in north Manchester under suspicion of handling stolen goods, for example, or the force’s abject failure to provide evidence on time to the Arena inquiry – and our articles were the first they knew of them.
But that doesn’t mean broader issues were unknown to his office. And the remarks now appearing in the names of Andy Burnham and Beverley Hughes are an order of magnitude more critical than they were just weeks previously.
As a result, their comments aren’t flying with a lot of police officers, even if there were few tears shed following the Chief’s departure.
To take just one of those who got in touch after Friday’s meeting: “Andy Burnham and Bev Hughes can’t pretend they had to wait for things to get really sh**e before doing something.
“It was obvious to Stevie Wonder how bad it was.”
Concerns about safeguarding in particular had been raised internally with the mayor’s office long before December’s report, they said. And of course they had been raised in public by the inspectorate: in 2016, 2018, 2019 and twice in 2020.
A former senior official puts it another way: “I can’t believe that statement. It’s a complete own f***ing goal if you ask me. ‘They didn’t tell me’ has never really washed with me, or anybody else.”
Another says: “Everyone knew about Ian and the culture and the crap decisions, eg IOPS. It should have been tackled when Andy first got the job.”
The Arena attack happened just days after Burnham took office, meaning a widescale overhaul of the force would undoubtedly have been politically unpalatable. The horror and trauma unleashed by the attack may have cooled now, but it was white-hot at the time. Nevertheless critics, from Peter O’reilly to others still working in the system, would point out that it didn’t stop the mayor launching a root-andbranch review into the fire service soon afterwards.
So while there are few who would disagree with the mayor’s analysis that GMP has suffered from a negative, defensive culture – certainly not me, having regularly been at the receiving end of it – that doesn’t mean it is landing convincingly as an explanation for belated action.
Nevertheless the mayor’s office is not the only part of the local political system to have kept its head down where criticising the police is concerned.
For years politicians have told me, in varied tones of despair and resignation, that the force is a basketcase, but only sparsely have those sentiments been iterated in public.
There are exceptions: Tory MPS, including Chris Green and James Daly; Labour’s Graham Stringer and Jim Mcmahon; Bolton’s Tory council leader David Greenhalgh. But Labour MPS, more generally, were quick enough to criticise Home Office problems with the Police National Computer system a few weeks ago, while being largely silent about GMP. More often, such is the political culture in Greater Manchester, the conversations that did take place were held behind closed doors.
Stories would drift back of Labour MPS telling Andy Burnham in private of their frustrations around the force’s culture, or of Labour council leaders raising the wildly troublesome new computer system – which is directly relevant to them, due to its interaction with the safeguarding services for which they are responsible – as a concern, but being brushed off by the force.
On only one occasion was there a relevant conversation in public at the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, however, or at least that I’ve ever seen: in October 2019, when we had (correctly) made such a fuss about the
risks in the backlogs being created by IOPS that the Chief Constable was brought before leaders to explain what was happening.
Even then – and even though all of the conurbation’s directors of children’s services had written to the Chief raising their own concerns about the system – there was still little challenge from leaders.
The only real exceptions were Coun Greenhalgh, who expressed worries about the impact of IOPS on his safeguarding department, and Salford’s mayor Paul Dennett.
It was an opportunity to raise all those wider underlying frustrations about the force, but little was made of it.
I confess to still being peeved about that meeting, in Salford civic centre.
The Chief spent much of it suggesting we were overplaying the issues with IOPS and implying that I didn’t understand the way policing worked. He underestimated just how many conversations I’d actually had.
Yet there was little public help from councillors, even though many of them knew there to be quite serious and legitimate concerns about the system.
Still. Council leaders are not, ultimately, tasked with direct political oversight of GMP.
Aside from the mayor and his deputy, that role falls instead to Greater Manchester’s police and crime panel.
This is the closest thing we now have to the old police authority, a body that was itself far from perfect, but which seemed to get through a good deal more in the way of substantial paperwork, whether on police performance, budgets or operational expenditure, than its successor.
Made up of a councillor from each local authority and almost exclusively comprising Labour members, in the early days of the panel I was struck by the lack of paperwork being tabled to it. Meeting after meeting would seem to largely focus on the committee’s own terms of reference, or its membership. A couple of times a year, the precept or a glossy document about policing priorities would be discussed.
The panel has begun receiving a bit more in the way of reports since then. But to take IOPS as a really obvious example of something requiring tedious but rigorous scrutiny – given the expenditure, performance and safety implications – I can’t see any evidence that the computer system had ever been discussed by the panel prior to it going live in summer 2019, despite it being 18 months late by that point, hugely expensive and clearly a crucial and highrisk plank in the force’s transformation plans.
Why not? The answer isn’t clear. There’s any number of other major issues I can’t recollect seeing discussed by the panel either.
Then again, the mayor himself didn’t go to a single meeting with GMP about the new computer system before it went live, according to the results of a Freedom of Information request I eventually dragged out of the GMCA last year.
