What happens when everyone plays by the same rules?

Why fewer choices might be good for policing, but maybe not for business…

I’ve had a busy but rewarding week. It kicked off at the Palace of Westminster on Monday for the parliamentary launch of Antisocial Behaviour
(ASB) Awareness Week.

Hosted by Resolve UK, the event had key figures from housing associations and community safety. But notably, nobody I could see from retail…

Curious, given the considerable overlap between the sectors. Resolve UK represents 4 million homes and around 13 million constituents across the UK. And I suspect that many of the individuals causing ASB issues in housing are also the same faces causing trouble in retail.

Data-sharing was a hot topic, and I suggested that perhaps retail has something valuable to offer here. After all, we’ve already cracked some of these issues.

A couple of days later, I sat in on the Resolve National Policy Advisory Group (NPAG) meeting – one of the leading think tanks on ASB and community safety. These are the experts, not me, so I mostly listened. But again, it struck me how similar the problems are across sectors, and how partnership working could really change things.

Midweek, outside Waterloo Station, I had an interesting conversation with a homeless man. He was asking for money for a coffee. After chatting briefly, he admitted he’d actually spend any cash on heroin. He seemed surprised I’d even stopped to talk to him, expecting avoidance rather than conversation. I didn’t give him money, but it was a reminder of how complex social issues can be, and how open dialogue matters. I explained some of the initiatives going on across the country, such as second chances initiatives and offending to recovery projects and he showed a keen interest in this. But of course, I was unable to do any more for him at that time.

Come the weekend, the serious stuff paused for family time. I rented a Rug Doctor carpet cleaner – much needed, thanks to Bruce Wayne, our Cavalier King Charles Spaniel who excels at turning carpets into chew toys. You don’t want to clean carpets on a sunny Saturday, but there’s
satisfaction in ticking it off the list.

Sunday meant athletics competitions for James and Arya. Bacon and egg rolls in hand, we watched James smiling through his field events. Arya, on the other hand, is fiercely competitive. Fortunately, second and third places were enough to keep all hell from breaking loose. As I always say, if there’s only one runner, there’s no race.

Speaking of competition, I was intrigued by Met Commissioner Mark Rowley’s comments this week. He said the UK’s 43 police forces are inefficient and proposed merging them into 12 or 13 ‘mega forces’. Makes sense to me. We currently lose economies of scale, duplicating HR,
vetting, and software across dozens of forces. When criminals move between jurisdictions, investigations become fragmented, and justice is diluted.

But interestingly, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper also caught my attention by urging businesses to adopt Auror, a single crime-reporting platform from New Zealand.

It got me thinking: fewer police forces seems sensible, yet driving every retailer onto a single software platform feels problematic. Sure, Auror might be excellent, but shouldn’t businesses have the right to choose freely, without the pressure of ‘going against the grain’? Without competition, innovation could stagnate. As Fatboy Slim once put it, “I’m #1 so why try harder?”

Maybe these ideas seem contradictory: fewer choices are good for policing but not for private business. But public services and commercial enterprises differ fundamentally. One thrives on efficiency and standardisation; the other on innovation and competition.

Still, the contrast is worth thinking about. Diametrically opposed ideas, after all, make us question our assumptions.

As Richard Nixon once said: “only when you’ve been in the deepest valley can you appreciate the view from the highest peak”. Personal growth and real change happen outside comfort zones. And perhaps challenging our own perspectives is exactly where meaningful progress begins.

Peter Fisher

Director Risk & Intelligence