A plan to combat police racism has made limited progress and will not lead to meaningful change unless it has the full support of the new home secretary, a report has warned.
The police race action plan was announced by police chiefs in 2020 to tackle prejudice in forces, whether directed at officers or the public, but the Independent Scrutiny and Oversight Board (ISOB), which monitors progress, says the new government must take responsibility for it to succeed.
Abimbola Johnson, the chair of the ISOB, whose report was published on Monday, said the Conservative government had shown “no real interest” in the plan, which left the onus on individual forces.
“There are certain forces that just really don’t prioritise anti-racism work at all because the chief constable or the PCC [police and crime commissioner] doesn’t buy into it,” she said.
“The only way to cut through that is for there to be a push from central government, which makes all 44 police forces have to work in tandem with one another to do it. It means that ambitious officers who are more individually motivated and not philosophically driven to it will have to buy into it because they’ll acknowledge that if they don’t deliver against it their careers aren’t going to go anywhere.”
She said the last government had been “actively obstructive”, citing the review into police activism commissioned by Suella Braverman, which Johnson said detracted from day-to-day policing and affected the race action plan, which is due to end in its current format in March next year.
The ISOB chair said the profile of the plan was so poor that even when she attended the National Black Police Association (NBPA) conference in October people had not heard of it or, if they had, did not know how to hold their force to account for its delivery.
In June, the NBPA withdrew support for the plan, accusing police leaders of breaking years of promises of reform and allowing a “toxic” environment to destroy or blight the careers of black and Asian officers. It said the programme for reform “must be taken out of the hands of chief constables”.
Johnson compared the public visibility of the plan and buy-in by police leaders with that of the violence against women and girls (VAWG) strategy. “Obviously it’s a very London-centric perspective but you sit on the tube and you see posters dedicated to VAWG, with the BTP [British Transport Police] stamp, mayor of London stamp, where they’ve thought about these high-profile campaigns.
“When you see quotes and discussions by the police about failures to deliver against aims in VAWG, they are nuanced, they’re thoughtful, it’s them really pushing the fact that they need to deliver against this because not doing so would make policing less legitimate. You don’t see the same messaging with the race action programme.”
The ISOB says the plan needs to have metrics that police forces could be assessed against, potentially by the police inspectorate.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “Racism has no place in policing. Police forces must improve the culture as well as reflect the diverse communities they serve. This new government is committed to working with police and police staff to achieve a diverse workforce.”
