Local governance in the new Police Scotland: Renegotiating power,recognition and responsiveness

Introduction

The most significant reform of public policing in Scotland for a generation provides the background to this article. On 1 April 2013, Police Scotland commenced operations. This new ‘single’ police organization amalgamated eight regional police services in operation since the 1970s, and incorporated functions previously undertaken by the national-level Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency and Scottish Police Services Authority. Movement towards more central coordination and strategic direction of policing had been apparent for some years through regimes of inspection, auditing and target-setting (Donnelly and Scott, 2002; Walker, 2000) which are also well documented in England and Wales (Reiner, 2010: 227–37; Jones, 2008: 703–6). Even so, structurally reorganizing policing into a single unit marked a bold extension of what had so far been an incremental process. It nonetheless placed Scotland firmly in the company of similarly minded European neighbours moving in a similar direction over a similar time period driven by similar concerns about efficiencies, coordination and consolidation (Fyfe et al., 2013), while its closest neighbour explored a different direction (Fyfe and Henry, 2012; Jones and Lister, 2019).

It would be a gross understatement to suggest that the first five years of Police Scotland have not passed without incident. Rather, public, political and academic interest in, and scrutiny of, policing in Scotland has become more intense than at any point in recent memory (Murray and Harkin, 2017), prompted by a series of controversies and problems involving senior officials, as well as specific functions, strategies and policies of the new service. A number of these controversies included expressions of concern about the ‘loss of the local’ in policing (see also SIPR, What Works Scotland and ScotCen, 2017). This sense of ‘loss of the local’ was our starting point in two ways. On the one hand it created an opportunity to revisit questions about the virtues of, and necessary balance between, central and local dimensions of police governance (Lustgarten, 1986: 177–8) and to use this as a lens to critically appraise the design and implementation of a single national force in Scotland. On the other hand, mindful of Nelken’s invitation to challenge taken-for-granted ‘cultural assumptions’ and ‘universal truths’ (2017: 417), we sought to subject these appeals to the ‘local’ to scrutiny. Were appeals to the local in Scotland mere sentiment or resistance to change, or did they articulate something fundamental about the new arrangements, something flawed in the design or implementation that spoke to what the function of local governance in policing is within this context, and potentially beyond it?

Drawing on a small but in-depth study of the emergent new local arrangements, and on theoretical resources that disentangle the democratic claims and governance mechanisms of police institutions (Jones et al., 1996; Kuper, 2004; Loader and Walker, 2007; Lustgarten, 1986), we develop two arguments. Firstly, we demonstrate that organizational police reform of this scale is not an event but a negotiated and incremental process through which formal designs in legislation are adapted and made to work in practice. This needs to be better understood in future police reform. Secondly, we argue that appeals to localism in the early years of Police Scotland were not reactionary sentiment against change. Rather they articulated failures of the new system of policing to provide recognition of, and responsiveness to, public interests or to provide a meaningful check and balance against policing discourse being (and/or being perceived to be) monopolized by the powerful voices of the police and central government. Recognition, responsiveness and distribution of power are necessary and fundamental features of police governance that are given some of their specific expression through local government and public service delivery institutions in Scotland. Clearly these necessary features of police governance can be given expression through other local, central or even international institutional arrangements in other jurisdictions, as is evident from other contributions to this Special Issue.

A short history of police organization and governance in Scotland: From the regional to Police Scotland

Public policing developed early in Scotland and certainly before the more celebrated birth of the Metropolitan Police in 1829 in England (Carson, 1984; Walker, 2000). Walker observes that this early development of policing in Scotland might account for the fairly broad understanding of ‘policing’, incorporating ideas of public health and welfare (2000: 152–3). As we shall see, these have been explicitly acknowledged again in the 2012 reform. Police forces in Aberdeen (1795), Glasgow (1800) and Edinburgh (1805), established by and accountable to local city administrations, led the way but were quickly followed by police forces being established around the country by burgh and county administrations (Walker, 2000: 152). However, it was the Police (Scotland) Act 1857 that required all local administrations to establish police capacity. This Act reflected central government belief in the necessity of such a resource and so arguably marked the beginning of the centralizing tendencies that would animate much of the subsequent history of policing in Scotland (see Davidson et al., 2016: 89). Indeed, pressures for force amalgamations to enhance efficiencies and improve service took effect almost immediately. Davidson et al. (2016) document the process whereby 89 police forces had become 64 by 1899, 48 by 1939, and settled at 8 in 1975, a position that would remain stable until the 2012 reform. ¹ The remainder of this section provides a brief sketch of these eight regional forces and their governance, setting out some of the problems with this configuration and the subsequent political process through which Police Scotland emerged as the solution.

