Chief Constable Wanted: One Applicant, No Questions Asked

Somewhere in England this year, a force advertised for a chief constable and received one applicant it considered suitable. Not one outstanding candidate among several — one, full stop. This is not a story about a shortage of ambitious police officers. It is a story about what happens to a leadership pipeline when nobody has been asked to own it for thirty years.

The Police Leadership Commission's report, published Monday and co-authored by Lord Blunkett, puts numbers to what most serving officers already knew. Promotion in England and Wales operates as a postcode lottery: whether you rise depends less on merit than on which force you happen to be in, who your chief inspector happens to like, and whether you can survive a sergeant's exam so badly designed that fewer than half of candidates pass it. The report uses the word "outdated." A civil servant would call it what it is — a filter that screens for exam technique rather than leadership, and has done since long before most of the officers now failing it were born.

Blunkett's language is careful, as it should be from a man who has run a department. He found "outstanding examples of those who have transformed delivery to the public" alongside "extraordinarily worrying evidence requiring profound change." Translate the second phrase properly and it means this: somewhere in the system, for years, people watched leaders fail and did nothing, because nobody's job was to intervene.

That is the actual finding, and it is worth sitting with. Not that individual officers were promoted above their competence — that happens in every institution — but that the mechanism for catching it, correcting it, or even naming it, does not exist. There is no national body responsible for developing chief constables the way NHS England is responsible for developing hospital trust chief executives. There is the College of Policing, chronically underfunded relative to its NHS equivalent; there are forty-three forces, each running its own promotion process; and there are Police and Crime Commissioners, elected since 2012 specifically to provide local accountability, who mostly discovered they had influence over budgets and precious little over how a force cultivates its future leadership.

The honest defence of the current arrangement runs like this. England and Wales already has HMICFRS inspecting forces, the IOPC investigating misconduct, PCCs providing local democratic oversight, and the College of Policing setting standards — four bodies, arguably too many, each with a remit. On this view the problem the Commission describes isn't structural at all; it's a run of bad individual appointments, unfortunate but not systemic, and a fresh national academy risks adding a fifth layer of bureaucracy to a system already thick with them, without fixing the culture that actually produces bad chiefs.

It is a serious argument and it survives contact with about half the report. It does not survive the sergeant's exam, which is a mechanism, not a personality. It does not survive the finding that central funding for leadership development was allowed to wither while the NHS equivalent was protected — a decision nobody announced and everybody who worked in either institution noticed. And it does not survive the testimony, circulating this year among serving officers, of a sergeant with twenty-four years' service walking away because the disconnect between headquarters and the custody suite had become unbridgeable. You do not lose a sergeant of that seniority to individual failings. You lose them to a system that never asked what leadership training he had received since the day he passed the exam he is now watching his own recruits fail.

Here the history is unusually direct. Robert Peel built the Metropolitan Police in 1829 on the principle that the Home Secretary answered to Parliament for how it was led — an accountability line short enough to follow with your finger. It survived, more or less, until the tripartite system of 1964 blurred it between chief constables, watch committees and the Home Office, and it blurred further still when Police and Crime Commissioners arrived in 2012 promising a direct democratic answer and delivering, in practice, a fifth wheel with a mandate nobody much noticed at the ballot box. Each reform added a body. None restored the thing Peel actually built, which was a single point where responsibility landed.

The Commission's answer, a National Academy of Police Leadership, is the correct instinct — consistent training, a credible pipeline, funding restored to something like NHS levels rather than the leftovers it has survived on. Policing Minister Sarah Jones says the recommendations will "shape" the government's reform programme, which is the department's present tense for we have read this and intend to be seen reading it again. Sir Andy Marsh calls it the most comprehensive examination of police leadership in a generation, which may well be true and is also what people say about examinations that produce academies rather than decisions.

An academy is a building, or in practice a website and a curriculum, and it will not by itself answer the only question the report actually raises: who is now responsible for whether the next generation of chief constables is any good, and what happens to them if it isn't? Peel's Home Secretary could be summoned to the Commons and sacked. Name the person who inherits that job now, and you will have done more for policing than the academy ever will.