So how does one go from sacking DJ Chris Evans to passing judgment on police funding? Grant

IT WAS in the early Noughties that Andrew Fl a nagan emerged f r om t he relative anonymity of the boardroom for a brief spell in the limelight. He was the man who – as £500,000-a-year chief executive of Scottish Media Group (SMG) – sacked Chris Evans, then the enfant terrible Virgin Radio breakfast show host.

SMG had bought Evans’s Ginger Media Group in 2000 for £225million but the following year the star DJ lost his job after missing work and going on a booze-fuelled partying spree for five days.

While Evans has reinvented himself as the rather more sober successor to Wogan on Radio 2, Mr Flanagan is now chairman of the Scottish Police Authority (SPA), the civilian oversight body f or Police Scotland.

It has distinguished itself as perhaps the most toothless regulatory body of all time since the inception of Police Scotland in April 2013 – hopelessly out of its depth as a string of scandals battered the fledgling single force.

Ruthless

Far from being dogged inquisitors, holding Police Scotland to account at every turn, its members have a host of second jobs and routinely fail to ask tough questions of top brass.

Mr Flanagan has been determinedly low-profile since he was appointed SPA chairman last September.

But last month he outlined a vision of the police service clearly informed by his ruthless corporate background.

He told me that policing in Scotland ‘still has a very oldfashioned feel to it’ as ‘something like 90 per cent of our cost base is people’.

As if addressing fellow board members, he asked: ‘Is that a good place to be? Are we using technology to our best advantage? Are we properly training our officers?

‘What does “good” look like? We have the lowest recorded crime figures in 40 years, more police officers than ever before and everyone’s busier than ever before. How do those three things reconcile?’

The SPA chairman was also dismissive of the turmoil caused by a cuts agenda that has seen hundreds of civilian workers lose their jobs, saying finances did not ‘ keep him awake at nights’ – a comment that did not endear him to union bosses.

Perhaps most starkly, he raised the prospect of more than 1,000 officers losing their jobs, if the SNP dropped its commitment to 17,234 officers – a pledge that i s proving harder to keep as the financial squeeze grows.

A range of new demands on police means that we may, in theory, need fewer officers, Mr Flanagan said, though he candidly admitted he did not know how many officers would be required in the future.

Softly spoken, unflappable and with a firm eye on the bottom line, Mr Flanagan had in effect just proclaimed that policing is too ‘ people-based’ and that indeed its reliance on ‘people’ is outdated.

As for police stations, Mr Flanagan is unconvinced that ‘fixed property is a great place for us to be, going forward’.

And yet the shift in thinking he outlined, as seismic as it is, was delivered in much the same manner as the chief executive of a blue-chip firm might present a business plan for the coming year.

It might be argued, of course, that the reason everyone in Police Scotland is so busy (apart from all the job losses) is that they have been fighting crime – though violent and sexual offending are on the rise and housebreaking in some areas has reached epidemic proportions.

The days of Dixon of Dock Green have long vanished and the demands on modern-day policing have indeed changed radically – cyber-crime specialists are pursuing paedophiles online rather than pounding pavements.

But is it really so ‘ oldfashioned’ to presume that ‘people’ are central to policing – and that the police service simply cannot be treated in the same way as a business?

In his previous job as boss of children’s charity NSPCC, Mr Flanagan embarked on a controversial cuts agenda that closed down services and replaced professionals with volunteers.

And he may be about to do it all again because, despite his relaxed attitude to the growing budgetary constraints on policing, there is far more pain to come.

It emerged last week that Police Scotland may have to pull the plug on a £60million crime-fighting supercomputer.

It is being built by Accenture, a company which once played a role in one of the world’s biggest public sector computing disasters, the development of a new IT system for the NHS in England and Wales.

This is where corporate scrutiny might well be rather useful – and yet the SPA has been asleep at the wheel again.

Mr Flanagan, at last week’s SPA board meeting, seemed content with police reassurances that Accenture had been given a three-month deadline to sort out scores of glitches.

Clearly, the near-collapse of a flag ship computer project doesn’t keep him awake at night either.

Disastrous

Much of Mr Flanagan’s strategy in fact seems to reflect the approach of his predecessor, Vic Emery, formerly in charge of Edinburgh’s disastrous trams project, who was forced out of the SPA job after an internal revolt last year.

In an interview yesterday, Mr Emery said: ‘New Zealand is, in terms of population and geography, not too different from Scotland.

‘It had a radical change in policing ten years ago, going from an enforcement agenda to a heavy preventative one.

‘The last time I looked at it, they police New Zealand with approximately 8,500 officers. I am not saying we can do that here. What I am saying is that there are things we can look at.’

The clear ‘direction of travel’ – to use the corporate jargon – is for a thinner blue line.

And yet, as police statistics showed l ast week, violent crime has risen by 5 per cent in the past year and sexual crime is up by 8 per cent (something Mr Flanagan and other SPA members seem remarkably relaxed about).

This points towards the need for more rather than fewer people, but not in the looking-glass realm of policing.

Errors

Fewer people may mean more specialists – of the kind who target online paedophiles, for example – and a greater reliance on more hi-tech approaches.

At a conference hosted by the Association of Scottish Police Superintendents last year, I listened to a presentation by computer experts who said that in future, members of the public would be able to email photographs of crimes via their smartphones to police.

Officers would be despatched – so there will have to be some ‘people’ after all – and the evidence could be stored for future use at trial.

This is an idea that may bear further examination, though of course it could also put the public at risk of attack as they take furtive snaps of thugs.

There are also plans for the public to be able to tweet or even text details of serious crimes – no need for all those costly police stations.

And yet civilian call centre staff are forced to use notepads because of the ‘slow response’ of police computers, with errors in call-logging presenting a‘ risk to the public ’, according to Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland.

It produced a report in the wake of the M9 crash scandal last summer, when a woman was left to die for three days by the roadside because of police blunders.

All those troublesome, expensive people may be around for a while yet – so perhaps there is a place for Dixon of Dock Green policing after all.