Grand Committee
Education Bill
(13 years, 4 months ago)
Grand CommitteeRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Brougham and Vaux)
My Lords, we have done as much as we can to make more room for your Lordships by providing smaller chairs. That is all that we can do. If noble Lords consider that it becomes too hot in this Room, I shall allow them to take off their jackets if they so wish. It is the Chairman’s prerogative. If there is a Division in the Chamber, I shall ask the noble Lord who is speaking at the time to cease speaking and we will resume after 10 minutes.
Clause 4 : Exclusion of pupils from schools in England: review
Amendment 37
Baroness Walmsley
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendments 38, 40, 44 to 47, 53 and 55 to 59 in my name.
I thank the Minister for the letter that I received today following our debates on Thursday. I particularly welcome the pilot to which he referred that allows children to apply in their own right to the Special Educational Needs and Disability Tribunal, with the possibility of that being extended across the country. He also referred to the possibility of regulations to allow them to appeal in their own name to the independent review tribunals when they come into force, and which we are about to debate. I should point out, however, that it would be discriminatory if children were not allowed to appeal.
I and others have been very troubled by the proposed changes to the right of appeal against exclusions. None of us wants to undermine the authority of head teachers and we understand their concerns. However, the fact that some appeals succeed indicates that not all decisions to exclude are correct. The effects of an exclusion on the life of a child are so extreme that it is vital to get these decisions right. I appreciate the Government’s attempt to put some sort of appeal in place in the form of the independent review panels but, frankly, that is not really good enough. I believe that if the appeals go to the right body with the right powers, expertise and experience, all will be well and justice will be done.
These amendments remove the education review panels created by the Bill and replace them with the right for all excluded pupils to appeal against permanent exclusion to the First-tier Tribunal for Special Educational Needs and Disability, as consistently recommended by the Administrative Justice and Tribunals Council. Here is the problem: the new review panels can only uphold the decision to exclude, recommend that the governing body reconsider the case or quash the decision and order the governing body to reconsider where it finds the decision to be,
“flawed when considered in the light of the principles applicable to an application for judicial review”.
The new review panels will not have the power to direct reinstatement. They will have less scope within which to operate and make decisions, but the nature of those decisions will be increasingly complex because they will have to decide whether the governing body’s decision was flawed in the light of the principles of judicial review. The Joint Committee on Human Rights and the AJTC have concluded that this does not provide adequate access to a fair and independent tribunal or an adequate remedy, and is contrary to Articles 6 and 13 of the ECHR.
There are many unanswered questions, including how the recommendation or direction to review will operate and the consequences of a governing body not complying with a recommendation or reaching the same decision to exclude again, following a direction to review. What happens to the pupil? Do they get another appeal? What timescales will operate and how do budgets cope with these additional procedures, especially given the additional powers given to the review panels to adjust school budgets, following a permanent exclusion?
One might ask: does the right of access to a court or tribunal apply to school exclusions? The Government state that it does not because of R (on the application of LG) v Independent Panel for Tom Hood School, decided in February 2010, which found that exclusion is not determinative of a civil right to which Article 6 applies, and Simpson v UK, which found that Article 6 does not apply to educational disputes. However, in Oršuš and Others v Croatia, decided a month later in March 2010, the European Court of Human Rights stated that Simpson v UK was no longer good law, so that Article 6 does apply to educational disputes. In Oršuš, the dispute related to discrimination. The JCHR is of the view that, if Article 6 applies to discrimination in schools, it would also apply to exclusions, which is a strong case. In Oršuš, the court also referred to its case law, which establishes that where a state confers rights that can be enforced by a judicial remedy, those rights can in principle be regarded as civil rights to which Article 6 applies. So the judicial review bit is very significant.
The JCHR is of the view that in a case of permanent exclusion, the right in question is not just the right to an education but the right to continue to attend the school at which the child is enrolled. That right is enforceable before the ordinary civil courts by way of judicial review. The JCHR therefore finds that, as a matter of convention law or of the common law, the right to access to an independent court or tribunal applies to permanent exclusion from school.
Therefore, we now need to ask whether the new review panels are really an independent and impartial tribunal. The Government’s view is that they are. However, the review panels will be able only to quash a decision and order reconsideration. That does not create the possibility for a proper review of the facts, so does not meet the requirements of a fair trial. Given the consequences of exclusion, it is especially important that the cases are examined carefully to ensure that the decision was correct and can be justified, as I said.