The most important point to note thus far is that Scottish police forces were, right from the beginning, ‘closely tied to the elected structures of local government’ (Donnelly and Scott, 2002: 4) and this meant that they would develop a ‘role in the new corporate management approach to local services’ (2002: 5). This remains an important if oft-overlooked facet of police governance to this day. For now, the changing structures of local government and their fit, or lack thereof, with changing structures of policing must underpin any sketch of the post-1975 period. It is too complex a story to fully do justice to here (see Donnelly and Scott, 2002: 5–6; Walker, 2000: 151–70), but there are two moments of particular note. The Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973 scrapped the old and complex model of burgh and county council administrations, rationalizing them into 9 regional and 53 district councils, each with distinct fields of competence, the regional being the most relevant here with responsibilities for funding education, social work, police and fire services. Upon implementation in 1975, the link between local government and police was imperfect. Six of the eight regional police forces coincided directly with regional councils but Lothian and Borders (including the city of Edinburgh) and Northern Constabulary (covering the highlands of Scotland and many outlying islands) served ‘joint’ Police Boards covering more than one regional council. In the 1990s, local government was reformed again. The two-tier model was replaced with a single-tier model under the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1994, implemented in 1996. Under this model 32 local authorities were established. The issue for the unchanged structure of eight regional police forces was that now a direct link between a police force and the relevant local government body was the exception rather than the norm. Six of the eight police forces now served joint Police Boards made up of representatives of multiple local authorities (12 in the case of Strathclyde Police). Therefore, direct links between police and local authorities were, in the main, severed, the local authority representation within Police Boards being split across different local authorities, which could well be led by different political parties. Further, some of the local authority participation came through Local Authority Officers (LAOs), employed officials working for the local authority, delegated to attend police authority meetings, rather than through democratically elected councillors themselves (see McFadden and Lazarowicz, 1999, cited in Donnelly and Scott, 2002: 6). Although later reviews showed that council officers tended to be there to provide technical support and competence, and did not have elected members’ voting rights (Laing and Fossey, 2011: 5), there was nonetheless a growing perception of a democratic deficit in local Police Boards, bolstered by declining turnouts in local elections.

The Police Boards formed part of a tripartite structure that had characterized police governance throughout the UK since the 1960s (Donnelly and Scott, 2002; Jones, 2008; Walker, 2000). The tripartite framework gives expression to the democratic principle of the distribution of power (Jones et al., 1996: 188) by separating out authority and responsibility for policing across central government (represented by the Scottish Secretary at Westminster prior to devolution in 1999, and by the Cabinet Secretary for Justice at Holyrood thereafter), local government (through the Police Boards) and the police (through the office of Chief Constable and/or delegated representatives). The problems with the framework are well rehearsed in the English context, where it was consistently demonstrated that, where there was disagreement, the will of the police and central government prevailed over the local (Reiner, 2010: 228–9). Similar conclusions were reached in Scotland. Despite local Police Boards having important powers relating, for example, to the formal appointment and dismissal of chief officers, as well as responsibilities to maintain an efficient and effective police service through formally contributing 49 percent of the police budget, there was little evidence of them actively using their powers, and a growing body of commentary showed they were failing to offer meaningful challenge to the police (Donnelly and Scott, 2002; Laing and Fossey, 2011; Walker, 2000). Some claimed that the Boards were too deferential to Chief Constables (Scott and Wilkie, 2001), in part because they actually lacked the necessary expertise in policing, crime patterns, finance and other relevant organizational matters to competently hold the police to account (Laing and Fossey, 2011: 5–6; Malik, 2018), resulting in a process of governance understood to be ‘passive’ (Audit Scotland and HMICS, 2012: 6). Indicative of the direction of future reform, one influential HM Inspector of Constabulary observed that there was a ‘disconnect’ between local governance and national issues requiring coordination (HMICS, 2009: 38).

Perceived inadequacies with local governance and democratic representation through Police Boards preceded Police Scotland but were not the sole ‘drivers’ of reform. If anything, longstanding concerns about the ‘lopsided’ structure of Scottish policing, which seemed to lack rhyme or reason, ² growing concerns about national and international issues requiring better coordination of policing (HMICS, 2009), and the 2008 financial crash and the ensuing call for public sector austerity (Christie Commission, 2011; Fyfe and Henry, 2012; Scottish Policing Board, 2010) were of greater import. It was really following the Independent Review of Policing in Scotland (HMICS, 2009) that momentum began to gather, although this review did not explicitly endorse a single service. The Scottish Policing Board was established by the Scottish government later in 2009 and it further established a Sustainable Policing Sub-Group to review options, which included the status quo, further regionalization, and the single service option. Even as late as 2011 a move towards a single service was not inevitable, despite relative political consensus that some reform was necessary. The Scottish National Party (SNP), in government at the time, committed to reform and enhanced accountability to communities, but not to a single service, in their 2011 election manifesto. Both the Scottish Labour and Conservative parties did commit to a single police service but with strong, albeit distinct, emphases on how local policing would be developed as a balance. Labour favoured community policing teams and the Conservatives a variant of the elected police commissioner model later enacted south of the border (see Jones and Lister, 2019). Only the Scottish Liberal Democrats, of the four main parties, rejected the single model. Following the re-election of the SNP, two public consultations on police reform were run, neither producing a definitive result in favour of centralization. Perhaps emboldened by the Christie Commission’s (2011) wider recommendations for public service delivery reform in this direction, opinion in the Scottish government turned around and a single service became the objective (for the definitive account of this process, see Malik, 2018). Police Scotland therefore emerged as a solution to a complex web of issues including: public sector service delivery; public expenditure cuts; national and local police accountability; and a perceived lack of expertise, competence and democratic representation within local police governance arrangements.

