Mother of all tests for Police’s ‘man with the plan’
For someone with a distinctly positive outlook on life, it is somewhat ironic that recently retired Deputy Chief Constable Paul Netherton has spent a significant part of his career looking at the worst-case scenario of, well, everything. He spoke to Andy
THE world of forward planning in the police service, as elsewhere, goes largely unseen and titles like civil contingency and resilience forum hardly convey a sense of headline-grabbing excitement.
However, the scenarios under constant consideration are genuinely fascinating and have enjoyed huge media coverage, whether that has been the risks posed by terrorists, Brexit, flooding, solar flares, tsunamis and, of course, coronavirus.
As the national police lead for resilience, emergency planning and risk management, Paul Netherton has been at the heart of that process and most recently faced the biggest challenge of his 31-year career as the threat posed by Covid-19 became clear.
“Very early on we were asked ‘what’s the impact on policing?’ and we set out a scenarios that if we had 10% abstraction this is what we would be able to do and what we wouldn’t be able to do,” he explained. “And we did that for 20% and 30% as well.
“Of course, by the time you get to 30% you are doing what we call ‘fire brigade policing’ – just going to the 999 jobs, you are ignoring everything else, you really are on your chin straps.
“In fact policing never got close to 10%, so actually while we did lose some people, which is obviously a tragedy, we weren’t impacted anywhere near as badly as we thought we were going to be, mainly because Covid-19 affected the elderly most seriously but because most police officers are under 50 and are fit and healthy.
“That didn’t mean it didn’t impact on the rest of the country and, of course, it did mean that we had to get our PPE supply out and support things like testing and enforcement.”
As people across the country endured the first lockdown, much of the attention shifted to how the police were, or were not, enforcing rules.
“To be honest we have had the most draconian restrictions on peoples’ liberties since the Second World War and the majority of people abided by it,” Mr Netherton said. “There were some exceptions but the police in Devon and Cornwall got it about right. Sometimes we are going to get it wrong and there was that classic example in Derbyshire [two women were fined for driving to meet up for a walk] but most of the time there were tens of thousands of interactions with the public, when police weren’t heavy-handed.”
While some planning had been done after the SARS outbreak in 2003 and the MERS outbreak in 2012 – both respiratory-related viruses – coronavirus put everyone behind the curve.
Part of the country’s successful response, Mr Netherton said, was to learn on the hoof, taking evidence from around the world. “What I did during Covid early on was to set up what was called the National Foresight Group which was learning the lessons from across the globe and trying to put out information to all the agencies and government saying you need to be thinking about these issues, and sure enough many of them have come to pass – things like mental health, the impact on children and the Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) community. It was about what we could learn to take into the second wave, the third wave.
“Most of the things I am involved with, even if they are big, are usually over in a day – train crashes, plane crashes, fires, even flooding is over within two or three days. Covid has gone on for over a year so we have learned as we have gone through and we have got better as we have gone through.
“The vaccine programme is a lesson in that. We learned and responded to the PPE crisis, we got better at testing and we nailed it by the time we got to vaccines.”
While responding to the pandemic was the “ultimate test”, Mr Netherton said he remained fearful about the long-term impact on people and society as a whole.
He added: “I am more concerned by the long-term impact of Covid on mental health. Our suicide rate will be significantly higher, it is a third up already, people have just not had proper relationships for a year and that is sad.
“We have to go back to normal, we have to encourage people because we are human beings and we operate in a social setting, we need to integrate and go back out again.
“That may mean it is challenging for policing and there may be a lot of parties this summer, there may be a bit of antisocial behaviour and people won’t be as tolerant of each other as perhaps they were in the past, but actually I would
rather see people partying on the beach and a crowded Devon and Cornwall than an empty Devon and Cornwall.
“At times people have needed to let off steam and this summer I think there will be a bit of that as well. I’m sure my colleagues in policing will say ‘don’t say that too loud’ but actually I think it is quite important.”
While coronavirus has been allencompassing over the last year, previous topics for resilience planning are many and as varied as one’s imagination. “Professionally, it is really fascinating,” Mr Netherton said. “We’ve explored the impact of a tsunami on the UK, what that would look like, how would we respond and how likely it is. The answer is it is not very likely at all but you have to think about it.
“I laugh about a zombie apocalypse but certainly meteor strikes and space weather, these things you actually have to think about.
“Our job is to look at the risks and plan for them, even if the view is that a tsunami is so unlikely that we’ll use our flood plans and get by. The things I have been particularly interested in over the last few years is what the impact of climate change is going to be. I have worked very closely with Exeter University and the Met Office looking at what the impacts are going to be on the South West.
“The figures are challenging. If you take the middle scenario, the Goldilocks ‘not too hot, not too cold’ scenario, we are talking in the next 30 years of half-a-metre sea level rise, plus two degrees in temperature, 40% more rain in winter and 30% less in summer. It is going to change of our climate and it is going to change where we build. We have to start thinking about that now and doing something about it.”
Mr Netherton began his police career in 1990 in Surrey. He joined Devon and Cornwall Police as assistant chief constable in April, 2008.
“When I came down here we had 3,500 people officers, we had 2,000 police staff and lots of special constables and then austerity bit – we dropped in numbers below the 3,000 mark and we really struggled with redundancies, it was really tough for a while,” he said.
“The more discretionary things had to go and, sadly, that is what people want to see – they want visibility, they want antisocial behaviour dealt with, they want that presence to control exuberance, shall we say.
“That unfortunately had to go because you have to prioritise things in policing. When you are dealing with counter-terrorism to domestic abuse and child abuse, drunkenness and antisocial behaviour fall down the list and that is a real challenge.
“The police is the agency of last resort but it cannot deal with everything. The terrorism threat to this country is significant and we have to be conscious of that, but it takes police resources and energy and then we have the other challenges of the rise in organised crime, drugs and County Lines.
“I think the future threat for the next ten years is cyber, it is an international threat, you don’t know where it might be coming from, it could be state-sponsored or organised crime, so they are some really tough challenges looking forwards and the police service has to adapt. Policing is about society and society is changing very fast, you can see and feel it.”
‘Policing is about society and society is changing very fast’ PAUL NETHERTON