Call to 'de-politicise' the Northern Ireland Policing Board: 'Politicians should not hold a gun to PSNI head'

Former party leader Doug Beattie, the UUP justice spokesman, was commenting after the release of a report about how the board operates.

Among other things, the report criticised the "real or perceived dominant political culture of the board", and said that the board "should assert its good authority in advocating and supporting policing with the community, especially within communities where trust in policing has been historically low".

Mr Beattie said: "The most insightful finding from the review of the Northern Ireland Policing Board is the ‘dominant political culture’ which, as the report lays out, is impeding ‘maturation of collective responsibility, cohesion, common purpose and corpocracy’.

"This has been something the Ulster Unionist Party has raised on multiple occasions.

“The politicising of policing goes well beyond the board as we see individual politicians hold a proverbial gun to the head of the police to ensure they react in a way favourable to their political outlook when an incident occurs.

"The threat that if the police don’t act in a particular way, political parties would withdraw from the policing board is an impossible position for any Chief Constable.

"Yet this is exactly what happened following the Sean Grahams commemoration on the Ormeau Road in 2021."

This is a reference to the pressure which Sinn Fein had piled on the PSNI top brass after two junior officers arrested a man who was attending a memorial event for a loyalist massacre amid lockdown restrictions.

One officer was suspended and another repositioned - but the High Court later found this had been unlawful.

Mr Beattie said: "To depoliticise the board we must rebalance its membership. If you are a party of the Executive then you should have one Policing Board member; the rest should be made up of lay members."

The board is made up of 19 members: nine "independent members" (that is, members who are not politicians) and 10 "political members", meaning MLAs.

The more MLAs a party has, the more seats it gets on the board.

Sinn Fein, as the biggest political party, has three members. The DUP has two, as does Alliance, and the SDLP and UUP have one each.

Mr Beattie also criticised the report itself, saying: "This review could have delved further into the operation of the Policing Board and the relationship between it, the Department of Justice, and the police service.

"Yet a short time limited review with limited terms of references have left us without any real recommendations for change and no momentum to fix a politicised police oversight body.”

The review had been ordered by the justice minister Naomi Long last September.

She had appointed former top civil servant Paul Sweeney to carry it out, alongside Dr John Topping, senior lecturer of Criminology at Queen's University Belfast.

The report said: "Consultees spoke of the need to make every effort to ensure that people who join the PSNI are drawn from the widest possible pool of talent in society.

"This is especially the case for communities who are under-represented in the PSNI workforce and where trust in policing is historically low."

It did not name which communities it was talking about.

The report added: "In practice, the oversight and accountability role of the NI Policing Board has been more prominent than their leadership role around advocacy and support for policing…

"It was further articulated that the NI Policing Board should be much more active, for example, in advocating for support around community safety, non-crime demand on PSNI, while acting as a more visible vehicle for recruitment, BAME [black and minority ethic] and related issues."

It added that "it is difficult for the PSNI to be seen to ‘self-promote’ and [they] are largely reliant on the NI Policing Board to communicate the positive aspects of policing".