All change

After all, the former Rail Regulator has already identified £150m-a-year savings in pay and allowances. And, with new ideas for performance-related pay, bringing in outside talent at high-ranking levels and regular fitness tests, Mr Winsor is proposing fundamental changes to the police’s time-honoured way of doing things.

Resistance, then, is only to be expected. And certainly it is far from clear that all Mr Winsor’s ideas would work. But in kicking up such a storm against the very notion of change, and by disparaging the idea of graduates from other walks of life taking positions of command, officers are only reinforcing one of Mr Winsor’s key criticisms – that the police service is insular, inflexible and resistant to reform.

For, when it is remembered that this is an organisation with built-in job security, where staff cannot be sacked for poor performance, where those who prefer nine-to-five office jobs are paid the same as those who work all hours and risk their lives to protect the public and where physical fitness is not usually tested again after the start of a 30-year career, most observers would surely agree that change should, at the very least, be up for discussion.

It is, therefore, crucially important that Mr Winsor’s proposals are met with an open mind and discussed freely and that the police do not prove their critics’ point by exhibiting complacency about an organisation whose job structure has remained largely unaltered for almost a century even though the challenges it faces have been transformed utterly during that time.