Peel and the Home Office - transforming the country with 17 staff

Great British Bureaucracies IV

When Robert Peel became Home Secretary, he arrived at a department which had not only the responsibilities of the current Home Office and Ministry of Justice, but those of most other Whitehall departments too – the Home Office basically did everything that wasn’t foreign policy, defence or tax raising. The country was going through breakneck economic transformation, combined with rapid population growth, urbanisation and immiseration with falling real wages. Regular outbreaks of disorder and rapidly rising crime were the predictable result.

His record in the department over his two terms (1822-27 and 1828-30) was nothing short of extraordinary. He is most famous for the creation of the Metropolitan Police, a response to the chronic lawlessness of London. After a rebuff in 1822, he finally succeeded in passing the legislation to establish the Metropolitan Police in 1829, and moved rapidly to appoint leadership and establish the force within a year.

Not only did he pass the legislation and put outstanding leaders in charge, he also made far reaching decisions on pay and on the type of people who would be recruited that still determine the way police forces work today throughout the English speaking world. From the very foundation of the Metropolitan Police, what became known as the Peelian Principles are clear- the two most important of which are that success is defined not by the detection but the prevention of crime, and the concept of the police as ‘citizens in uniform’ – ‘the police are the public and the public are the police’.

Peel was also however, responsible for a massive simplification and partial liberalisation of the criminal law. He boasted that by the time his reform of the forgery laws was complete, 90% of offences before the courts would be tried under simplified legislation he had brought in, repealing around 300 prior statutes in the process.

Peel inherited a criminal justice system that combined savagery with randomness – archaic procedures, little enforcement capability, capricious and unpredictable behaviour by juries and occasionally liberal judges meant that the response to capital offences was effectively a lottery. Peel abolished the death penalty for a range of miscellaneous offences, like tearing down hop vines, or impersonation of a Greenwich pensioner¹. But his main interest was simplification of the law, arguing the option of the death penalty should remain open to the judge, depending on the circumstances of the case.

His new Act on Offences Against the Person repealed 57 previous statutes. 120 statutes on forgery were repealed and replaced by a single bill of four clauses. 130 statutes on theft were replaced with a single Act.

He began the process of prison reform, introducing a national regime and the first process of inspection. He reformed the jury process, which had previously been covered by provisions in 85 different statutes. And he put in place major reforms of the Court of Chancery, which had been plagued by delay.

Peel was in many ways a pragmatist, a conservative sceptical about theoretical approaches to problem solving, even while consulting and enjoying cordial relations with reformers like Bentham. At the same time, he had a clear strategic vision of what he was trying to achieve. He saw that the mood of the time demanded an amelioration of the severity of the criminal law. But the increase in crime meant liberalisation had to be accompanied by corresponding measures to improve the efficiency of prevention and dealing with crime, through the simplification of the law and building up an effective mechanism to maintain order. He had in the process to overcome the deep seated English suspicion of creating a Napoleonic style ‘Gendarmerie’. The very idea of a police force was dismissed by a Parliamentary committee in 1819 as ‘odious and repulsive’.

The reforms of the criminal justice system concentrated initially on simplification and removal of the death penalty from the most absurd offences. Those who wanted to go further on liberalisation were often the same who were most suspicious of a police force, and Peel was frustrated when the committee he set up in 1822 to review the question of policing the metropolis repeated the rejection of 1819. Those on the more conservative side were won over to the idea of a disciplined police service by the spectre of public unrest, including the riots around Queen Caroline’s funeral, and the fear that the regular army were neither suitable for maintaining public order nor necessarily always reliable, with an attempted mutiny even in a Guards battalion.

When Peel returned to office in 1828 he set up another committee, and this time there would be no rebuff to his ideas. He had spent considerable time building up statistics on the scale of rising crime in London, and had even sought information on the state of affairs in other cities in Europe. He was scornful about the arguments that a police service was an infringement on liberty, writing to Wellington ‘liberty does not consist in having your house robbed by organised gangs of thieves and in leaving the principal streets of London in the nightly possession of drunken women and vagabonds”

The 1829 Act went through with surprisingly little resistance in Parliament, and Peel then moved with what would now be inconceivable speed to set the new force up, leaving the forces of resistance no time to mobilise. The two first Commissioners were appointed (without an interview) within two weeks of the Act securing Royal Assent , they rapidly came up with their proposals for establishment, and recruitment was underway within months. The determination and speed steamrollered resistance from various parishes who bitterly resented the loss of patronage and the 8d in a pound on assessed rateable property. The only local interest that was respected was the City of London ‘with which I should be afraid to meddle’ – a sentiment shared by every subsequent Home Secretary, hence the anomalous survival of the City of London Police even today.

