‘The Sarah Everard case made me feel sick to my stomach’

As crime figures spiral and forces face racism and sexism charges, the head of Britain’s police chiefs admits he must find new ways to rebuild public trust.

In many ways, Gavin Stephens is an old-fashioned police officer. Now chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), which brings together police leaders across the UK, he is at the forefront of discussions with the Government about the future of policing: investment in facial recognition and artificial intelligence, but his core passion remains neighbourhood policing, which he calls the “bread and butter” of crime-fighting and has been the focus of much of his three-decade career.

“It’s my belief that’s the bedrock of what we do,” he says. “Local relationships will always be important for everything, from antisocial behaviour through to countering terrorism. Everything happens in a neighbourhood somewhere.”

Stephens knows that the impact of one crime can be felt far more widely than in the area it happened. The murder of Sarah Everard in March 2021 by a serving Metropolitan Police officer in London decimated trust in the police nationally and generated reverberations that are still being felt three years later.

When we meet, the NPCC has just announced the results of an unprecedented screening of UK police officers and staff – over 307,000 employees – carried out in the wake of the Casey Review. It resulted in nine new criminal investigations, including into alleged sexual assault, as well as 88 disciplinary investigations, 139 vetting reviews and 128 interventions by management.

“The murder of Sarah Everard made me sick to my stomach – how a colleague could abuse their position of authority and power to commit the most unimaginable suffering,” says Stephens.

He vows that there will be “no place to hide” for sexual predators after a wave of systemic changes aiming to stop the likes of Wayne Couzens entering British policing ever again. He used his warrant card to stop Everard as she walked home alone through London and lure her into his car in March 2021, before raping and murdering her.

It swiftly emerged that Couzens, an armed MetPolice officer, should have been arrested for a series of previous flashing incidents targeting women. Months after he was jailed, David Carrick, an officer serving in the same unit, was exposed as one of Britain’s worst known serial rapists.

Stephens, 52, says the “horrific” cases shook his belief in policing and its values. Asked if another Carrick could be lurking among Britain’s police, he says that despite improvements to vetting and disciplinary procedures, he “can’t give a cast-iron guarantee”.

“What we’re doing gives us a much higher degree of confidence,” but he admits more bad cases will emerge that “have the potential to undermine public confidence because policing is exposing so much, so quickly.”

Stephens wants to repeat the exercise on a regular basis, because it is “only as good as the day in which the data was captured”.

“Transparency has got to be the best thing,” he says. “We will build back lost confidence because we can’t police without it. But it’s a longer process to build back trust than it is to lose it.”

Following a wave of scandals over the treatment of women, the police handling of mentally ill people is now under scrutiny following a knife rampage that left three people dead in Nottingham. Killer Valdo Calocane was given a hospital order on Thursday, after pleading guilty to manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility.

A court heard that during the rampage that saw him brutally stab to death two students and a school caretaker last June, he was “impaired by psychosis resulting from paranoid schizophrenia”. The mother of one of his victims accused Nottinghamshire Police of having “blood on their hands” after failing to arrest him under a warrant issued in September 2022 for another violent assault.

The force said its previous engagement with Calocane was “largely while supporting our colleagues in the NHS”, but admitted there was more it should have done more to arrest him before the stabbings.

Speaking to The Telegraph before the details of the case emerged, Stephens said police had been struggling to balance increasing demand from mental health-related incidents with their other responsibilities.

“There’s always been this discussion about the breadth of [policing], but post-austerity, we’ve seen pressure on other services,” he says. “Policing is a can-do organisation, but I think in places that we’ve tried to help too hard, and maybe we’re not the best agency to give the right care. We’re not mental health professionals.”

A new model known as “right care, right person” is rolling out nationally with the aim of ensuring appropriate NHS agencies, rather than the police, respond to mentally ill people who are not committing a crime or putting people at risk. The Government hopes the change will enable police to prioritise traditional crime-fighting with official statistics showing theft on the rise.