Police Scotland: The solution and the (local) problem

The Police and Fire Reform (Scotland) Act 2012 was passed by the Scottish Parliament in June 2012 and signed into law with Royal Assent in August of the same year. Although the focus of this article is local policing, three features of the new ‘Police Service for Scotland’ (as it is known in the Act, Police Scotland being its corporate identity) are worth noting as necessary background to what follows: tripartism for the new Police Scotland formally moved to the centre, power and responsibility now being distributed between the Chief Constable, the Cabinet Secretary for Justice and a new independent body, the Scottish Police Authority (SPA) (see Malik, 2018); much of the wider architecture of central governance, auditing and inspection, primarily through the offices of the Auditor General, Audit Scotland and HM Inspectorate of Constabulary, remained largely unchanged; and, s32 of the Act took the opportunity to assert new principles for Scottish policing, its main purpose being stated as ‘to improve the safety and well-being of persons, localities and communities’, to be advanced through ‘working in collaboration with others’, being ‘engaged with local communities’, and working ‘to prevent crime, harm and disorder’. In the legislation at least, ideas associated with the local governance of crime (for example, Crawford, 1997) – partnership, engagement, community, prevention – were given explicit expression.

The new relationship between policing and local government was set out in chapter 7 of the 2012 Act. Following a very general provision (s45.1) that the Chief Constable ‘must ensure that there are adequate arrangements in place for the policing of each local authority area’, the key provisions are those that set out replacements for the old Police Boards (ss46 and 48) and those that confirm police community planning responsibilities (s47). On both issues the Act is quite permissive and open. S45 establishes a direct link between Police Scotland and each of the 32 local authorities through the new role of the Local Area Commander (LAC), a ‘constable’ designated as such by the Chief Constable, who may act in this capacity for multiple local authorities (s45). This role is the primary conduit between the local authority and the police. There is no mention of an equivalent to a Police Board in the Act itself; the relationship is formally between the designated LAC and the ‘local authority’. In practice, however, local authorities work through committee structures and quickly had to work out where local authority police business under chapter 7 of the Act would be located (see HMICS and HMFSIS, 2013). This will be detailed more fully in the next section. In terms of the statutory roles of the LAC and the local authority, they are very much couched in ‘consultative’ terms. The local authority may ‘monitor’ and ‘provide feedback’ to the police on local matters of policing (s46) and, specifically, on the local police plan (s47). The local police plan is ultimately the responsibility of the LAC, who must ‘have regard’ to the centrally set strategic policing plan (s34) as well as other interested bodies. It is supposed to set out ‘priorities’ tailored to the specific local authority area, the means of achieving these priorities and reasonable processes of monitoring progress (s48). The plan requires the ‘approval’ of the local authority but the Act is silent on what follows if approval is not forthcoming. Importantly, the Act does require the local policing plan and its priorities to ‘contribute to the delivery of’ local service delivery objectives agreed in community planning (s48.2e). Given this new, weaker local relationship based on ‘consultation’ rather than ‘powers’ over senior appointments and funding that moved to the SPA at the centre, s48.2e is an important reminder of the strong historical link in Scotland between police and local public service delivery (a link that is not only about governance and accountability). S47 confirms that the police remain part of community planning arrangements in each local authority. Community planning was established through the Local Government (Scotland) Act 2003 and is the statutory basis for strategic-level collaborative partnership working at the local level (nonetheless taking heed of national priorities), requiring service delivery (this can involve police, social work, education, health, transport, planning and many other areas) to be joined up through agreed outcomes across partners (Henry, 2009: 100–1). Despite real challenges associated with community planning in practice (Sinclair, 2008), the 2012 Act reaffirms that the police are a lead partner in it and thus situated (formally at least) within a horizontal network of local government institutions sharing duties and responsibilities (Kuper, 2004: 103–6). This shaped some local authority decisions about where the narrower consultative functions would be located in the committee structure. It is also an important institutional feature of the democratic governance of Police Scotland that is easily overlooked.

Although the relevant sections of the 2012 Act set out the envisaged ‘solutions’ to earlier problems of local democratic governance, new ‘problems’ were quick to emerge. It is important to reiterate that many of the early and ongoing controversies attaching themselves to Police Scotland were more to do with central governance (Malik, 2017a) or tactics, such as stop and search, whose use actually preceded the reform (Murray and Harkin, 2017). There was general disquiet about the ‘enforcement’ focused operating philosophy of the first Chief Constable. It did not sit comfortably with the newly minted policing principles, or with the reaffirmed statutory commitments to partnership and local service delivery. Nor did it sit comfortably with the historical community policing orientation of many of the eight legacy police services and fed into a series of wider concerns that cumulatively had the effect of implying that implementation of the 2012 Act was very much a top down affair. Specifically local concerns emerged around a constellation of issues: perceptions of increased use of stop and search in some localities; the closing of local police counters and curtailment of police-run traffic warden schemes; routine arming of rural patrol officers in the former Northern Constabulary; and moving from a ‘tolerance’ to an ‘enforcement’ approach towards the sex industry in Edinburgh. Whether these issues, or perceptions of them, were either accurate or reasonable is not the question here. What matters is that they raised questions about Police Scotland’s responsiveness to local needs and local preferences, about tensions between central policy and local priorities, and about whether basic statutory duties to consult local authorities were happening or were adequate. These specific concerns about local police responsiveness prompted our small empirical study to explore how the chapter 7 provisions outlined above were working in practice, and were later also reiterated in the official government evaluation of the Police and Fire Reform Act (see SIPR et al., 2017).

