The politicians of the centre right in England and Wales were in no doubt: police chief constables had to be made more accountable. The lead was given nationally in 2005 by Michael Gove MP, then Shadow Housing Spokesman, when he declared in The Times that:

A prominent Conservative theorist, who had headed the Policy Exchange think-tank and who had been formerly a Times columnist, Gove led the charge in 2005 against ‘failing chief constables’, because:

Three years later, writing in The Scotsman, Gove asserted that:

This notion of ‘direct accountability’ actually derives from elected commissioners of police in the United States, and Gove is here in line with a fine tradition of importing American policing methods into the UK. It followed with rather remorseless logic that his suggestion of a person who could ‘put the fear of God’ into chief constables in 2005 should become a ‘directly elected individual’ in 2008, and find its way into the Conservative Party manifesto as ‘a directly elected Police and Crime Commissioner’, two years later. By the time the Conservative Party had formed the majority in a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats in 2010, the suggestion of an elected person to hold the police directly to account had become policy and was a key part of the Queen's Speech.