Shortly before the last General Election, the TaxPayers’ Alliance produced a manifesto. Here is the latest in our series of posts looking at how the Coalition Government has performed in relation to our recommendations.
The full TaxPayers' Alliance manifesto can be found here. Click here to see the full series of posts.
We believe that taxpayers deserve a say in their local policing priorities – that’s why we supported the idea of elected police commissioners as a better model than the old unaccountable police authorities. The Coalition Government did introduce police commissioners, but the first elections were not successful. They were held on a cold, dark November day, out of sync with the rest of the electoral calendar. Turnout was extremely low and the legitimacy of the commissioners suffered greatly as a result. What's more, stories continue to emerge about wasteful spending by the commissioners and the use of taxpayers’ money to build empires – teams of staff which are not necessary to carry out the job.
The principle behind the idea is good – local residents deserve a say in local policing needs. But the implementation was shoddy, so we have scored a 3.