I SEE our very own Cheshire Police and Crime Commissioner David Keane has made the headlines for all the wrong reasons again.

Mr Keane, who is also a councillor for Penketh, made national news when he appointed the daughter of fellow Penketh councillors to the £50,000 a year post of Deputy PCC, a move criticised by Cheshire’s cross-party Police and Crime Panel, which scrutinises the work of the police commissioner’s office.

In March, the panel raised issues about the appointment of Sareda Dirir to the deputy role with members expressing concerns about how the public may perceive Ms Dirir’s appointment when they learned she had known Mr Keane for 20 years and that both her parents are Labour councillors representing the same ward as Mr Keane on Warrington Borough Council.

Now the scrutiny panel has refused to back the appointment of a new PCC top officer.

Mr Keane announced on Friday he had appointed Peter Astley MBE as his new chief of staff, with a salary band of £75,841 to £79,890.

Mr Astley was a senior officer at Warrington Borough Council until he left the council earlier this year and Mr Keane had previously been the portfolio holder for the area Mr Astley was responsible for.

In a statement last week, the Police Commissioner said: “Peter Astley is a high achieving and dedicated senior leader in the public sector who has a wealth of experience at leading high profile and important regulatory services such as planning, licensing and environmental health.

“Peter not only has exceptional leadership skills that are directly relevant to the role of chief of staff but also has considerable experience in working closely with the police at a local, regional, national and international level.”

The Police Commissioner said Mr Astley’s appointment was made after ‘a rigorous recruitment process which included a paper application, shortlisting, medical, personality questionnaires and police vetting’.

That wasn’t enough to satisfy members of the panel however.

A letter from Conservative councillor Howard Murray, chairman of the Police and Crime Panel, said the cross-party panel was unanimous in its decision not to back Mr Astley’s appointment.

The letter said: “It is with regret that the Cheshire Police and Crime Panel cannot on this occasion support your candidate for the position of chief of staff for the office of Police and Crime Commissioner for Cheshire.

“This was the unanimous decision of the panel following the confirmation hearing.”

While the panel has no authority to overturn the appointment, it does put the spotlight back on the office of the Police and Crime Commissioner.

I’m really sad about all of this.

Police and crime commissioners were foisted on us by the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition government ostensibly to provide greater accountability than the police authorities they replaced.

I see no evidence this is the case.

Just cast your mind back.

Can you ever remember any controversy surrounding the old Cheshire Police Authority? I can’t.

I’ll bet you didn’t even know the name of the authority chairman.

And yet we were well served by Cheshire’s police.

We are just over a year into Mr Keane’s four-year term of office as PCC and we have already had three fairly major controversies (the other one was his decision to move his office out of Police HQ in Winsford and into Stockton Heath police station).

I’m not apportioning blame here.

I don’t know if Mr Keane’s decisions have been correct or if the panel scrutinising his work has some kind of axe to grind.

But these kinds of public spats revolving round one of our most important public services is not what we expect or need. The people of Cheshire deserve better than this.

I wonder how long it will be before someone at Westminster takes a look at this.