Stephens admits that British police had “lost some of the focus on burglary, shoplifting; things that affect people’s day-to-day lives. I always take issue where people call it low-level offending – it is not.” But he says there is now a “welcome renewed focus on getting the basics right”.

Stephens, who was the chief constable of Surrey Police before he took up his current role last April, believes the breakdown of the neighbourhood policing model during years of austerity is one of the factors driving current public dissatisfaction.

He warns that “very stretched” forces across the UK are about to start a new period of swingeing cuts and that forces will not be able to “provide the services that we know our communities need”.

Calculations by the NPCCsuggest there is a “£3 billion hole” over the next four years, because of a combination of high demand on forces, the rising cost of technology, rocketing wage bills and expensive borrowing. He warns that forces will not be able to “provide the services that our communities need.”

“If you were to walk into any force at the moment, there’ll be conversations going on about where they’re going to have to reduce headcount, where investment needs to be taken out,” Stephens says.

Announcing its new annual funding package in December, the Home Office said forces in England and Wales could receive up to £922m extra funding in the coming year – but only if police and crime commissioners increase the amount taken from council tax.

Stephens is calling for the Government to end “cycles of boom and bust” that have seen periods of pinched budgets followed by massive investment in specific initiatives. The Conservatives have hailed the recruitment of 20,000 additional officers as part of an ambitious “uplift” programme started by Boris Johnson in 2019, but the rapid recruitment caused an imbalance of experience by flooding forces with new officers.

“I want to get away from this idea that you can somehow judge the success of policing by the number of constables,” Stephens says. “That doesn’t tell the story about the skills we need to combat criminality in the future. We need coders and computer scientists, not just bobbies on the beat.”

He estimates there are 4,000 empty police staff posts, including essential forensics experts, data scientists, crime scene examiners, intelligence analysts and other roles core to investigations, vacant across England and Wales. The shortage is leaving police constables recruited as part of the government’s uplift programme “in jobs that they don’t need to do, like answering the phone”, Stephens says.

In his three-year term, his mission is to create more “long-term thinking” about what policing needs and convince the Government to drastically reform its year-by-year funding settlement process in favour of NHS-style longterm workforce planning.

The grand designs are a long way from how Stephens’s career started in 1993, when he joined as a graduate fresh from an engineering and management studies degree at Cambridge University. The prestigious course was sponsored by the General Electric Company (GEC), where Stephens worked every summer, but he soon realised he was more interested in policing because “it was about people, and essentially engineering was a lot about things”.

The career change, which came as something of a shock to his parents, was inspired by the tales told by a school friend’s father, who had been a detective in their hometown of Hartlepool.

“When I graduated, I said to my mam and dad ‘I’m going to join the police’ and they were like, ‘what?’,” Stephens recalls. “But I’ve never looked back really. It’s my friend Andy to blame. It was listening to his dad’s stories, sitting in his kitchen.”

Today we’re meeting in a small glass-fronted room at the NPCC’s new HQ in Westminster. Boxes are still stacked up waiting to be unpacked in his spartan office. Two traditional police hats dangle from a coat stand behind his desk, but Stephens says they belong to his predecessor Martin Hewitt.

He doesn’t seem to mind the lack of creature comforts. “I absolutely love policing,” he grins. “I’m always learning something new, and I think that when policing is done well, we can make a massive difference to people’s lives.”

He is proud of his post, bringing his mother to watch him lay the policing wreath during the Remembrance Sunday service at the Cenotaph, which was “pretty special”. Stephens’ life started out in Hartlepool, County Durham, and despite moving to Surrey in 1996 he has retained his accent and says he is “still proud to be a northerner, I always call that home”.

His mother worked as a clerk on a children’s hospital ward, and his father was an architectural consultant and ran his own small practice, meaning Stephens spent part of his youth “on building sites holding up spirit levels and measuring tapes”.

As a teenager one of his part-time jobs was as a wedding photographer’s assistant, which often involved battling 1980s “meringue-style” bridal dresses. He attended the local comprehensive school and sixth-form college, and became one of its first students to get into Cambridge University after learning about a scholarship scheme at a Middlesbrough careers fair.