The AJTC has the statutory remit to keep under review the administrative justice system and the constitution and workings of tribunals within its oversight. It has taken a keen interest in the operation of school exclusion appeal panels for some years, and has concerns about the Government’s proposals. It notes, as has been mentioned in Committee, that 70 per cent of permanent exclusions affect children with special educational needs. It has consistently recommended that all appeals against permanent exclusion should be heard by the First-tier Tribunal, which it points out can easily be renamed the “first-tier tribunal (education)”.
The AJTC notes that the Government’s proposals are based on the assumption that all exclusions concern children who have been violent against teachers or pupils. That is not the case. I have here a table that shows exclusions in 18 local authorities across the country and 82 exclusion appeals in a particular year, of which 22 were successful. Of the 82, just under 80 per cent were for violent offences; one in five was for non-violent offences.
The AJTC has found that the small percentage of exclusions which go to appeal, which is around only 9 per cent, are more likely to be cases where the parent feels a real sense of injustice. It is therefore interesting to look at the reasons why some appeals succeed. The majority succeed either because the panel did not accept, on the evidence before it, that the pupil had done what he or she was alleged to have done; or because exclusion was a disproportionate punishment for the alleged offence.
A couple of other points need to be made. The Government claim that the SEND reviews take too long. It is true that there is clearly room for improvement, but they are piloting an eight-week turnaround time for appeals, which is very much better than they have been achieving. Secondly, since 70 per cent of all exclusions concern SEN and therefore go to the First-tier Tribunal anyway, it would be much more economical for all exclusion appeals to be heard by the tribunal, instead of requiring each local authority to set up and operate a separate system of review panels to deal with only 30 per cent of the total number of appeals. Also, I regard it as discriminatory to allow SEND pupils to apply to a proper tribunal, while fully able pupils can apply only to a panel with reduced powers.
I have tabled two groups of amendments that do roughly the same thing. I shall mention the difference. Amendments 37, 53, 55, 56, 58 and 59 have been proposed by the AJTC. The rest achieve roughly the same outcome but with one small difference. My noble friend Lord Storey will speak to Amendment 47 in this group, which covers a slightly different matter and has to do with the fine.
What do my groups of amendments do? The right of appeal to the First-tier Tribunal is separated in the Bill from the power to exclude, since this would have the effect of not requiring the tribunal to have regard to the Secretary of State’s guidance, and so maintain the tribunal’s independent discretion. The AJTC group gives the tribunal the power to state that reinstatement would be appropriate but is not practicable in the circumstances. This could happen if, for example, the pupil, parent or guardian does not want reinstatement, even though they have a right to it, but has brought the appeal because they want to state their case. It could happen where relationships have broken down to the extent that it would be more in the interests of the child and the rest of the school community if he were to go elsewhere. The other group of amendments does not give this power, but the tribunal should have it; it is crucial. Where relationships have broken down to such an extent that the head, for various reasons, does not want to let the child back into the school, this would give the tribunal the opportunity to take that into account and make the case that the child has been unwarrantedly excluded, without insisting on reinstatement.
Should the department maintain its argument that sending all exclusion appeals to SEND tribunals suggests that all exclusions concern children with SEND, this could easily be remedied by changing the type of tribunal. This may require a consequential amendment, but I am advised by the Public Bill Office that this could be tabled at a later date. I am also advised that consequential amendments to Schedule 1 may be needed. Again, these could be tabled at a later date when the fate of these amendments is known.
I have received a note of support for these amendments from the National Governors’ Association, which says that the majority of its members support the right of appeal and think that the current government proposals to change to a review panel will be more bureaucratic, and will cause more work, delay and confusion for the parties concerned. I hope I have made the case, albeit rather long-windedly, that justice requires some changes to the proposals in Clause 4. I beg to move.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees
I should advise the Committee that if this amendment is agreed I cannot call Amendments 40 to 47, inclusive, for reason of pre-emption.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
My Lords, I pick up initially on some of the points that were made previously, and which the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, has rehearsed. We start from the recognition that a permanent exclusion can have a significant impact on the life of the excluded child, both in the short term on their education, and in the long term. In other words, a permanent exclusion is a very significant decision in the life of that child. It is very important that, in taking such profoundly significant decisions, it should be evident to everybody involved, including parents and children, that there is a process of natural justice whereby schools not only act fairly but are transparently seen to act fairly.