The research: Local scrutiny committees mapped and in action

A detailed account of the Partners in Scrutiny project – its design, methods and findings – has been published elsewhere (Henry et al., 2016). The objective here is not to duplicate that report but to draw from the experience of conducting the project during a period when the reform of Police Scotland was still settling, and to reflect more broadly about what the main findings tell us about local police governance. Readers should go directly to that report for a full account of the methods employed and for a richer selection of data gathered. Here we briefly discuss the two-stage research approach and, where helpful, draw on illustrative quotations or links back to the original data.

By late summer 2015, when we were laying the groundwork for the research, it was already clear that the 2012 Act had provided only a bare bones design for new arrangements. There had already been a considerable amount of ‘filling in the gaps’, or negotiated practice, by practitioners and stakeholders (HMICS and HMFSIS, 2013; Scottish Government et al., 2013) seeking to think through and guide how the new arrangements would actually work. This included the development of a shared terminology that was not in the statute but that the project adopted as shorthand: Local Scrutiny Committees (LSCs). LSCs were the new chapter 7 points of interaction between the police, local government and (depending on how they were configured) other interested partners. In effect, they were the new Police Boards. It quickly became apparent that the term masked divergent practice (below), but it did serve to articulate what the new local authority function was.

The first stage of the research, a ‘mapping’ of how chapter 7 had been implemented around the country, drew upon this early ‘filling in the gaps’ work of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, the Improvement Service and the Scottish Government (see HMICS and HMFSIS, 2013; Scottish Government et al., 2013), updating it through two processes. Firstly, targeted interviews were carried out with selected stakeholders that had an overview perspective on the reform process (the Scottish government, the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities [CoSLA] and the Improvement Service). Secondly, the project team established an Advisory Board that had the necessary experience to actively contribute to the mapping exercise. ³ These exercises showed that the ‘local scrutiny’ function was being implemented differently across the 32 local authorities, dependent on historical variation in the organization of council business. A four-fold typology, which roughly captured where ‘local scrutiny’ was located, emerged, with the function exercised within:

In theory, there were potential pros and cons of each. Dedicated blue light committees offered a specialist focus on emergency services. Full council committees would lose that specialist focus, but gained the full transparency of open council business and the greatest presence of elected councillors. Community safety and community planning nested police scrutiny within the key public service delivery committee, thus linking matters of policing directly with partners whose business might overlap (social work, education, health, etc.). As will be noted later, these committees are also explicitly ‘community facing’ and thus give various types of ‘representation’ to community voices that can be lacking in more bureaucratic committees. Auditing/performance might gain in terms of expertise in performance regimes and accounting, but lose in terms of joined-up working and police-specific expertise. There was no ‘right’ answer, and throughout the period of the fieldwork local authorities were reviewing and sometimes changing where they located police scrutiny. The most common location, and also the direction of travel where arrangements were being changed, was (but only just) the second option: community safety/community planning committees. At the outset of the project, 13 LSCs were located here, another moving to this model during the period of the fieldwork. Several of the audit/‘other’ LSCs (four that we could discern) were actually quite close to this model in that they consistently involved other partner agencies and agendas, thus reflecting a horizontally joined-up model that is relevant to the analysis that follows in later sections.

In the second stage of the project, interviews were conducted with police, local authority, elected and third sector participants in three LSCs. Interviews were, where possible, supplemented with, and cross-checked against, documents, including policing plans, LSC minutes and police data as provided to the LSCs. The mapping exercise informed our selection process, which could only claim to offer a sample that was ‘illustrative’ of emerging practice rather than fully ‘representative’; ⁴ however, the findings were later disseminated to representatives from all 32 LSCs and were corroborated as being consistent with wider experience. ⁵ Stage two was designed to allow participants to speak openly about their experience of the reform, and in support of this we committed to maintaining the anonymity of individuals and the areas they work in. Across both the police and the local authorities there appeared to be a professional ethos to make things work and evidence of specific negotiated practices through which problems were creatively worked around. This negotiated practice was filling in the blanks in the legislation, was ongoing when the study had to conclude, and was illustrative of the processual, iterative nature of reform in practice. The problems that had to be negotiated, and in particular the ones that were resistant to negotiation, were also illustrative of recognized tensions between central and local administration and the values of local governance and democratic policing. They draw attention to real problems and omissions in the Act and to failures in the early years of implementation. The negotiated practice of governance is documented in the next section. The one that follows develops this account by exploring how many of the issues described talk to essential requirements of democratic governance and deliberation, including recognition, responsiveness and the distribution of power.

