The Police Race Action Plan (PRAP) was announced by the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) and the College of Policing in June 2020. It aims to improve policing for Black people by building an anti-racist police service.

My Independent Scrutiny and Oversight Board (ISOB) is tasked with monitoring its progress. On 8 August 2023, we released Police Race Action Plan: Independent Scrutiny and Oversight Board annual report May 2022–May 2023, our first annual report, in which we make seven thematic recommendations:

Since PRAP’s announcement, there have been a vast number of significant policing-related reports or incidents that have confirmed that racism in policing in England and Wales remains an ongoing and urgent problem. We include in the report a timeline showing just some of these milestones to emphasise the importance of PRAP.

This invokes one of the difficulties with delivering this work. Although PRAP is national, it is, in effect, 44 different local programmes of work that need equal and considered delivery by every police force across England and Wales. The Policing Protocol Order 2011 SI No 2744, which created the office of police and crime commissioner, states: ‘The establishment of PCCs has allowed for the Home Office to withdraw from day-to-day policing matters, giving the police greater freedom to fight crime as they see fit, and allowing local communities to hold the police to account’ (article 27 of the Schedule). The devolved nature of accountability structures in policing means that the delivery of PRAP is dependent on the consensual dedication of police chiefs and PCCs to deliver it.

More broadly, there is a lack of alignment between the goals of PRAP and those of the Home Office. Although Home Office representatives sit on its programme board, PRAP does not receive funding from central government. Furthermore, the home secretary’s rhetoric undermines the efforts behind a programme like PRAP. In November 2022, when addressing the NPCC and the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners’ summit, the home secretary, Suella Braverman KC, railed against ‘politically correct distractions’ and ‘woke policing’.1Suella Braverman at the APCC and NPCC Partnership Summit, Home Office, 9 November 2022. She wrote to chief constables, encouraging them to ‘ramp up the use of stop and search’, despite the clear race disparity in the use of such powers.2‘Police urged to use stop and search to save more lives’, Home Office news story, 20 June 2023. She endorsed the relaxation of restrictions around the use of suspicion-less search powers despite there being a live super-complaint being investigated by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) into the disproportionalities this power manifests.3Suella Braverman at the APCC and NPCC Partnership Summit, ibid. Recently, she wrote to the chief inspector, asking him to inspect forces, not in relation to discrimination, but to scrutinise whether police involvement and commentary on ‘“gender identity” politics’ and ‘critical race theory’, among other matters, detracts from getting the basics right in policing.4Letter to HMCI Andy Cooke, 1 September 2023.

Despite these constraints, some forces have demonstrated a determination to deliver on PRAP. Thames Valley Police (TVP) has established a local delivery structure, which has included appointing an independent chair of a localised ISOB. It has held several community engagement events centred around PRAP. The rank and file, senior officers, and community members from the area frequently attended the forum sessions we ran in 2022. TVP leadership has consistently and openly spoken about the importance of PRAP in delivering its ambitious goals. This is not to say that its delivery of PRAP is or will be free of criticism, but it appears to be laying the foundations for meaningful work that will be implemented in collaboration with internal and external communities.

Delivery of PRAP requires a unique type of leadership in policing, one that can: bring together the communities who have been left behind by the institution (under-protected and over-policed both internally and externally); galvanise the senior leadership in policing to tackle this programme of work; provide support and adequate resourcing; and ensure that the rank and file in policing – the very officers with whom the public come into contact the most and those who themselves feel the brunt of the shortfalls in policing – are listened to and brought into this work. PRAP itself has been tarnished by public reports of racism and discrimination being experienced by its own officers and staff.5‘Police initiative to tackle racism accused of being racist’, BBC News, 31 May 2023.

We would also like more visible and aligned work between PRAP and the statutory bodies empowered to scrutinise forces against PRAP’s anti-racism aims: HMICFRS and the Independent Office for Police Conduct. Both have representatives who sit on PRAP’s programme board, which meets every two months. However, seeing more direct interaction between PRAP and those agencies would provide clearer metrics against which its progress can be measured. This feedback has, for the most part, been positively received, with some recommendations already being acted on to improve delivery. Markers of success over the next year will be: whether improvement is actually felt within Black communities; consistency in programme rollout; and an improvement in public communication around racism and policing.

Readers can sign up here to register interest in attending the ISOB’s public event on 9 November 2023 at Conway Hall, where it and members of the PRAP team will be available to go through the report’s findings and set out priorities for moving forward.