The official web site of the West Mercia Police Authority is here. This site expresses criticisms of the way it conducts its business and its continuing excessive Council Tax demands.
Policing in England and Wales is undertaken by a number of regional police forces with the West Mercia Constabulary (WMC) covering Herefordshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire.
Taxpayers pay for the police through a combination of central and local funding with police grants, revenue support grants and business rates allocated by central government and local funding obtained from a component of Council Tax.
To ensure that Police Forces are accountable to the people they serve, each force has an associated Police Authority made up of local councillors and independent members (including one or more magistrates). Police Authorities are responsible for the political oversight of Police Forces and for deciding how much money taxpayers should pay for policing through Council Tax.
The Police Authority for Herefordshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire is the West Mercia Police Authority (WMPA) whose official web site is here.
In principle the police are supposed to be accountable to the people in their regions through their Police Authorities. In practice, however, this accountability is at best weak and at worst non existent. In the case of the West Mercia Police Authority it is easy to see from attending meetings that the relationship between the Authority and the Police Force has become so intimate and intertwined that they are now one organisation in all but name. In consequence the independence and objectively needed for effective oversight is completely absent.
The government has been aware of this problem since it first came to power but has done little about it until recently. It did, however, ask Sir Ronnie Flanagan, a retired senior Chief Constable, to look at this as a part of his wider review of policing and his report confirmed the need for change and made concrete proposals to establish proper accountability through the introduction of directly elected Police Authorities.
Predictably, however, vested interests within police authorities voiced their opposition to these changes and it now seems that the Home Secretary has once again backed away from the reforms that Sir Ronnie Flanagan and many others see as vital if Police Authorities are ever to be made properly accountable.
It remains to be seen what will now happen but there is a serious risk that the current unsatisfactory situation will not be reformed.
The West Mercia Police Authority consists of 9 local councillors and 8 independent members serving an area that has over 200 councillors at County/Unitary level. Councillors are not elected onto the WMPA but are nominated by their Councils. In consequence, 19 out of 20 taxpayers across West Mercia are being taxed by the WMPA without playing any part whatsoever in electing those who are imposing this taxation. While some authority members accept that their role carries accountability to the public, others are adamant that no such accountability exists. This is hence taxation without representation in a very real sense and is a situation that the West Mercia Constabulary exploits to obtain levels of Council Tax funding far above any level that can be justified.
The other parts of this web site provide details of the poor record of the WMPA in failing to protect the financial interests of local taxpayers. All the material from which the details have been derived are available to the public and can be verified if necessary.