Structural disconnects and governance as negotiated practice

‘Structural disconnect’ was a term gleaned from LSC participants that also had currency with government stakeholders and members of the Advisory Board. It referred to a general idea that, whether through the design of the new arrangements or their implementation, there were information flow and communication gaps or blocks that created tension in the system. This section outlines three instances of structural disconnect found in the project and documents how they were often creatively negotiated through the practice of those ‘doing governance’.

The first ‘structural disconnect’ was between LSCs and the SPA. At its heart it was a realistic acknowledgement that power had shifted to the centre, away from local authorities.

Most of the power around scrutiny is concentrated at the national level and in a sense what we have in the local scrutiny area is the opportunity to ask questions of what is happening nationally. What we don’t have is the genuine ability to get answers at our local scrutiny committees… . The Local Area Commanders may agree with us but they are not capable of changing the policy of Police Scotland. So within that context there is a limit to what we can do. (LSC Convenor)

Under the 2012 Act it is the SPA that has powers to hold the Chief Constable to account, to maintain the police (finance) and to appoint and dismiss senior ranks. Local authority members of LSCs understood this and accepted that their role in chapter 7 was one of monitoring and being consulted by the police in the production of tailored local policing priorities. What concerned them was the absence of a formal mechanism for them to ‘escalate’ issues on which there was disagreement or on which they felt there had not been satisfactory consultation. The counter-closures, loss of traffic warden schemes and concerns about stop and search practice were understood to be examples of where central (as defined by the police) policy decisions had been taken that had clear locally felt ramifications, but local voices had not been recognized in the process. For example, on the issue of firearms officers, affected LSCs were most concerned about the lack of deliberation and the sense this gave that ‘operational matters’ were not their concern, despite the changes in practice within their communities:

[T]he standing firearms authority … that annoyed members because it was a change in practice that had never been heralded as a change – it just happened. And it just happened when people noticed that police officers on the beat were armed and that was alarming. When it was raised as a change in (police) policy we were told it’s not a change in policy, it’s an operational matter, it is for the police to decide, and that really angered some of our members. (LAO).

LACs from Police Scotland were sympathetic to this issue but did not themselves necessarily command either the hierarchy or the lines of communication to feed these concerns upwards within the organization (another ‘structural disconnect’ that will be returned to). The informal workaround that occurred during the life of the project was that SPA board members sat in on LSC meetings. The idea was that they could advise the LSCs on matters that were happening centrally and also that they could formally ‘escalate’ dissatisfaction with decisions that affected their communities. This negotiated practice sought to give LSCs recourse to the accountability body with formal power in the new arrangements, to ensure that local interests were heard and recognized and could not simply be ignored. The workaround was valued by local authority and police members even as its informality was noted with regret.

Whilst SPA’s initiatives are welcomed, the outcome from those meetings are not long lasting and do not have an impact on local practices. If the SPA board members held more face to face meetings with local representatives they would be more in tune with the local needs as members felt having one representative was not enough to raise local concerns at the national level. (LSC Member)

Following the publication of the Partners in Scrutiny report, which included a recommendation to formalize the ‘connection’ between LSCs and the SPA, the SPA itself later acknowledged the issue in its own governance report (Flanagan, 2016) but it took CoSLA to act on it. CoSLA established a forum of LSC members that included representation from all 32 local authorities. As previously noted, findings from Partners in Scrutiny were reported to the inaugural meeting of this forum and were largely in line with the mood of the room. It is through having board members attend this forum that the SPA now seeks to close the structural disconnect between LSCs and the SPA. It is a promising negotiated practice reflecting CoSLA and LSC interests in having a voice in the new arrangements, but its working has not yet been evaluated.

The second ‘structural disconnect’ was between LSCs and the communities they served. Ultimately, this structural disconnect expressed wider scepticism about local democracy in Scotland. The question here was, did LSCs adequately ‘represent’ communities? Did they really know how their constituents felt about policing? And did they communicate back to communities the LSC’s work on their behalf? Questions about representation related to the presence and involvement of elected members but also to their mandate, owing to declining turnouts in local elections. The other questions related to information flows between local authorities and citizens and ongoing debates about what kinds of local and place-based representation and opportunities for active participation might enhance local democracy (for example, see Raco and Flint, 2001). Full answers to these important questions were beyond the scope of this limited project but, again, the negotiated practice of LSC participants demonstrated sensitivity to and acknowledgement of them. Perhaps more a fortuitous result of the design of the 2012 Act (although stakeholders suggested it had been intentional) than negotiated practice, the first point to note is that the shift from joint Police Boards to direct police-local authority LSCs led to an increasing number of elected members becoming actively involved in local police governance. In the early days of Police Scotland, the police themselves also sought to offer deeper and more direct local input than was required by the Act by generating ‘ward’ level plans – wards are small geographical units to which individual councillors are elected – that would engage all elected councillors, although this burdensome process was soon curtailed. Negotiated practice was most pronounced in relation to the decisions on where to locate LSCs in council business discussed previously. It needs again to be emphasized that the project could not study all of the 32 LSCs and there are undoubtedly complex reasons and histories for many of these choices, but the active preference of community safety and community planning committees in two of our sites was important. Community safety and community planning are partnerships (the former generally a sub-group of the latter) that have to involve a diverse group of local service providers, as noted previously. They also tend to involve community groups (young people, LGBT+, minority interests) and relevant voluntary sector organizations within the sector (for example, Victim Support Scotland were active in one of the sites). In common parlance in the field, these partnerships tend to be the most ‘community facing’. Therefore, within this structure both the local authority and the police are most likely to be working alongside a range of other institutions and agencies that reflect distinct fields of expertise and interest, including some quite specific community interests.