Peel created the division between the Commissioner(s) responsible for the law enforcement, and the ‘collector’ who was responsible for pay and rations. And he made a far reaching call about the sort of people the Met would recruit – reducing the proposed salary to make it clear his core recruit was a peninsular veteran Non Commissioned Officer rather than someone from the office class, whom Peel felt would see street patrolling as beneath their dignity. For better or worse, this ‘NCO’ culture has dominated policing ever since, in the UK and throughout the Anglosphere. His personal imprint on the culture of policing was recognised in the nicknames given to police - ‘Peelers’ in Ireland, ‘Bobbies’ in Britain.

Peel’s approach to administration combined pragmatism with drive, a keen eye for the right people to deliver, and a willingness to ‘co-produce’ much of his policy with experts and practitioners.

Peel was operating in the old unreformed public service. Clerks could be a law unto themselves. He had previously been frustrated in Ireland with the carelessness of much of the legislative drafting, and ordered his under secretary to issue a rebuke. This was done, only for his deputy to note ruefully “the cool indifference with which the matter was treated I confess has annoyed me very much”. It turns out firing unsatisfactory officials was not straightforward even in the pre Northcote-Trevelyan era, though Peel eventually seems to have driven performance through high expectations and fearsome work appetite. When Peel arrived in the Home Office he found an outstanding Permanent Secretary, Henry Hobhouse, 14 clerks and a precis writer. There were some consolations in the ability to recruit outstanding people, for example Gregson, a barrister on the Northern circuit who became Peel’s chief advisor on law reform.

Patronage was a fact of life – while Peel tried to get the best people in wherever possible, and sought to exclude patronage from newly established organisations like the Metropolitan Police, he was realistic enough to work within the system. He responded to one colleague “I do not think your son can make a more inefficient member of the board of stamps than Mr T has done… I am perfectly ready therefore to acquiesce in the exchange”

As a member of the tight elite, Peel knew everyone. If he could not think of a suitable candidate himself, with a clear sense of the sort of person he was looking for, he could get a well informed recommendation. This led to his outstandingly successful appointments of the first joint commissioners of the Met, a star barrister Richard Mayne and Charles Rowan, a retired colonel and distinguished solider who had served under Moore and Wellington, and who was noted for his skill in organisation, training and humane approach to his troops.

With such a tiny establishment, and with less rigid rules of Parliamentary process, Peel was never going to come up with policies and legislation on his own, nor did he want to. He preferred to operate through ‘co-creation’. The Gaols Act had originally been prepared by a Parliamentary committee of reformers, for example. When the Court of Chancery was attacked for delays, Peel was able to defend the Lord Chancellor’s conduct, while ensuring a mixed commission of judges and reformers to come up with proposals.

Peel was criticised for not going further with legal reform. But he was most keen to ensure the reforms were palatable to the judges who would be responsible for them. Bills were shared with judges in draft, and, extraordinarily to modern eyes, the Lord Chief Justice even helped take some of them through the Lords. No Home Secretary has probably ever received a better compliment from a judge than Peel, of whom the Lord Chief Justice said in Parliament

‘it was fortunate for the country when a gentleman of comprehensive mind, not bred to law, turned his attention to the subject, for those who were bred to the law, were often, by habit, dull to its imperfections’.

His personality combined sharp intelligence with tact, if not always warmth, and boundless energy. His position as Home Secretary combined with his assured status in the ruling class meant he was on corresponding terms with anyone who mattered, maintaining a flow of official and personal intelligence coming into the office.

This enabled him to use the Home Secretary’s authority as a sort of ‘bully pulpit’, urging local magistrates to enforce legislation which challenged the interests of factory owners with as much enthusiasm as they did those outlawing unions and used his power to send troops with some discretion depending on whether he felt the law was being implemented fairly. He did this through a relentless stream of correspondence, questionnaires and an early enthusiasm for statistics.

At various points in the 1820s, the Home Secretary was writing personally to cotton mill owners who about the illegal activity they were carrying out and instructing them to stop. In one case in Wigan where magistrates were reluctant to act and witnesses to appear, Peel wrote threatening to legislate to create an overlapping jurisdiction between county magistrates and those of the town – rural aristocratic magistrates often being more sympathetic to the claims of workers than town magistrates who were factory owners themselves or linked to them. Peel made sure these letters were copied to local figures sympathetic to the working people so word would get around.

There is no question Peel was the most consequential Home Secretary ever. If he had never become Prime Minister and abolished the Corn Laws, his time in the Home Office alone would give him a claim to be the most radical and consequential reformer of the entire nineteenth century. The fact he had a long spell was essential too, particularly on police reform.

Other than the Met police, he was not a great institution builder – but his legal reforms were profound and the spirit of rationalism breathed the spirt of the period to come. His approach already breathed the moderate Tory spirit of the future Tamworth declaration – reasonable and pragmatic reforms where the facts justified them, building on precedent and existing institutions where possible unless they were clearly not working, and attempting to address even handedly the tensions in an increasingly divided society – ultimately reflected as PM in is preparedness to shift tax from the poor to the rich through Income Tax and most of all in the commitment to free trade in agriculture which broke his party for a generation.

1. ie ex Royal Navy sailers or marines from the Royal Hospital Greenwich