We have all variously recognised some of the dilemmas and difficulties for schools. However, exclusion without the right of appeal to an independent arbiter, with the possibility of reinstatement, is not a positive example of fair treatment. It sets a bad example to the very children whom we are seeking to influence, telling them that this is how things can be done when it suits the authorities.
My second point is one which we started to rehearse when we debated this issue last week but which I think we need to explore further. We know that, even now, schools permanently exclude a disproportionate number of very vulnerable children from specific groups. Last time, we talked a lot about children with special educational needs and disability, and we heard the figures for the number of those children who are excluded. However, there are other groups. The Runnymede Trust has pointed out that in 2008-09 more than 16 per cent of all black Caribbean boys were excluded compared with 8 per cent of white boys—that is, double the proportion of black Caribbean boys. Gypsy, Roma and Traveller children have similar problems, as do looked-after children and those in care.
Lord Knight of Weymouth
My noble friend is making an important case, as did the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley. Later, we will talk about behaviour and attendance partnerships. Does my noble friend think that the notions of fairness that have been discussed would shift if schools had to remain within behaviour and attendance partnerships and therefore had to make sure that excluded pupils were properly found a place within that community of schools?
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
My noble friend makes an extremely important point, which I was also going to try to make but he has made it very well. This is one of the problems with the way that the Bill has been constructed, tearing down, as it does—in my view, somewhat recklessly—a whole range of requirements and apparatus. When you look, as we will shortly, at the proposal to repeal the responsibility of schools to be in a behaviour and attendance partnership, and set that alongside the measures before us, you see that the situation is compounded. At least if schools were in such a partnership, they would have a responsibility to work with schools in their federation or partnership to find solutions for those difficult children whom some schools propose to exclude. Taking both away makes things very difficult. One cannot see what will happen to children when they are excluded through this process.
If the Minister is not minded to reconsider, will he explain to the Committee what safeguards the Government would put in place to assure the groups whom we have been discussing who are already adversely affected by permanent exclusion and would be more so through these measures? What safeguards do they propose to put in place, not just to contain but to reverse that trend?
Many organisations in addition to those mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, have expressed their concern about these proposals. The Children’s Society, the National Children’s Bureau and the Children’s Commissioner have asked the Government to think again. Some trade unions have raised a slightly different but equally important point, arguing that rather than reducing bureaucracy there is a danger that, unless either the amendment that I am speaking to or that proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, is enacted, removing the panels and taking away the power to reinstate may lead parents to think about taking legal action against schools. That would involve a great deal more work and unnecessary bureaucracy for schools.
The amendments proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, would mean that all parents of permanently excluded children would be able instead to appeal to the first-level tribunal. That has much to commend it. Those tribunals, unlike the review panels, would be led by somebody who was legally trained, which is a big advantage. One could ask, as did the noble Baroness, what the consequences would be in terms of time, delay and expense of all the cases going to such a tribunal. Might there not be an argument for a remedy at a more local level for at least some of those cases? I am open to debate on that point; the main thing, as we have both said, is that there should be somewhere in the system a right of appeal to a body that has the power to reinstate.
Sir Alan Steer recommended in his independent review, Learning Behaviour:
“Independent exclusion appeals panels should be retained, both in the interests of natural justice and to prevent schools becoming embroiled in time-consuming or costly alternative legal processes”.
I have mentioned the Runnymede Trust, which has provided a number of case studies, one of which is particularly salutary. It is the case of the Formula 1 champion, Lewis Hamilton, who when he was 16 was excluded from school in a case of mistaken identity after he witnessed an attack. In his autobiography, he writes:
“I knew I was innocent but”,
the head teacher,
“did not appear to be interested. Subsequent letters to the local education authority, our local MP, the education secretary and even the prime minister, were of no help. No one appeared to listen—no one either wanted to or had the time. We were on our own, and I was out of school”.
However, Hamilton’s school career was saved due a successful case made by his father to an independent appeal panel, which reinstated him at the school.
While there is a chance of even a small number of cases such as that occurring, and given the arguments that we have all made about natural justice and fair process, it would be wrong to remove the power to reinstate. The noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, asked at our previous sitting what would then happen if that decision was taken. Yes, we can have a conversation about where that child goes. However, to have won your appeal puts you in a very different position from being excluded and there being no power to reinstate.