It is important every board should have third sector on the scrutiny board. The more people involved in scrutiny, the better. Every organization like the council will have preconceived ideas as to what they think the police should do, the third sector will have their own ideas, and with the involvement of the third sector we are getting more rounded scrutiny. We are not just trying to appease or to keep councillors happy, there is a broad spectrum, so scrutiny is healthy and we are looking at the broader picture. (LAC)

Local authorities, the police and third sector agencies themselves (sometimes working together) also all use community surveys and, increasingly, a range of other methods to try to engage the public about local service delivery:

Public consultation is done in as many ways as possible. for example we will do it by leaflet, by email, by online surveys, organizing events, going out to public events. In one of our areas there was an international event, we decided to consult the public there so we put up a table and the police went along with us and they also put up a table and put a questionnaire out. (Third Sector Representative)

These approaches are used in various committees but are explicitly promoted in community safety and community planning where ‘community’ interests are more pronounced than in, for example, a more technically focused audit committee. In short, the connection between local councillors and communities remains an issue in Scotland, but ‘representation’ is not exclusively about the ballot box in local elections. However instinctively or imperfectly, many LSC practitioners are thinking about committee structures and practices that are responsive to communities and that make connections horizontally across service providers.

The third set of ‘structural disconnects’ were those within the new Police Scotland itself. It was noted earlier that an LAC could be put in a difficult position where central policy caused local concern but, either because of rank or function, they had no direct means of escalating the matter internally. This raised questions about how responsive an LAC could be to local interests, and whether they had the rank and capacity to make things happen on behalf of the LSC. This was an ongoing issue throughout the project but significant negotiated practices on the part of the police had engendered goodwill. From the outset, Police Scotland had gone beyond the 2012 Act’s s45 requirement that a generic ‘constable’ be designated as an LAC. At a minimum, officers identified in our study were of the rank of Inspector, itself denoting a certain status to the committee and certain expectations about experience and capacity of the incumbent, although for councillors and officials with experience of the old Boards it was nonetheless a serious demotion given that the police were formally represented by the Chief Constable of the relevant regional service. However, even officers of this rank had encountered difficulties in escalating matters, and so by the time of our fieldwork in late 2015/early 2016 LACs were generally supported by their Divisional Commanders, who held the rank of Chief Superintendent. This is indicative of a wider point about the gap between the statute and the reality of Police Scotland as a ‘single’ organization. Police Scotland retained an internal structure that includes 13 Divisions that are also now coordinated under three regions – East, West and North – each headed by an Assistant Chief Constable. Routine involvement of Divisional Commanders in LSCs was very favourably received by local authority members. Symbolically it represented the importance that Police Scotland was seen to give local matters. Practically, a Chief Superintendent has greater clout to make decisions and feed matters up into the Division. One example of an effective intervention from a Divisional Commander was where an LSC complained that the pro forma quantitative reports provided by Police Scotland were unhelpful and lacked qualitative detail on issues of noted interest to the community. The Divisional Commander agreed and, from that point on, data and reporting were provided to the LSC in the manner that it had requested. The result of this was that, across the sites studied, the police had consistently moved away from providing basic pro forma reports and have gathered information from multiple sources to provide richer and more balanced accounts of local issues that had credibility with partners and elected members in LSCs by the time that more formal police plans had to be agreed.

When the first police plan was presented it was drawn from a partnership assessment of risk so it wasn’t done in isolation from what the partners thought and included in that risk assessment was feedback that we have from the public on their community safety priorities and that’s gathered quantitatively through our citizen’s panel and local face to face meetings. So … the police were good in synthesizing all that information and saying this is what the priorities look like … ‘this is the take on it from our local area’. (LAO)

However, even Divisional Commanders experienced frustrations where specialist functions or Operational Support services with a national remit (for example, organized crime, counter-terrorism, air support) were the source of local complaint.

We have lost the boundaries of the previous forces with Police Scotland but we have created new boundaries with the specialist forces that we never had before. (Divisional Commander)

Representatives of these services were not connected to the LSCs in the formal lines of communication. At the time of the project it was hoped that the move towards greater autonomy of the three regions, which was gaining momentum, would further open lines of communication from LSCs up to senior strategic-level ranks, facilitating policing that could be more adaptable and responsive to local interests. In short, Police Scotland was never ‘single’ in terms of being completely top down from one Chief Constable. Underneath there were layers of organization – regional, divisional and specialist – and the links and connections between them had been, and were still being, actively negotiated as the organization developed.

Distributed power, recognition and responsiveness: Essential functions of governance

Many of the issues that had caused public displeasure with the new Police Scotland, alongside a generally perceived tension between central and local interests (partly rooted in structural disconnects in the new governance arrangements), intuitively express real, fundamental problems with the design and implementation of Police Scotland. Negotiated practice has constructively responded to some of them, but is on its own insufficient. Explicit articulation of them as principled convictions around the distribution of power, recognition and responsiveness is a necessary stage in better understanding appeals to the ‘local’ in police governance, revealing what is at stake and providing a vocabulary through which the developing landscape of police governance in and beyond Scotland should be more critically monitored. It is the aim of this section to begin the work of recasting the intuitions of LSCs as important issues of principle in police governance.

