Cooper can do more to fix the breakdown of trust in police

Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, yesterday announced "major" reforms of policing aimed at ensuring that "communities can have confidence in their local police force".

- JOHN RENTOUL

This is an urgent task. In a YouGov survey last month, half the population said that they had “none” or “not very much” confidence in the police to tackle crime locally. Confidence has fallen by 13 percentage points in the last five years.

Cooper’s reforms are sensible enough. Indeed, they follow the Blairite template of public service improvement to the letter. The first stage of “deliverology”, according to Michael Barber, the guru of Tony Blair’s delivery unit, who is back in No 10 advising Keir Starmer, is to have reliable real-time information about the state of a public service.