Lord Peston
I express my sympathy with the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, and her amendments. I do not have her expertise on this matter, but there are some general principles which, it seems to me, we cannot avoid looking at. First and foremost of those principles is the fact that the young people whom we are talking about come overwhelmingly from the lowest socio-economic group in our society. This is not a random group of misbehaving young people; it is a highly limited group. Indeed, the latest research, which I have looked at, says that what the experts call young people with socio-emotional problems occurs to an enormous degree among the poorest in our society and to virtually no degree at all among the richest. We cannot avoid that fact, if we take deprivation as one of the main criteria in judging how we run our education system.
The thing that horrified me was the discovery that we can see these socio-emotional problems arising at a very young age. The evidence overwhelmingly is that it can be seen at the age of three, or even less. I do not remotely believe that this Government would go down this path, but my immediate thought was that it could end up like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. I can easily imagine someone or other coming up and saying that what we ought to do is to filter these people before they go to school and not let them go there. That is the kind of background that we have to bear in mind as we look at this.
The second point that I make, which the noble Baroness herself made, as did my noble friend, is that the fact that these people are young children does not mean that they have no human rights. None of us would tolerate being treated in this way on anything else that we encountered as adults. Whatever was going on, and if we were doing something wrong, we would certainly expect to be dealt with with due process and the right of appeal against anything that was relevant.
I as a teacher have never had to deal with disruptive pupils. I dealt for years and years with students who had not the slightest interest in what I had to say, but my experience was that they just shut off. They did not bother me, and I was perfectly happy for them to shut off, because I could then talk to the people who I really felt wanted to learn my subject. But my heart goes out to teachers who have to deal with disruption in their classrooms. None of us doubts that, or I hope they do not. But that is quite different from saying that these people who disrupt are in full control, when very frequently they are not. Overwhelmingly, it does not mean that they have no rights.
My view therefore, as is typical when we meet as a Committee in your Lordships' House, and particularly in a Grand Committee, is that we should have our say and hope that the Minister listens sympathetically and sees whether anything can be done to meet our worries. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, has put her finger on something that is not minor at all. It is a major question that confronts how we run our education system, and I should like her to know that I, along I am sure with many of my colleagues, am very much in sympathy with what she has to say.
Lord Morris of Handsworth
My Lords, I support the amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, dealing with the issue of exclusions. As we have heard, the issue is not exclusions per se but one of process and, of course, procedure. More importantly, it is one of basic natural justice.
All of us in this Room and in this debate start from the position that good discipline is important to good learning. We start from the position that everyone associated with the education system needs to be and should be supported. Teachers should be supported, heads and governing bodies should be supported and parents need support. In the overall context of those stakeholders, however, the children themselves need proper support.
So these amendments, which I support, are necessary to prevent what I call the end game—exclusion without proper review, given the possible consequences of exclusion on the future of those pupils affected. The decision to exclude, without the process for the facts, the information and all the consequences that led to the decision, means that it is neither properly heard nor properly examined.
Fairness and justice lie at the heart but it seems that the Secretary of State has taken the position that the heads and governing bodies are always right and that the pupil is always wrong. That cannot be sustained because here we have a situation where those associated with a decision, whether it is the heads or governing body, are the accusers in the first instance. They are the investigators, assembling the facts and putting together the arguments. They prosecute in the case and, in the end, they are the judge and jury, all without any recourse to justification. The review panel, as we have heard, has no powers for reinstatement, however unjust the decision might have been.
In her introduction to the amendment, the noble Baroness set out the position of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, and here I declare an interest as a member of that committee. Moving beyond its view, however, the fact of the matter is that legally decided opinions on the issue of expulsion without review are not on the side of the Government. The decided cases that the Government have used in their defence claim that expulsion from education is not a human right. But that is not the issue. There are equally strong legally decided cases which indicate very strongly that the real issue is not a question of whether education is a human right. What is a human right is the right of the excluded individual to return to the school from which they have been excluded. That is fundamentally different from the Government’s legal position that they cite in support. With that conclusion, I support the amendment.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees
My Lords, some of you might have heard buzzing noises, sounding like bumble-bees, coming out of the speakers. That is because some people have got mobile telephones in their pockets and they are too close to the microphones. Could we leave our telephones well away from the microphones or even switch them off for a little while?
Baroness Morris of Yardley
My Lords, I support the sentiments behind these amendments, and those in the opening remarks of the noble Baronesses, Lady Walmsley and Lady Hughes. Some of these amendments are quite technical, but there is something underpinning them in that the proposals before us are, first, unjust, and, secondly, not the best way of dealing with a significant problem. In particular, I support the group of amendments that give a right of reinstatement if an appeal should be successful.