It should be stated from the outset that in no way does this discussion seek to privilege ‘local’ over ‘central’ police organization or governance. Each has ‘virtues’ (Lustgarten, 1986: 177–8; Walker, 2000: 28–31). In contemporary parlance the virtues of central organization are coordination, efficiencies, standards and equality of service (see Houtsonen and Huotari, 2019), whereas the virtue of the local is recognition of and responsiveness to local preferences through engagement and tailoring of services to particular (and diverse) communities. Both ‘virtues’ were extolled in debates preceding reform. Our point here is to reiterate the importance of the balance between central and local, and to argue that it has yet to be reached in Scotland.

[I]mportant values are safeguarded by both localism and centralism. Each has its virtues, but the main responsibility for policy and administration should remain close to the persons using the service; the national function consists of standard-setting, equalisation and protection of minorities. Moreover, it is dangerous to concentrate all power over a particular service at any one level of government. Permanent, institutionalised tension between different levels of the political process is as firm a guarantee against abuse of power as democracy can devise. (Lustgarten, 1986: 178, emphasis added)

The idea that no single body should exercise unfettered power over the police is not new and lies at the heart of tripartism in the UK (Jones et al., 1996; Reiner, 2010; Walker, 2000). When power is distributed amongst multiple parties they necessarily act as a check on one another’s exercise of it, particularly where they occupy distinct roles and/or represent particular interests to be protected. Given that the powers wielded by the police make them central to the ‘repressive complex’ (Jones et al., 1996: 189), the distribution of power is especially important in this context, although it is a principle of democratic administration more broadly.

The 2012 Act, and the surrounding debate, were attentive to this issue despite formally relocating powers to the centre. LSCs’ calls for an ‘escalation’ route to the SPA in situations where there was disagreement, inadequate consultation or ‘structural disconnect’ within the local-level scrutiny functions reflected their acknowledgement of their post-reform status. They now lacked decisive formal powers (including dismissal of senior officers or withholding of budgets), and so needed to ‘escalate’ to the independent body that held that authority. One problem was that the distribution of power at the centre was found to be wanting. The SPA was a completely new institutional player in the governance landscape. With little time to consolidate, it quickly became enmeshed in clashes with the Chief Constable over financial responsibilities and roles and on various controversies surrounding Police Scotland’s tactics (for example, stop and search). Invariably it came out badly (see Malik, 2017a). Its autonomy from Scottish Ministers was also questioned (Malik, 2017b). Thus, the whole problem of ‘local’ governance needs to be seen in a context in which a fully functioning ‘permanent, institutionalised tension between different levels of political process’ (Lustgarten, 1986: 178) was not evident anywhere in the system. Escalation routes may come to provide an adequate solution to the reorganization of the formal distribution of power in favour of the centre (the virtues of which we do not question here), but they can do so only if those central arrangements are credible.

A second interrelated problem with the new position of LSCs was one of recognition and responsiveness. Recognition acknowledges the symbolic dimension of public policing. Whether in individual police–public contacts (Bradford, 2014) or through engagement and participation with local democratic institutions (Loader and Walker, 2007: 220–3), public–police interactions are communicative and can be important signifiers of how individuals or groups are ‘recognized’ as citizens or bearers of rights that have to be responded to appropriately. Procedural justice literature shows that interactions perceived as demonstrably unfair undermine citizens’ sense of status, with potentially disastrous consequences for the legitimacy of the police within that group (Bradford, 2014). In the present context, the shift of formal statutory powers to the centre signified the lowering of the status of local arrangements. LSCs were no longer committees that ‘took decisions’ and this has importance for the status of such committees within local government. As committees had no formal censure against the police (apart from the potential of reputational damage flowing from a refusal to ‘approve’ a local police plan), this affected the importance attached to them within Police Scotland. Significantly, at the outset, less senior Inspectors now held local governance responsibilities in place of a Chief Constable. In short, the loss of formal powers was felt by some as a devaluation of the importance of recognizing local interests.

Much of the negotiated practice was an implicit response to this. Bringing Divisional Commanders into the process of local scrutiny was an important symbolic act by Police Scotland that gave recognition to LSCs, and to the local interests they represented. Similarly, the increased involvement of elected councillors and the tendency to institutionally link scrutiny functions with harder-edged service delivery functions of community planning might be understood in the same way, as of course can the willingness of SPA board members to take upon themselves the role of ‘escalation’ route. In any case, a related issue to stress here is that giving recognition to local interests is not to make an argument that uncritically favours local ‘direction’. To give recognition to locally elected representatives is not necessarily to do as they ask. What they ask might be illegal, oppressive to other groups of citizens or otherwise inconsistent with other police commitments (to law, equality, human rights, etc.) (Jones et al., 1996: 191). For Loader and Walker, what is important is that the police give reasons for what they do or do not do, that there is deliberation about policing priorities, strategies and resources (2007: 227–31). It was a strong perception that such deliberation was not taking place, in part because of gaps in communication resulting from structural disconnects between central and local managers in Police Scotland, rather than complete disagreement with all central decisions taken, that lay at the heart of much of the disquiet in LSCs. For example, LSC ‘annoyance’ regarding the more routine appearance of armed officers was more down to Police Scotland’s designation of it as an ‘operational matter’ not requiring local deliberation than it was necessarily down to the decision itself (see above). Negotiated practice around providing LSCs with information requested, involving more senior police officials to reach up into the hierarchy, and potential developments in the autonomy of the emergent regions, again testify to practitioners’ intuitive grasp of the democratic need to give recognition through reason giving.

