Having been excluded from the conference for most of Monday I managed to miss most of the Home Affairs debates and fringe meetings. This was not good news considering I had promised to cover home affairs for Conservative Home.
I spent a great deal of time sitting in the accreditation office pondering the irony of my situation, unable to hear the debates on security, police and terrorism because of tightened police security measures brought about by the threat of terrorism.
Luckily for me Iain Dale covered David Davis’ speech so I went off to find fringe meetings outside the “Secure Zone”, I managed to get in to see a Conservative Way Forward meeting where Nick Herbert gave the Nicolas Ridley MP memorial lecture. Nick is the Shadow Minister for Police Reform so I was hoping to hear some home affairs stuff in what is a traditionally wide ranging lecture, I wasn’t disappointed.
Nick spoke about local police accountability; in practice this means directly elected police chief or police chiefs accountable to directly elected mayors. The Conservatives have traditionally been weary of directly elected mayors but our push towards greater local accountability means that this will be something we may need to get used to.
What I found particularly interesting was that Nick didn’t completely dismiss the idea of some police mergers, although he did make the point that if there were any mergers in the future they would be dictated by policing requirements rather than by arbitrary geographical/regional lines.
Crime, policing and security have always been strong topics for the Conservatives and we traditionally been great supporters of the police, but reform is the order of the day and it will come to the police in some form. It will be interesting to see how ideas like this are received by the police themselves.