I invite the Minister to revisit the Government’s assumptions that brought about this group of amendments. It strikes me as the sort of thing that is great in opposition but which you hope that people have realised is not very good by the time they get to government. Its starting point was something that we can all share: there are children whose behaviour is such that they ought not to be in schools. They ruin the educational chances of other children and make the lives of teachers a misery. Nobody ought to have to put up with that.
There is another starting point that I support: that the head needs control of their own school. They need to be able to set the rules and regulations. Within a framework their writ must run. That is the nature of leadership. Where this went wrong to some extent is that there is a feeling out there that the problem of reinstated children is bigger than it actually is. Somebody will quote the figures at some point, but it is not a big issue. It does not happen often. On most occasions, the tried and tested system which will now be repealed completely has worked well. Schools, parents, governing bodies, head teachers and pupils will on the whole say that it works well. In any structure in a social organisation like a school or society, there will be times when it does not work well, is a bit frayed at the edges and you might want to second-guess a judgment. We should always try to make that better, to improve the law and improve the process.
I do not know how the Government have concluded that this is the way forward from there. What I really want to test with the Minister is that there seem to be two either/or assumptions underpinning this bit of legislation. The first is that heads are always right and pupils are always wrong, which is a case of infallibility all over again. The second is that even if heads are wrong, we must not admit it. If one of those two assumptions does not underpin this set of amendments, I do not know what assumption does. Both are deeply flawed. I hope that I do not have to say more than “heads are not always right”. I have taught where heads have made the wrong decision about exclusion; sometimes there have been sets of circumstances. It has been absolutely right that the child has been reinstated, and the school has not collapsed. Nobody can say that the head is always right.
I agree about the power of the head, but it must be about having a set of rules that the school community and the parents have bought into, and about enacting those rules. I do not agree with this notion of leadership and headship which says, “I can make the rules up as I go along, and if I decide that you have broken them then I can act accordingly”. It is only by giving that sort of power of rule-making to the head that this legislation makes any sense.
Let us say that we do not agree that heads are always right. I sense that where the Government are coming from is that, in order to support heads, we must support their every decision. That is a miscalculation and a misjudgment, and I choose my words carefully. There are heads in this room who will tell me whether I am right or wrong in this but, to be honest, if a head teacher needed this sort of legal protection to keep order and discipline in their school, I would question the quality of the school leadership. A half good head teacher can manage a reinstatement and the house will not fall down. What seems to be feared here is that, if a reinstatement goes ahead, the head will lose control and authority within the school. Good heads do not do that; they manage it, because exclusion is not the only way in which to ensure discipline and good behaviour in schools.
If we make laws to protect weak heads so that they never have to admit that they are wrong, we will not be producing laws that are good for discipline in schools. We need laws that give heads the right to run their schools, and in our utterances and judgments we always need to support heads in what they do. They live in the real world; the children live in the real world; the parents and governors live in the real world, and nowhere else in the real world is someone proven innocent but not given the right to reinstatement.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough
I was for many years one of those utterly infallible heads until my governors thought otherwise. Will the noble Baroness comment on the other factor that she has not mentioned? There is a misconception that the organisation that reinstates these children against the wishes of the head and the governors is the local education authority. That is another fallacy that underpins so much of this proposed legislation—that somehow it is pernicious local authorities that want to keep the heads under control. Perhaps she would like to comment on that, given her experience as a Minister and a Secretary of State.
Baroness Morris of Yardley
The noble Lord is right. As a not so infallible Minister, I remember the legislation because there was a fear that local authorities would make life difficult for head teachers. If my memory serves me right—and I am absolutely sure that it does on this—there was a requirement in previous legislation to make sure that someone with educational experience was on the appeals panel. Previous legislation has done the mending that needed to be done in terms of the appeals panel. People who have served as Members of Parliament may also know that there has always been a feeling among parents and students that appeals panels lean over backwards to support the schools. If there is a feeling in society, it is not that the appeals panel leans over backwards to exclude the child; it is the other way about. As the noble Lord said, many people on the panels have educational experience and want to support heads. Therefore, the people on the appeals panel are not anti-heads, anti-discipline, anti-order, anti-fairness or anti-justice; they are people who know about education and they try to do a difficult job.
