Police tsar says ‘unaccountable’ NHS should adopt same model

Matthew Grove says he has had to battle “impenetrable” bureaucracy in the policing service since defeating John Prescott to become the elected Humberside crime tsar in November last year.

Describing his role as one of the region’s four police and crime commissioners (PCCs) as “the job from hell, but a job I absolutely love”, the former councillor says it has made his force directly accountable to the public for the first time.

The first year of the reforms have seen several PCCs come under fire for political cronyism and enter into damaging feuds with the police forces they are holding to account. And a report today warns that more than two-thirds of crime commissioners are not providing enough information about the number of staff from police forces and local councils who are working for them.

The study by CoPaCC, an advice group on policing and related services, said the level of disclosure by PCCs on their websites was generally good, though there was room for improvement. It said a lack of information meant it was hard to assess how well they were performing.

South Yorkshire is understood to be in the bottom half of the table of 42 PCCs on transparency, though both Humberside and West Yorkshire Police are in the top ten.

Mr Grove told the Yorkshire Post he believed it would be “extremely beneficial” to bring in directly elected commissioners to scrutinise the performance of other public bodies.

“I think the health service currently is not held properly to account. To have a health commissioner who is a directly elected representative of the public whose service it is, who has a name, who has a face who is trusted, could be the future of politics.

“It is an experiment, and like all experiments it won’t be 100 per cent successful. Some PCCs will be all right, some will fail catastrophically and we have perhaps seen evidence of that happening already, and some will be very successful. I want to be the most successful PCC for the public of this area.”

Public scrutiny of local health services is currently in the form of committees made up of councillors, who have the power to ask questions and invite officials to attend their meetings but cannot hire and fire.

Jim Clark, chairman of North Yorkshire county council’s Scrutiny of Health Committee, said: “I wouldn’t have thought that using the system of PCC, when the jury is still out on them, was a good idea. A lot of PCCs have appointed their chums as assistant commissioners and only 13 per cent of people voted..”

Since taking office, Yorkshire’s PCCs have had to take out tens of millions of pounds from their forces’ budgets in response to dramatic cuts in Government funding.

Humberside has slashed more than £23m since 2011, including £7.5m last year, but needs to find further savings of between £25m and £30m before 2018.

Mr Grove said he was “very unhappy” with the way the force had dealt with the need to cut resources prior to his arrival, with some officers previously told to do a round trip of 30 miles to fill up their cars at a garage because fuel was slightly cheaper there than at a base near their police station.

Mr Grove said: “You are losing an hour’s time for a police constable, and it is costing more in fuel to go and get the fuel than you are saving. I challenged the chief constable to go away, get a plain sheet of paper. I said re-design a police service to best protect the people of this area with the money we believe we will have available.”

Walk-in centre closures spark warning on care: Page 7.