What should we do about our national crisis of confidence? In every sense, confidence and trust in our institutions and national infrastructure is tanking. Let me count the ways. Tomorrow, I plan to go to London from Exeter. I have low confidence that when I get to the station my train will appear at all, let alone on time, in the right configuration or survive past Reading’s engineering twilight zone.
Sadly, concerns about transport are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Britain’s crisis of public trust. Former Victims Commissioner Vera Baird had this to say in response to a dramatic fall in the number of arrests of suspected criminals in the last decade. These rates, she said, had halved because of a collapse in trust by citizens that reported crime would achieve anything. Even though the number of police officers is at a record high, that isn’t producing more arrests. In the case of the Met, the UK’s worst performing force, its officers arrest on average 2.8 offenders a year. Unfelt collars are a result of more complex factors, but that won’t deter criminals and citizens from feeling that an age of impunity has dawned.
Confidence is eroding in the forces of law and order but also within them. Policing is a dangerous business in more ways than one. Men and women who pull on a stab vest in the morning never know when they leave their stations if they will come back to a long-winded investigation, frequently malicious, into their conduct. Mark Rowley, the Met Commissioner, spoke out about this crisis of confidence last week. Volunteer firearms officers and public order police officers vital to protect national security, deter serious criminals and manage civil disorder are withdrawing from those duties, rather than be exposed to disproportionate levels of scrutiny and abuse. It turns out that the age of instant online judgment isn’t great for recruitment and retention of people who run towards danger on our behalf. Acting in good faith in split seconds in circumstances most of us would run a mile from has been traduced by an administrative cadre of quangos and bureaucrats, whose well-intentioned interference is paralysing effective policing. Shoplifters, burglars, terrorists and rapists can read the room too.
Low-trust societies are at greater risk of a breakdown in social cohesion. Nowhere is this more apparent than in how the state protects its citizens. In this respect, a government that loses the confidence of its voters to act competently is in serious bother.
The response to the summer riots was eventually robust, and the vast majority of ordinary people will shed no tears over people who threatened the country with anarchy being sent down. But in order to get these people into a penal system in chaos facing gridlock, room had to be found. The emergency release of prisoners is now mired in controversy, with domestic abusers slipping through the net and victims of crime traumatised by scenes of released prisoners cavorting outside jails with champagne. But the most egregious example of damaged public confidence is prisoners who were supposed to be tagged walking free because the provider was overwhelmed before they had left their cells.
Electronic monitoring was a centrepiece of the Government’s assurance exercise to sell the idea of letting thousands of people out of prison early. Secretary of State for Justice Shabana Mahmood told Parliament that it was one of the ‘stringent protections’ that would be put in place to ensure that risky offenders would be controlled. It now emerges that an unknown number of these offenders were not tagged on release because the providers G4S and Serco hadn’t enough staff to cope with a backlog that already existed. Both private companies won £500 million contracts for the provision of this service in May 2024 despite having been investigated by the Serious Fraud Office and fined for fraudulent behaviour. A judge in the case said Serco was ‘engaged in quite deliberate fraud against the Ministry of Justice in relation to the provision of services vital to the criminal justice system’.
The dozens of senior bureaucrats paid handsomely to scrutinise such contracts knew or ought to have known before emergency release that the company responsible for this critical bit of public reassurance was unfit to meet its obligations. Yet the plans went ahead anyway and the Ministry of Justice was reduced to making empty promises that domestic abuse offenders on the loose will be ‘prioritised’. From the railway platform to front line policing to the ministerial boardroom, the Justice Secretary is finding out the hard way that a low-trust society gets created when you pull a lever and nothing happens.
Transforming a low-trust society isn’t easy at the best of times. The last few weeks of media coverage of Labour ministers having their freebies wrestled from them and not getting what all the fuss is about won’t have helped Starmer’s imagine of stolid rectitude one bit. But the ingredients are well known – transparency and accountability, public services that deliver, devolution of power to the lowest level, social inclusion and ethical leadership. Above all else, though, is competence. The mood of the nation is that nothing works properly any more and the public realm is stuffed with useless people on high salaries who are disconnected from the social and economic corrosion outside the Zone 1 bubble.
The Post Office scandal revealed a mediocracy of public service leadership promoted hugely beyond their capacity to deliver. While history tells us that running the trains on time can set dangerous precedents, it would be a good start.
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