Lord Knight of Weymouth
When the noble Baroness talks about heads, I wonder what her thoughts are on the pupil premium that has been introduced by the Government. Interestingly, it motivates heads to admit pupils from poorer backgrounds; and we know that, because of the chaotic backgrounds that some children from poorer backgrounds might have, behaviour might then be an issue to some extent. Does she think that there might be a danger of selection by exclusion, whereby heads take in children to get more money and then, whether deliberately, up front or otherwise, exclude those who are more difficult and damage the education of others?
Baroness Morris of Yardley
My thoughts had not gone that far, but my noble friend puts forward a very interesting proposition. I think that perhaps why he thinks that—and why he is right—is because some heads have always sought to manage their admissions through some element of exclusion. There are times when that is right. Some heads, in their first year of taking over a school that has been in very challenging circumstances, have excluded to lay down rules and regulations and to make sure that they can set standards. I understand that, but what the noble Lord suggests would be a terrible thing—and I hope, having put that on record, the Minister will bear it in mind.
I will finish there, because I wanted only to make that brief point. Either assumption is wrong, whether it is about the infallibility of heads or whether it is that when they make a mistake we pretend they have not made a mistake. Worse than that, this is not only unjust and unfair but will do nothing to improve discipline, because the kids and the school community will know that a child was excluded, that the appeal found for them and that the child has not been reinstated. That will do nothing to encourage the school community to support the head. Kids are really good about fairness, and so are parents. The legislation as it has been put to us will not help in that regard.
Baroness Perry of Southwark
I have a great deal of sympathy with what the noble Baroness said. I am very pleased that she brought our attention to two factors—that the children who tend to be the subject of exclusion have made the lives of their fellow pupils in their class pretty difficult and seriously hampered their education, and that they have made several teachers’ lives very miserable. There is nothing worse than having a seriously disruptive child in a class when you are trying to teach the rest of the children.
Where I part company from the noble Baroness, on a purely factual basis, is when she says that the clauses in the Bill assume that the head is always right. Of course, they do not. New subsection (4)(c) says quite firmly that the review panel may consider,
“that the decision of the responsible body was flawed when considered in the light of the principles applicable on an application for judicial review”,
and that it may,
“quash the decision of the responsible body”.
In other words, the Bill clearly assumes that sometimes the head will be wrong.
The other point that the noble Baroness made was about the importance of the head being in authority and being able to control and show leadership in his or her own school. As many of us have said in previous debates and as much research has shown, the authority of the head is paramount in the success of the school. It is not only that the head must be right—and you would hope he or she would be right more times than he or she is wrong—but that the head must be seen to be in control and in authority. If the head is constantly overruled by an outside body, it is very difficult for that to be seen. I agree with that the noble Baroness said—that kids are very quick to recognise what is fair and what is not fair. But we have already established—thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, giving us the figures—that there are very few occasions when the decision of the head has proved to be wrong. Most of the time, the head gets it right, and the excluded child leaves the school a bit more peace and the other pupils more ability to learn than there was before.
My final point is that this does not involve the head alone. It involves the head with the governing body, which will have made the decision as well. There will already have been considerable investigation of the head’s decision. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, will speak for the authority of the governors. I find it very hard to believe that many cases will go wrong, when the head has made a decision on behalf of a teacher who wishes to exclude a pupil and if that has been reviewed by a governing body. Of course, some will, and the review panel has the power to say so, to stand the decision on one side and to ask the head to go again. I disagree with the noble Baroness when she said that, when the review panel sends it back to the school, it will always repeat what it said before. I do not think that that is so. I think that after the very solemn and rather frightening business of being found to be wrong by an external review panel, the school will certainly think again.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
That may be the case but will the noble Baroness agree that in those circumstances at the moment, if the appeals panel decides that the decision was wrong, it has the power to allow the child back into the school? What is proposed now is that, when the review panel puts the decision aside, it cannot make its own, informed judgment—it can simply ask the governing body to reconsider—and it has no power to give the child redress if it is really of the view that a mistake has been made. Does she really think that that is a just process?
Lord Peston
My reading of the Bill is somewhat different from that of the noble Baroness, Lady Perry: it is that it gives the head enormously more power than he or she had before. Is she saying that that is not true?
