Candidate briefing: working with others within your force area
These candidate briefings cover how police and crime commissioners (PCCs) should work with others in their force area.
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These candidate briefings cover how police and crime commissioners (PCCs) should work with others in their force area.
PCCs will need to work in partnership with other local leaders in community safety and criminal justice, and will have specific powers and duties that support this. Positive engagement, mutual respect and an understanding of the legal and practical frameworks will be crucial. For example, commissioners will need to be mindful of the need for judicial and prosecutorial independence.
Links with local government, as well as with health and other local services are vital. PCCs and their teams will need to understand and find ways to engage with the complex partnership landscape that currently exists that contribute towards community safety and public protection. These range from tactical partnerships delivering multi-agency case work to area wide strategic boards. PCCs may also wish to engage with or initiate work to streamline and make sense of the ways that services work together in future.
The briefings below provide candidates with the information to help them understand partnership structures, working and initiatives. The Criminal Justice Service briefings need to be read in conjunction with the following principles:
- the operational independence and impartiality of the judiciary and prosecutors must be preserved
- each individual criminal justice system body remains responsible for setting its own priorities in line with its statutory obligations
- each criminal justice body’s accounting officer remains ultimately accountable for use of that body’s budget to the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee and to Parliament, whether via the Secretary of State for Justice or the Attorney General