You won’t win back public confidence in the police with a ‘data monitoring unit’, Yvette…

The home secretary’s overhaul of policing should go even further than the blueprint she unveiled today – abolishing ‘non-crime hate incidents’ would enable units to prioritise fighting actual crime, says John Rentoul

Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, today announced “major” reforms of policing aimed at ensuring that “communities can have confidence in their local police force”.

This is an urgent task. In a YouGov survey last month, half the population said that they had “none” or “not very much” confidence in the police to tackle crime locally. Confidence has fallen by 13 percentage points in the last five years.

Cooper’s reforms are sensible enough. Indeed, they follow the Blairite template of public service improvement to the letter. The first stage of “deliverology”, according to Michael Barber, the guru of Tony Blair’s delivery unit, who is back in No 10 advising Keir Starmer, is to have reliable real-time information about the state of a public service.

Thus, Cooper’s new Home Office unit will collect data nationally to monitor police performance, “including in high-priority areas such as tackling violence against women and girls and knife crime”. The Home Office says: “Police response times will also be standardised and measured, a key issue for the public that is currently not consistently monitored and managed.”

This is basic stuff. It is important, and the essential basis for any improvement in performance, but it is not going to do anything in the short term to alter public perception of the police.

A data-collection exercise is not going to change people’s view that the police are more interested in knocking on the doors of journalists posting “incorrect” opinions on social media than in answering the phone to the victims of theft.

It was reported last week that Essex Police, who thought it a prudent use of officers’ time to visit Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson on Remembrance Sunday about an allegedly hateful tweet, are so bad at answering the 101 phone line for reporting theft and damaging property that one in seven calls is abandoned.

It is a good thing if better information leads to better performance, and it surprises me at least that the police don’t already collect data on police response times.

But what undermines public confidence in the police is news coverage of “non-crime hate incidents”, a recent legal invention that blurs the line between an offence and the taking of offence.

What undermines public confidence is a police officer going to prison for the murder of Sarah Everard, and all the reports before and since of officers charged with sexual offences.

Non-crime hate incidents should be abolished, so that the police can prioritise fighting crime rather than recording non-crime.

Cooper has already taken a step in the right direction by changing the guidelines on shoplifting, which gave the unfortunate impression that the police would ignore anyone stealing anything worth less than £200.

And the reforms unveiled today are a necessary foundation for better national performance management. The platitudes about new technology and working in partnership with the police, so that the service providers don’t feel that they are being imposed on, which has been a drawback of some “Blairite” reforms in the past, are important even if they are vacuous. Morale matters.

But until strong leadership ensures rigorous screening of the character of every police officer in the country, public confidence is going to be hard to restore.