12 Aug 2011

Police made the decisions, not ministers, says Orde

Senior police chief Sir Hugh Orde says Home Secretary Theresa May had no role in “more robust tactics”, no power to cancel police leave, and that the return of MPs from holiday was “an irrelevance”.

Sir Hugh, the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, said tactics had changed because more officers were made available, and that MPs coming home from holiday was “an irrelevance”.

Theresa May had “no power whatsoever” to cancel all police leave, Orde continued. “The more robust policing tactics you saw were not a function of political interference; they were a function of the numbers being available to allow the chief constables to change their tactics,” he told BBC’s Newsnight.

Sir Hugh also said cuts of 20 per cent to policing over the current spending period would “inevitably” lead to fewer police officers.

Acting Metropolitan Police Commissioner Tim Godwin agreed that decisions about tactics and numbers during the riots were “all police decisions and they were all made by my police commanders and myself”.

The two senior officers defended the police after David Cameron used an emergency debate on the riots in the Commons to criticise their tactics.

Mr Cameron told MPs police chiefs had been “frank” with him about what went wrong on Sunday and Monday nights in London and elsewhere.

“There were simply far too few police deployed on to our streets and the tactics they were using weren’t working,” said the Prime Minister.

“Initially, the police treated the situation too much as a public order issue – rather than essentially one of crime.”

Read more: Full coverage of the UK riots

The Prime Minister returned from holiday on Monday night – a few hours after his Home Secretary – and called an urgent meeting of emergencies committee Cobra, which included Sir Hugh.

Communities Secretary Eric Pickles said the prime minister had been “very much in charge” of that meeting.

Police Federation vice chairman Simon Reed said Sir Hugh was “clearly upset” at the suggestion it was the government that ordered the change in tactics.

“It’s a slight on the professionalism of the police service and the rank and file because some of the language, some of the tone used, was that they were too timid – almost that they weren’t brave enough.

“Rank and file officers will be very upset about those comments because these were unprecedented levels of violence that we saw.”

London Mayor Boris Johnson gave the Met Police his full backing, saying: “Anybody can have 20/20 hindsight about decisions that could have been taken…[but] let’s look at what’s going on now… the people who did this stuff are not getting away with it and that is thanks to the efforts of the Metropolitan Police force and others.”