Training for every police officer to tackle ‘corrosive canteen culture’
In response to the damning Met review, all ranks will be taught to call out racist, sexist and homophobic behaviour
Article in the Sunday Times by Home Affairs Correspondent Dipesh Gadher on 18 June 2023
Police of all ranks are to receive leadership training in a new drive to stamp out the “corrosive canteen culture” that has contributed to the erosion of public confidence in forces.
Officers will be taught to call out racist, sexist and homophobic behaviour by colleagues and learn how to better engage with communities where trust has collapsed.
The centrally run courses are to be bolstered by plans for a flagship national police training centre modelled on the world-renowned Defence Academy in Shrivenham, Oxfordshire, which educates armed forces personnel and civil servants.
The initiative follows the murder of Sarah Everard by Wayne Couzens, a serving Metropolitan Police officer, the jailing of his Met colleague David Carrick, a serial rapist, and a string of scandals in which vile messages were shared by police officers in WhatsApp groups.
The new training is believed to have been amended by the College of Policing, which will set the curriculum, following Baroness Casey’s scathing review of the Met, which she described as institutionally racist, misogynistic and homophobic.
The churn rate of chief constables has also been a cause for concern, with the last four commissioners of the Metropolitan Police leaving early.
“Leadership development is the single most important thing that the police service now needs to focus on, because from it flows everything else,” said Lord Herbert of South Downs, chairman of the College of Policing.
“It’s a grave mistake to think of leadership as being only about the chief officers,” Herbert said. “We have to start at the beginning and recognise that every officer is a leader and will have to exercise judgment.”
“Leadership development is the single most important thing that the police service now needs to focus on, because from it flows everything else”
The college’s leadership programme is intended to deliver consistent standards across all 43 police forces in England and Wales.
It will also be linked to promotion. At the moment, a police constable seeking to become a sergeant has to pass an exam, but is not given any additional training to cope with the responsibilities of supervising more people.
“It’s like a learner driver being allowed to get on the road having only passed their theory test,” said one policing official.
The courses are expected to place a heavy emphasis on challenging inappropriate and discriminatory behaviour. Messages from the Charing Cross police station scandal, in which officers joked about raping and beating women and killing black children, will be used as examples.
Herbert, who helped to set up the College of Policing in 2011 as a Tory policing minister under David Cameron and who was appointed its chairman ten years later, said Casey had uncovered a “corrosive canteen culture”.
In a thinly veiled criticism of Dame Cressida Dick, who was ousted as Met commissioner last year, Herbert, 60, said: “We have got to move on from the idea that the problems have been a few rotten apples.
“The issue is: how were these behaviours allowed to continue unchallenged by peers and leaders?”
He warned that concerns about culture and leadership were not exclusive to the Met.
Much of the college’s new training will be provided online through local forces, particularly to those in junior ranks. However, the college will deliver courses directly to those at a senior level.
A site is also now being sought to accommodate a new police leadership academy.
Herbert admitted this weekend that he had opposed the sale by the government in 2015 of Bramshill House, a listed building in Hampshire that previously served as the Police Staff College.
“What was lost was the importance of a physical centre,” he said. “Can you imagine the armed forces without Sandhurst, without Dartmouth or without Shrivenham?”
The latter is the site of the Defence Academy which delivers world-class military training and education to Ministry of Defence students and overseas army leaders.
Suella Braverman, the home secretary, is thought to be supportive of having a similar academy for policing.
Herbert said it would not only form part of a National Centre for Police Leadership, but could act as a potential revenue-raising hub for police chiefs from abroad keen to learn from Britain. “It needs to be a campus that is inspirational,” he said.
The academy would most likely have to be located in the Midlands or the north of England to make it as accessible as possible to staff from UK forces.
Herbert said the premature departure of so many chief officers in the last two decades was “not desirable”. Prior to Dick’s ousting last year, the Met witnessed the early departure of three consecutive commissioners: Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, Sir Paul Stephenson and Sir Ian Blair.
“I set up the College of Policing in order to foster professionalism,” said Herbert. “There is a new generation of police leaders now — and that is epitomised by Sir Mark Rowley [Dick’s successor] and his team — who are not defensive about the Met, who recognise the problems, and say they are going to tackle them.
“It took too long. But there has been a very important change.”
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