The criminal justice system needs to learn lessons from the NHS crisis - Dr Alan Billings

All this we say to ourselves as well as to one another, despite knowing that we have said it so many times before on previous New Years.

But perhaps we are not in denial after all. We are realists and know that if things are to be better, we have a part to play in making it so, and the New Year offers us a chance to re-set the dial and make that fresh start happen. New Year is about renewed commitment and rekindled energy, not serendipity or magic. This year is no exception, including for policing.

This year, the police will be welcoming many new recruits – which is where the hope and energy springs from. In South Yorkshire we have been recruiting new cohorts for some time. This year, the first of those recruits will have gained full operational competency and will be able to be deployed across the force and across the county.

That is the good news of 2023. Of course, they will have to be funded, not just now, but in the years to come, and that is going to require some hard decisions about where some of that money is to come from, including the question of the level of precept – a decision that I shall have to make in January for 2023-2024.

The whole of the public sector is about to enter another period of austerity.

One well-understood consequence of budget restrictions in the public sector is that it becomes harder and harder to think about the future: our focus is relentlessly on managing the present and getting through another difficult financial year.

Horizon scanning, looking to the more distant future, seems like an unaffordable luxury. But we have to do it, because if we don’t, in a year or two’s time, the IT will be antiquated and not up to the job, the analysis necessary for predicting changes in crime will not have been done, the workforce will have the wrong mix of skills, and we will be constantly wrong-footed by the criminals. The current state of the NHS should be a warning to all other areas of public service. To take one glaringly obvious example.

One crucial reason why there is a shortage of nurses and doctors and specialist consultants, is because the NHS didn’t have a workforce plan all those years ago when people would have had to begin their training.

And in the light of what has happened in the NHS, we can see further dangers for the justice system which in part begin with policing and the increased numbers of officers.

It makes little sense now to increase police numbers if the criminal justice system – the courts, the crown prosecutors, defence barristers, the prisons – are not going to be able to cope with more offenders being caught, prosecuted and convicted.

We have not planned sufficiently and there is not the capacity in the system. Yet the whole point of having additional officers is, presumably, to catch more criminals. We are being set up to fail. South Yorkshire Police now has a Futures Board. Its task is to do that hard thinking: what do the economic, social and cultural changes that are going on around us mean for the future of society and so policing.

A shortened version of the Police and Crime Commissioner for South Yorkshire’s latest blog post.