ABSTRACT
The rate of production reflects the prominent place that policing now occupies in social policy and party political debate. Excessive centralisation - the development of a national police force - would be to rob policing of its local character and bring it too close to the influence of the executive. Though the government, in pursuit of its robust ‘law and order’ policy, undertook initially to exempt the police from the cuts to be achieved elsewhere in public expenditure, there was to be no exemption from the pursuit of effectiveness and efficiency. The government’s commitment to reducing the public sector borrowing requirement is allied closely to its view that the state has assumed responsibility for services better organised by the private or voluntary sectors. The corollary of this attempt to delineate ‘core’ policing activities is the promotion of community voluntarism and self-help policing.