“Cambridge was a great place to be,” Stephens says. “You see all that stuff about it being sort of elitist, but that wasn’t my experience at all. I met people from really different backgrounds, and I found it endlessly fascinating.”

It was while working for GEC in Chelmsford during the holidays, that Stephens met his future wife Sarah, who went on to become a teacher in Suffolk when he joined Cambridgeshire Constabulary after graduating.

The couple moved to the south-east to support Sarah’s family when her father passed away, and Sarah herself died of ovarian cancer in 2014, when their son was 14 years old.

“She was very young, fit, healthy, she was a really active teacher,” Stephens says. “It’s just one of those things that’s often late diagnosed, which was the case with Sarah. She fought hard for three years, but really we all pretty much knew it was too late from day one.”

He says he wouldn’t be doing his current job “if it wasn’t for the support and encouragement” from his late wife, and that families are vital for all police officers to “recharge their compassion”.

“We’re giving care to others, sometimes on the worst day in their life, and if your compassion is drained it’s hard to do,” he adds. “I think you get that from your families and I certainly got that from Sarah, and now from my son.”

Stephens joined Surrey Police in 1996 because the woman who answered his call “was friendly to me on the phone when I rang looking for a transfer” and he “never looked back”, rising up from being a constable to serve every single rank until he became its chief in 2019.

Stephens’s forebears in that post include the current Met commissioner Mark Rowley and his predecessor Ian Blair, previous National Crime Agency director-general Dame Lynne Owens, ex-counter terrorism chief Robert Quick and the former HM Chief Inspector of Constabulary Denis O’Connor.

But the person who encouraged Stephens to step up to the national stage was Simon Cole, the long-serving chief constable of Leicestershire Police, who took his own life 12 days after retiring in 2022. “Simon was a massive supporter and the first person that encouraged me to take on national responsibilities as well as force responsibilities,” he says. “Had it not been for Simon, I wouldn’t have got involved in national work in the first place.”

Stephens became the national lead for neighbourhood policing before going on to chair the National Police Chiefs’ Council finance committee.

“That gave me insight into the breadth of everything that goes on in policing,” he says. “Then when Martin Hewitt announced he was going it was encouragement from colleagues that made me decide to stand for election.”

The role as NPCC chair has thrown Stephens into the national spotlight and onto the frontline of fractious discussions with the Government. He had a front-row seat for the row between the Metropolitan Police and Suella Braverman over the policing of pro-Palestinian protests, which culminated in Braverman being sacked as home secretary in November.

Stephens is diplomatic about the controversy, which caused allegations from many police officers that politicians were stepping beyond the law and convention to interfere with complex operational decisions during thousands-strong demonstrations.

“In the grand scheme of things, it’s not a bad thing that we’ve had a discussion in public about the need for operational independence in policing – it’s a fundamental principle,” he says.

“As you get direct political influence over operational decisions, then that boundary can get blurred.”

When asked about the relationships between police leaders and recent home secretaries, Stephens says it’s “important not to invest it in an individual. We work with the government of the day, and we’ll always try to have a positive, strong relationship.”

Braverman had not endeared herself to police by accusing forces of being “woke”, and “spending taxpayers’ money that could have been spent fighting crime, on diversity training”.

Stephens leads the national Police Race Action Plan, drawn up in the aftermath of the widespread Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd in the US, and says he listens to views from “right across the spectrum, including polarised views”.

“For some, we’ll be changing too much and for others, we won’t be changing quickly enough,” he concedes.

Stephens denies charges of “wokeness” and says police are “taking sensible decisions that are in line with what our communities need” in response to the wave of horrific crimes committed by police officers that battered public trust.

“There are some wonderful aspects of policing culture – the teamwork, the camaraderie, the problem-solving ability, the willingness to throw yourself into things, to try and deal with issues that other agencies wouldn’t go anywhere near,” he says.

“But there are some awful parts of policing culture that need to be consigned to history.”

‘We can’t police without confidence. But it’s a long process to build back trust’

‘It’s not a bad thing that we’ve had a discussion in public about police independence’