2 - Social and political context

Summary

Introduction

This chapter tells the story of why and how neighbourhood policing emerged in the UK, and how it ended up in the particular shape and form we now recognise. It is important to understand this – and, crucially, what purposes it was intended to serve – to explain why some of the changes it has experienced over the last decade have been so damaging.

This part of the story begins in the mid-1990s, in the last years of a fading Conservative government, and a reformed Labour Party. Then-Shadow Home Secretary, Tony Blair, thought the party needed to recognise and address the real damage that crime caused to working-class communities who still made up the core of the Labour vote – but also to acknowledge that crime could not be addressed simply by locking more people up. This chapter explores the philosophy that grounded New Labour's policy on the police and which eventually produced neighbourhood policing as a model. This context matters: it is only because of the particular things that New Labour believed were true about communities, about the public sector, and about crime and the police, that funding and legislation was brought in that facilitated and shaped the Neighbourhood Policing Programme (NPP). This in turn affects policing strategy and practice to the present day.

The chapter begins by looking at the new government's focus on localism, a departure from previous assumptions of how public sector services should be delivered. It then explores the particular outcome of this focus on New Labour's policies for crime and policing – especially when coupled with the government's ‘What Works?’ agenda to improve public services through delivering evidence-based changes. It then touches on the roots of confidence as a policing metric (a theme which will be developed further in Chapter 3), and how that policy led first to Reassurance Policing, and then to the NPP, which ran from 2005 to 2008.

Continuing the narrative, the chapter then moves to what happened after the end of the formal programme and, particularly, after the change of government in 2010. It looks at the current state of neighbourhood policing and examines how neighbourhood policing became institutionalised in the UK, despite the major reforms affecting policing in the early years of the Coalition government.