Anyway, back to the panel.
Once Andy Burnham had made his statement last Friday about issues in the force, members had the opportunity to interrogate him.
The almost solely Labour membership chose mainly to highlight the benefits of partnership working, best practice and the importance of moving on and looking ahead. It played like a local government version of the BBC satire W1A.
One councillor, Oldham’s Stephen Williams, remarked sympathetically that Andy Burnham and Beverley Hughes ‘must have been fizzing’ when they read the HMI report. Indeed.
Salford’s David Lancaster professed himself ‘shocked’ that the latest HMI report was bad, given his own dealings with the force.
Telling, perhaps, given so many police officers and officials said after its publication that the inspection basically just told them what they already knew.
Coun Lancaster, who also used to sit on the old police authority, did complain that he hadn’t really seen very much information on GMP’S performance over the past few years, unlike under the old model, meaning it had been impossible to properly audit. They shouldn’t be waiting until ‘two or three years after the event’ to find out that the force is ‘weak’, he said.
True. Has he – or anyone else – ever requested that information be presented to the panel though? It’s hard to see any legitimate reason it could be refused. An oversight system is only as good as its members, after all.
Either way, Friday’s meeting was no shining example of interrogation. Nobody on the panel was planning to give Margaret Hodge a run for her money.
No councillor asked the mayor what sort of information GMP had failed to share with him, despite that being the stand-out claim in his statement. Nobody asked him how regularly he had met with the Chief since being elected in 2017, or queried how exactly he has gone about oversight, given the state that the force was ultimately shown to be in, four years on. No-one queried IOPS in relation to the GMP’S failures, at all, even though the mayor has recently sent in a team to independently review it, more than a year and a half after it launched, and the Police Federation is still raising concerns about its functionality.
And nobody asked why the Chief’s contract was extended back in July 2019, when performance and cultural issues were already evident.
There are legitimate points to be made about the toothlessness of the police and crime panel in comparison to the old police authority, due to the limits within the legislation controlling what it can legally consider.
But it is harder to buy that argument if it spends more time sympathising with the mayor than scrutinising him.
And if this is an issue here, it’s unlikely we’re the only part of the country dealing with these kinds of weaknesses.
In the background, though, there are signs the mayor’s office has realised how much more visible it now needs to be on policing.
Council sub-committees have historically struggled to get anyone from his office before them to interrogate, but it is understood both Andy Burnham and Bev Hughes are expected to attend several town hall meetings in the coming weeks.
That represents a shift. In March 2019, for example, Manchester town hall’s communities scrutiny committee resorted to sarcasm over its struggles to get Bev Hughes to attend. The councillors wanted to ask a reasonable question: how many of the new police officers being hired using council tax rises would be based in the city?
(A similar concern has recently been raised by councillors in Salford, who suspect they don’t have their fair share of cops.)
But the deputy mayor had made clear she would not be attending, after what the chair dryly described as the ‘72nd’ time of asking.
At the time, I was told that the view from the mayor’s office was that it wasn’t answerable to that committee. In the end, Baroness Hughes did attend a meeting with the members, but it was in private. Long live democracy.
So where are we now, in February 2021?
The Home Office, partly with a political eye to its leadership’s most hated Labour opponents, Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham, is in the process of reviewing the police and crime commissioner system right now.
Priti Patel is not said to be a fan of the system and Tory MPS here, most notably Bolton’s Chris Green, have pushed in Parliament on the issue of local scrutiny.
Quite what the government review will throw up is unclear, other than an opportunity for electiontime attacks. But whatever it concludes, there is decent reason to currently be worried about the way Greater Manchester goes about overseeing its police force.
The public has become acclimated to, if not accepting of, a force that often doesn’t take its concerns or requests seriously. That’s not a safe place to be in.
As journalists, we have become accustomed to, but definitely not happy about, a culture that aggressively says no.
Andy Burnham is not wrong in saying there’s been a problem with opaqueness and defensiveness at GMP. It has been a problem for years and we have now raised it so many times with the force that I’ve lost count.
What grates is the length of time it has taken for the political system to acknowledge publicly what we – and so many others – have been saying.
It’s important, too, not to forget police officers in all of this. The day after the mayor’s statement to the panel, I received this from a very experienced cop, in charge of a large number of other cops.
“Morale across the force is very low at the moment ... the frontline in particular feel blamed for the failures – which is totally wrong,” they said.
“Some admission of fault from the exec level, in regards to both the performance issues and the failings of IOPS, would go a long way to beginning the reparations. But as yet, that’s not been forthcoming, and I don’t think it will be. “Tough times, really.” It is to those people, and all the rest of us living here, that Greater Manchester’s political system pays its keep.
Its record of governance has been dealt a blow by this crisis – or perhaps not so much a blow, because that implies this all hit very suddenly. It really didn’t. More accurately, political scrutiny of the police has, over a long period of time, not stood up to much scrutiny itself.