John Apter did not mince his words: ‘I hold Theresa May personally responsible for the fact that policing is on its knees – it’s been personal for her, and it has been incredibly damaging.’ The Chair of the Police Federation, writing in 2019, shortly after May had stood down as leader of the Conservative Party and subsequently as Prime Minister, did not only welcome her resignation, he celebrated ‘The End of May’. Apter accused May of having had ‘utter contempt for policing and those who deliver it’ and saw as her legacy a ‘broken police service’ and the need to put ‘policing, and the safety and security of the public, at the heart of Government policy’ again.
Indeed, policing had changed under May who had first served as Home Secretary under David Cameron and then as Prime Minister. Under her oversight, police powers, status and financial resources had plummeted. The police workforce shrank by more than 20,000 officers, successive governments reduced spending on the police by, on average, 18 per cent and pay settlements were 18 per cent below inflation. The police had been severely hit by austerity cuts. Or as Apter put it, the forces had suffered an ‘attack’ by the Conservative Party that suddenly treated the police like any other state institution whose budget was severely curtailed once the Conservative–Liberal Democrats coalition came to power in 2010 and committed the country to a strict diet of ‘budgetary responsibility’, financial restraint and doing-more-with-less.
And yet, while the cuts to policing had indeed been substantial and thousands of jobs and some powers were lost (for example following a European Court of Human Rights ruling that led to the suspension of Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, a stop-and-search power), it would be a mistake to think that the role of the police had been reduced through austerity.
Indeed, there is considerable evidence that the opposite is the case, with significant implications for the future of police work, and work in the education, healthcare and social care sectors. In fact, because of austerity, police officers are increasingly taking over roles that prior to the cuts had been fulfilled by teachers, healthcare professionals or social workers whose jobs and resources have vanished. Austerity has driven the ‘policification’ of the British (welfare) state. This is because while the police experienced substantial cuts, its fundamental role for the British state did not change: it remained what the sociologist Egon Bittner already in the 1970s called the modern state’s institution of last resort.
Schools, or youth services, but also the NHS, however, do not have such an essential function and often had to retreat in the face of cuts and the ideological onslaught of austerity that portrayed some of their services as unaffordable and/or poorly designed handouts to the undeserving. Consequently, they were partially replaced and supplemented by a stretched, increasingly agitated, and politically alienated police force, effectively acting as a coercive scaffolding for institutions at the brink of collapse, reimagining the services in a more explicitly carceral and less inclusive way.
This development can be observed particularly well in schools in which police officers are now increasingly posted to replace teaching assistants. While school police officers are certainly no invention of the austerity age, the number of constables in London schools has more than doubled since 2010/11; figures for England and Wales have spiked from 680 officers in 2021 to 979 in 2023. Austerity is likely to explain this increase to a substantial degree as the relationship between austerity-elastic measures of social disadvantage and police postings shows. The case of free school meals (FSM) is specifically insightful: research has shown that officers were more likely to be based in schools with a higher share of disadvantaged pupils, with almost all schools where 50 per cent or more pupils were eligible for FSM having an onsite police officer. None of the schools that had no FSM-eligible students had an onsite officer. This is not coincidental. As The Guardian has reported, the London Metropolitan Police ‘sometimes used data on the numbers of deprived children to choose “priority schools” to receive more intensive interventions’. Forces across the country used indicators such as free school dinners, GCSE attainment rates, crime data linked to schools and persistent absence levels to decide which schools required an officer. The Norfolk Constabulary also considered the number of children on Pupil Premium grants and those with allocated social workers to determine the need for police.
This indicates that contemporary school policing systematically targets poorer and disadvantaged pupils. It also implies a strong link between intensified school policing and austerity, as the use of free school dinners as an indicator for priority schools shows. Austerity has exacerbated food insecurity with increased use of food banks and more children arriving to school hungry. Between 2015/16 and 2020/21, the percentage of pupils eligible for free school meals in England increased from 14.3 per cent to 22.5 per cent. More than 40 per cent of Black Caribbean pupils and 32.5 per cent of Black African pupils were eligible for free school meals, compared to 21.6 per cent of White British pupils. This suggests that austerity measures have not only exacerbated food poverty and reliance on free school meals among Black pupils, but also justified increased school policing. All the while, schools in Britain warn of teachers, teaching assistants and support staff leaving, often due to low pay and the lack of an institutional financial cushion. This would lead to a loss of support structures, especially for special needs students who benefit most from teaching assistants. Policing in the schools, however, has increased.
developments of policification can be observed in the mental health field, where it has become the norm for police, rather than NHS workers, to address mental health emergencies, and for people in mental ill-health to be transported in police cars instead of ambulances as best practice would demand it. Moreover, rough sleeping has increased by 120 per cent since 2010 and while welfare institutions and councils’ social care and housing budgets have come under pressure, the government has not acted on its commitment to repeal the 200-year-old Vagrancy Act, a law that criminalises rough sleeping. Indeed, it is discussing even harsher penalties, including imprisonment and fines more than double the current levels and therefore an increased role for police and the criminal justice system in what is a welfare issue in its purest form: the provision of shelter for those in need.
It is worth noting that police officers do not necessarily welcome this expansion of tasks that comes with a significantly increased workload and requires new skill sets, and also a different understanding of the job. Police have voiced loud opposition against what they perceive as ‘picking up the pieces’ of a failed welfare state, and forces have unilaterally decided to pull out of mental healthcare provision which they argued was not part of their job. Police have also argued for the scrapping of the Vagrancy Act and against the punishment of rough sleepers.
So, we are confronted with a complex situation. On the one hand, austerity has driven policification and should be seen as a key component of an increasingly authoritarian statecraft that also manifests in legislation such as the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023, all of which widen and strengthen the role the police play in the running of the British state. On the other hand, policification raises questions of state legitimacy in at least two ways: first, from those who require support from, for example, teaching assistants or medical professionals but are now confronted with police officers. Yet second, it also raises questions of legitimacy internal to the state where officers push back increasingly openly against being employed as a stop gap for an otherwise disintegrating (welfare) state. This raises not only questions about the future of work in the welfare sector and the police, but profound concerns about state capacity, and the racialised nature of neoliberal austerity.
Dr Malte Michael Laub is University Teacher in Politics and International Relations in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield.
Image credit: Nikolay Dimitrov via Unsplash