Wayne Couzens, cost-cutting and counterterrorism

Did the Met's insatiable demand for firearms officers trump quality control?

I posted this a while back on my blog - since pruned - and thought it might be worth featuring here. For the record, I'm not in the business of making excuses for the Met. No longer my circus. No longer my clowns.

I’ve updated the article slightly, to reflect corrections made by former police instructors about how UK officers across different forces are trained.

The background to the Couzens case is a jigsaw with lots of parts and I'm quietly confident this is one. And I'm not really surprised, given the quality of media commentary surrounding Couzens, the point hasn't been made. Maybe because it's a fairly technical issue, not easily explained in a shrill sentence or two. But let me explain. There are three categories of civilian police forces in England and Wales;

Home Office Forces: The Police you see on the streets, or not, as the case may be. There are 43 of them, and they're geographically organised. As the name suggests, their governance is via PCCs and the Home Office.

Ministry Forces: There are three, who provide specific policing functions to Her Majesty’s Government. They are the CNC (Civil Nuclear Constabulary), the MDP (Ministry of Defence Police) and the BTP (British Transport Police). The only one that really provides recognisably policing services to Joe Public are the BTP - the other two provide largely armed 'security policing' to government premises. Let me be blunt - most Home Office police see 'Ministry' officers as not ‘real’ police, although BTP get a pass given their public-facing role. Wandering around a nuclear power station or submarine base with a gun isn't 'policing'. This isn’t being disrespectful - it’s simply a fact static security roles are entirely different from mainstream policing and I’m sure these forces are perfectly good at what they do.

The Others: Municipal police services like Ports police, parks police and weird and wonderful anomalies like the Mersey Tunnels police. I mention them only in the interest of completeness.

It used to be officers from Ministry forces weren't allowed to transfer to Home Office forces without undergoing the full recruit training package. Why? Because their roles and training were different. Home Office police also received better pensions (although no longer), to reflect the significant difference in their roles.

Wayne Couzens, who'd been an unpaid, volunteer in Kent Police (a Special Constable), joined the CNC and performed security patrol work. Yes, he’d have had undertaken the Initial Police learning and Development Program (IPLDP), designed to codify UK police training. However, if you think IPLDP in the CNC is the same as completing a probationary period in a Home Office force, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

In 2008, UK PLC famously ran out of money. Come 2010 and the new austerity coalition government, Home Office forces needed people on the hurry up. In particular, they needed firearms officers to feed the counter-terrorism machine - especially the Met in London, responsible for the GSZ (Government Security Zone). All CNC and MDP officers are trained to use firearms. MDP, for example, is the largest armed police force in the UK. The cost of training a firearms officer is considerable, involving several months of expensive residential training.

Anecdotal evidence suggests the demand for firearms officers like Couzens meant standards were relaxed. This not only saved money, but filled rapidly emptying slots as officers left the Theresa May-era police service (as Home Secretary she gutted UK policing, causing damage that will take generations to repair). And, of course, this allowed politicians to talk about increased police numbers. I’ve been told, by credible people, that several Met firearms officers expressed concerns about the quality of recruits transferring from the CNC.

And so, after a brief spell as a response officer in southeast London, Couzens was soon transferred to what I knew as DPG (Diplomatic Protection Group), where the work wasn't wildly different from his old role at CNC. I'm sure the overtime incentive also played a part (Couzens was £29K in debt when arrested and living off of payday loans. As a former professional standards officer, I can tell you financial problems are the most common red flag for bad cops).

As an aside, I was around when Met vetting systems were overwhelmed by the sudden expansion of staff (when PCSOs were joining the Met in the mid-2000s we had at least one convicted rapist slip through the vetting net). Vetting is a whole different topic, even more arcane than cross-force transfer procedures. It doesn’t help that police vetting overlaps with Government / National Security vetting, with a web of clearances run by different units of competing civil servants.

And yes, there are many other reasons why the Couzens affair is disturbing. The culture inside armed policing is surely one of them (guns, overtime dependency, steroids, mundane work, machismo, sexism etc), but the question still needs to be asked; who at the Home Office decided armed security guards from quasi-police forces should be fast-tracked into the mainstream? I notice how the officers disciplined for having obscene WhatsApp messages on their phones were all ex-colleagues of Couzens’… from the Civil Nuclear Constabulary. This is a force, incidentally, that seems to take a generous view of misconduct by its senior officers.

Outliers will always exist and systems are imperfect - but would a creature like Wayne Couzens have got through six months training in a Home Office force followed by 18 months’ probation, on the street, dealing with the public? I don't know, of course (some bent Old Bill have), but clearly in his case there was a failure of basic due diligence.