I don’t do this very often, but I’m going to link to the Mail: this is a definitive ferret kebabbing reported hatchet job on ACPO. We live in strange times; usually they only devote this sort of work to some poor woman trying to blag £5 more housing benefit. But thar ye go. It’s one to keep around as a comments thread grenade, that bursts and scatters hard facts with sharp corners.
I’ve said it before; ACPO must go. It’s Britain’s newest political party, a free-floating lobby for authoritarianism that permits the executive branch of government to engage in parliamentary politics, a policy-laundering entity that carries out operational police tasks but which is shielded from local or parliamentary accountability and ministerial line management and which is also exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, and a rent-seeking missile devoted to enriching its management at the taxpayer’s expense.
It must go, and there is a simple way to achieve this. As a commercial company, it has essentially one customer, the Home Office. It does have other products, but their value lies entirely in the monopoly the Home Office has granted ACPO over them. Kill the body and the head must die. Cut its funding and either privatise or nationalise its operational functions. Alternatively, it could be converted into a Police Central Services Authority managing things like the PNC and the NPIA, accountable to the usual public powers, or even rolled into the Met. Either way, it’s really got to go.
You could also note a limited company called Solace – which is owned by council chief executives and has a subsidiary which acts as a paid consultancy to local authorities – for headhunting chief execs and setting their salary levels !
No wonder you see senior officers leave in disgrace after some scandal only to pop up somewhere else on a similar salary.