Although the giving of reasons is one way of responding to local preferences, responsiveness to preferences, and means of accessing or being exposed to them, is a wider issue (Jones et al., 1996: 191), of which the negotiated practice of LSCs again demonstrated an intuitive feel. Kuper distinguishes between vertical and horizontal responsiveness (2004: 103–4). Vertical responsiveness relates to the relationship of institutions and elected representatives to the citizens that they have a mandate to serve. The vertical responsiveness of LSCs was questioned in light of general concerns about the state of local electoral democracy in Scotland. However, vertical responsiveness is not only achieved through electoral mandate (Jones et al., 1996: 191). Public voice can be heard through an increasingly diverse set of mechanisms, including surveys, citizen juries and consultation exercises (Loader and Walker, 2007: 222). There are some encouraging developments along these lines in Scotland (Bland, 2017; Raco and Flint, 2001) but such innovations, other than routine use of public survey data, are not mainstream as yet. Where the LSCs sought to enhance their vertical responsiveness was where they sought location in community safety. Beyond drawing upon survey data, these committees can and do include representative community groups (often representing hard to reach voices of young people, the LGBT community or ethnic minorities – precisely the groups whose rights risk being threatened if recognition of mainstream public sentiment is not checked) and voluntary sector service providers. It might be the case that other committee structures also provide some additional vertical responsiveness of these kinds. That is a question for future studies of Scottish local government, but for the moment it can be observed that LSC members were intuitively aware of vertical responsiveness and it was often the case that community safety, through its active involvement of citizen representation, offered some dimension of it.

The location of community safety within community planning brings the discussion onto horizontal responsiveness. The 2012 Act reaffirms Police Scotland’s responsibilities to participate in the community planning local service delivery partnership (s47). Where police scrutiny occurs here it is conducted not only in conjunction with local authority officials but also with other local service delivery partners (social work, education, health, etc.) alongside the community representatives noted above. This offers a modicum of what Kuper terms horizontal responsiveness across different professional institutions:

(A) relationship between authorities that check and balance one another in part because (despite some divergent ends and means) they need to compromise or find consensus in order to fulfil their functions, and so will be receptive to one another’s claims and counterclaims. (2004: 103)

Horizontal responsiveness almost, but not quite, returns us to the opening preoccupation of this section. It is not a distribution of power in the formal legal sense but it does offer institutional check and balance at the local level. Community planning as a statutorily mandated partnership committee has real potential for institutionalizing a horizontal responsiveness in public service delivery that, as was demonstrated earlier, has a strong historical legacy in Scotland. It is therefore unsurprising that, as local arrangements were being renegotiated during the study, this was the direction of travel.

Conclusions

Far from being an event that took place on 1 April 2013, the reform of policing in Scotland remains an ongoing and sometimes contested process. The considerable scope within the enabling legislation for discretion regarding implementation was probably a necessity given the complexity of amalgamating eight regional police services and two national agencies into a single organization, but this requires the emergent practices negotiated around the Act to be scrutinized carefully.

This article has given focus to local governance arrangements, which run the risk of being forgotten in the midst of a process characterized as centralization. Police Scotland is a single organization, but questions of local governance and local policing were part of the debate that heralded it and of the enabling legislation itself, and a balance between its central and local orientations remains a work in progress and a matter of negotiated practice. Illustrations drawn from our small-scale study of the new local governance arrangements revealed how practitioners filled in the gaps to work around structural disconnects that impeded information and communication flows. These had contributed to a series of controversies with the new system where it appeared that local preferences and interests had been ignored or unheeded. We then demonstrated that these appeals to the local were not mere expressions of sentiment or resistance to change; rather they reflected an intuitive feel for what was vaguely framed in or absent from the bare bones of the legislation. In particular, the negotiated practice of those making the new governance arrangements work showed a grasp of key tenets of democratic police governance: that power over policing must be shared across different institutions and/or levels of government; that police organizations should recognize and be responsive to those subject to them; and, that flowing from these necessary requirements, policing and the policy of the police need to be subjected to meaningful deliberation. In Scotland, these ideas continue to find some, but by no means all, of their expression in local governance arrangements on account of the strong historical legacy of Scottish policing being institutionally situated within local public service delivery. They are, however, core dimensions of democratic police governance as a whole, and are not of purely ‘local’ import, either in Scotland or elsewhere. Indeed, other contributions to this issue clearly illustrate that particular histories of police and government do much to determine the institutional forms that democratic police governance takes.