I interviewed the Police and Crime Commissioner Angus Macpherson to find out more about what the role as Police and Crime Commissioner entails. One of his many jobs is to write a Police and Crime plan for the county [You can view the plan here: http://bit.ly/Police-Crime_Plan ] to set out (with the help of the public) how the police should work in the county. One of his other roles is to ‘commission’ the local police force to do things to keep the county safe and catch those who aren’t keeping the county safe, but also to commission other services such as Forensics. Primarily it’s to give an efficient and effective service.

Surprisingly, Angus hadn’t always wanted to be the PCC but about 20-30 years ago he became a magistrate and sat in the courthouse then he applied to sit on the governing body of policing made up of councillors from Swindon, Wiltshire and magistrates. His career was as a chartered accountant, but he’d spent a lot of time in policing as a secondary role, he originally stood for the role 8 years ago and was then re-elected 4 years ago by the public and his term finishes in May 2020.

When asked what the High Point of the role for him was, he referred high point being the point where you’re running around and busy to the Novichok incident in Salisbury back in 2018. As far in Activity it was busy for Wiltshire police and him as he’s in charge of the money and the attack cost Wiltshire Police £10 million, luckily the government paid the bill so that everyday policing would continue as normal, but it did effect the health and wellbeing of those who had to do overtime because of the incident. His second highlight was taking the role of PCC in the first place – because it hadn’t existed before, they had to do everything from designing the note paper to the website. There’s a couple of lines in the law about how so set up the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner but there’s nothing about note paper and websites!!

One thing that stood out was the fact that during the interview you could clearly see how passionate Angus is regarding the role he does. I was sad to hear that next year is going to be his last as the Police and Crime Commissioner but with him all the best in what he goes on to do in the future!