At the heart of this paper is a conundrum. The police service now does much more than it ever has in my 36 years' experience – I could never have imagined years ago having a Counter Terrorism Unit of more than 300 staff attached to my force, or employing an abusive images unit, or seizing millions of pounds each year from organised crime gangs through the skills of forensic accountants.

The growth in society's expectations is staggering. At the same time as this burgeoning requirement, the service has achieved significant success on the traditional measures of crime reduction and detection. The kind of crimes that are measured by the Home Office – burglary, violence, car crime etc – have been reduced by 42 per cent over the last decade.

So here is the paradox. The UK has a police service that is doing more than it ever has in its history and is being successful on the traditional measures set by Government. Yet the public that we serve, and that votes for governments, do not appear to appreciate those achievements. The proportion of the public that feel the police service is doing a good or excellent job in their local area stands at a less than spectacular 51 per cent

This is the key to understanding why there is this conundrum. When people look out of their window, they don't see terrorists, paedophiles, fraudsters and organised criminals – all of which have to be tackled by their local police force. They don't even see, on a regular basis, the burglaries and robberies and such crimes that the Government has measured police performance by.

What people see is anti-social behaviour, criminal damage, graffiti. They see a general standard of behaviour that appals them. Drunkenness, yobbish behaviour and a perceived threat (often over-stated) from young people.

While the British Police Service has been astonishingly successful in delivering greater performance and an ever-widening mission, we have failed to pay sufficient attention to our community service role. The Green Paper reaches the same conclusion.

I have been Chief Constable in two major police forces and have sought to refocus the service provided by those organisations to do two things; namely satisfy each person who turns to us for help, and build confidence and trust among local communities.

We won't achieve either of those objectives by only concentrating on the things that are measured by central Government. All the central machinery, and all the "carrots" and "sticks", have, hitherto, been focused narrowly upon a set of performance indicators that don't impact on the daily experience of local people.

In our determination to provide the kind of service that communities want to see – and this determination is shared by the Chief Constables of the four police forces of Yorkshire and Humberside – we have sometimes felt as though we were swimming against the tide. A tide of bureaucracy in measuring and reporting things that the centre felt was important, with sanctions imposed upon those that faltered.

We should celebrate, then, this apparent change of approach indicated by today's Green Paper.

If we can find a way of enabling more local priority setting and the development of a better local policing service, then the public will appreciate the police much more. I can tell you that every police officer joined the service to do just those things, and it will be a boost for their morale if they are given the opportunity to deliver on that commitment and vocation.

It has been obvious for a while that "something had to be done" with policing. There have been a range of simplistic notions put forward as potential solutions. One such idea, put forward by the Local Government Association among others, was that policing ought to be a local service, municipalised along with libraries and refuse collection.

But that failed to acknowledge the strategic and national reach of the policing requirement. Unlike most other countries, the same policing structures have to deal with everything from dropping litter to counter-terrorism and drugs importation. It cannot all be reduced to the local level. You could split it into two or more separate agencies, but that would cost the taxpayer an awful lot more through less flexibility in movement of resources.

Today's Green Paper is, therefore, an opportunity to think carefully about the future relationship between real policing and real people and, hopefully, unite around an agenda that improves public confidence. The police need that confidence in order to do our job.

Before the ink on the Green Paper is dry, I want to set out three things that ought to find common agreement among us all.

Firstly, everyone wants to achieve the aim of local accountability for local service delivery. The current Police Authority governance arrangements at a force level are necessary. Something additional may be appropriate, but not a replacement.

Secondly, we ought to be able to agree on what matters in terms of service provision. Of course, the Government has a right to say what matters to the electorate. Police authorities will understand what local communities need. But we need agreement from those involved in directing and overseeing policing at a central and local level that the most important measures of all are public confidence and user satisfaction. Too many of the performance indicators set for the Service recently have been about procedures or specific crime targets rather than these overarching outcomes.

Finally, police leaders and all the people that we are privileged to lead, care passionately about delivering a service that enjoys the trust and confidence of the local people we serve. Trust us a little more to find ways to achieve that. It is time to rein in the battalions of agencies and units set up to tell us how policing should be done.

Chief Constables, in common with many other public sector professionals, understand our responsibility. We simply want to get on with delivering the best public service that we can while balancing the wide and varied demands upon our service. If this Green Paper recognises this simple truth about public servants, then it could represent a broader ray of hope for the future.


Sir Norman Bettison is the Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police and the lead officer for the Association of Chief Police Officers on police reform.