I’ve learnt the hard way that bad police reform breeds pen pushers

OK, I admit it. police and crime commissioners are, at least in part, my fault. I suggested putting our constabularies under directly elected sheriffs in a 2005 book, Direct Democracy, co-written with a score of Conservative MPs. I carried on pushing the idea until a watered-down version of it appeared in the 2010 Conservative manifesto. As Prospero puts it, “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”.

The role of the 41 PCCs is up for review, and I can see why. They failed to catch the public’s imagination. Turnout at their first elections in 2012 was just 15.1 per cent, and in 2016 was still only 26.6 per cent. They never recovered from a 2014 Channel 4 documentary called Meet the Police Commissioner, in which Ann Barnes, who was PCC for Kent, revealed herself as a real-life David Brent, talking in wince-making management-speak and repeatedly getting her job title wrong.

And yet Ms Barnes had previously been running Kent’s police as chairman of the Police Authority. The difference was that voters could now remove her – as they surely would have done had she not seen which way the wind was blowing and stood down.

Which serves to remind us of why elections were introduced in the first place. A gap had opened up between the police and everyone else. When chief constables were asked what the police’s priorities should be, they talked about diversity and inclusion. When the general public were asked what the same question, they talked about catching criminals.

PCCs were intended to narrow that gap. But, from the beginning, there was bureaucratic resistance – a determination that, if elections could not be halted altogether, they should be made inconsequential. Hence the banal, unmemorable name. 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”.

“Where,” I asked, “do you think the Americans got the name from?” But, as was later to happen over Brexit, Whitehall was determined to be as unambitious as possible. “Commissioner” is a name only a civil servant would propose. And the shoddy syntax implies that PCCs are in charge of crime.

Worse, at the insistence of the Lib Dems, the first elections were shifted from the May local elections to November. Candidates were denied a free mailshot. The result was that few voters knew there was an election.

PCCs got off to the worst possible start.

Scrapping the elections would return us to the status quo ante – unaccountable constabularies filled with PC PCs. An alternative would be to go in the other direction and give elected police chiefs meaningful power – not just over budgets, but also over local sentencing guidelines.

Imagine that the PCC for Kent jailed shoplifters, while the PCC for Surrey took a softer line. One of two things would happen. Either a flood of Kentish crooks (and crooks of Kent) would pour across the county border, encouraging Surrey to elect someone tougher; or, conversely, Kentish taxpayers would baulk at funding the extra prison places. Either way, voters would be in charge.

If the office had meaningful powers then, instead of former councillors, we might get the heavyweight independents originally envisaged. But please let’s come up with a better name. If Sheriff really is too American, how about High Marshall? Anything rather than what we have.

FOLLOW Daniel Hannan on Twitter @DanielJHannan; at telegraph.co.uk/opinion