Baroness Perry of Southwark
I am not saying that it is true or untrue. The difference—it is very small—is that in the past the appeals panel could insist that the child went back to the school, while the review panel can now simply say, “You got the decision wrong. We ask you to consider again”. The only difference between what a review panel can do and what the previous appeals panel could do is the power to reinstate. In any case, to allow a child to go back into a school when all this process has taken place is a terrible thing for the teacher who asked for the exclusion in the first case, for the governing body which made the decision and supported the head, and for the authority of the head themselves.
Baroness Howarth of Breckland
I know what effort heads and teachers make when children are reinstated into schools in difficult circumstances, so I am very pro what is going on; they work very hard. Does the noble Baroness not accept that the child who finds that their case has been upheld but is still told that they are not able to go back to their school would see this as a total injustice? As many of these children are struggling anyway, this simply reinforces their feeling that society is simply not just, so why should they conform and join in with it?
Lord Storey
My Lords, I want to talk about Amendment 47, and then make some general comments on the other amendments. Amendment 47 is clear and concise: it is about the £4,000 fine, which is a blanket fine for all schools. For some schools, that might not seem a lot of money; for others, it is a considerable amount. For a small school—a rural village or a small urban school—it is a significant sum. In my area, there is a secondary school with 10 forms of entry. Next to that is a small Roman Catholic primary school with 101 pupils on roll, I think, and £4,000 equates to that school’s entire literacy and numeracy budget. Down the road, there is a small maintained school, for which £4,000 equates to its entire special needs budget. For a large secondary school, £4,000 is perhaps its promotion budget. We might need to link the sum in a fair and equitable way. On this occasion, one size does not fit all.
I turn to some comments made during the debate. I declare an interest as a head teacher of 25 years. I have never excluded a pupil at all. Why? First, we forget that the important thing is not the end of the process but all the things that you put in place beforehand. As I think I said last week, if you have a robust behaviour management policy, you will involve parents at every stage, and the parents are the greatest way of ensuring that a pupil does not have to be excluded from school.
Having said that, my wife is a secondary teacher in a large inner-city school and I have seen teachers’ careers destroyed by disruptive behaviour. We are not talking about teachers who should not be in the classroom but, because of the circumstances—because of poor leadership, because the other issues have not been put in place—their lives as teachers can be wrecked, as indeed can those of the pupils.
Some of you may recall that I said two things last week. I agreed with a noble Lord opposite who said that any exclusion is a tragedy. I also said, however, that teachers have a right to teach and pupils have a right to learn. Pupils also have a right to ensure that a system is fair and just and they are the first to know if something is not fair. In any school it is the pupils who say, “Hey, sir, that’s not fair” or “Hey, miss, why are we doing this?”. If we have an exclusion policy which is not fair and just, pupils will be the first to see that and that is why I support the amendment moved by my noble friend Lady Walmsley.
Baroness Benjamin
My Lords, I fully support all the amendments in the name of my noble friend Lady Walmsley and I congratulate her on her tireless efforts to highlight children’s and young people’s rights and well-being. I want to make the case for a group of young people up and down the country, especially in our urban cities, which are littered with potholes of deprivation, low self-esteem and practically no aspiration. As we have already heard, it is a sad fact that many black Caribbean and mixed-race white and black Caribbean boys experience a high number of exclusions. We have heard that 16.6 per cent of all Caribbean boys and 16.3 per cent of all mixed-race Caribbean boys experienced a fixed-term exclusion during 2008-09, in comparison to 8 per cent of their white and 4 per cent of their Asian counterparts.
We have to ask whether society is failing these young people, who in many cases grew up seeing themselves as victims, partly because of the harsh and sometimes abusive lives they encountered. They feel anger and frustration about their situation and their place in society, which becomes overwhelming, and in turn they become aggressive and disruptive.
As part of my charitable work, I once accompanied 100 children from disadvantaged backgrounds with some of their parents to Euro Disney. A 10 year-old Caribbean boy did not listen to what his mother and others told him about jumping over a barrier on a wet marble floor. Not surprisingly, he fell with a hard thump and hit his head. Instead of his mother rushing to comfort him, as you might have expected her to do, she violently kicked him while he lay on the floor injured. Eventually, after the doctor arrived and things calmed down, she had to be persuaded to go into the ambulance with her son but not before she broke down and, in between her sobs, she cried for help. She explained that she was on her own, that her son had been excluded time and again from school and that she could no longer cope because he would not listen to her. Goodness knows what she did behind closed doors.
They were both victims of circumstances. Family life is tough for many but for that family there was a happy ending. They were counselled by trained charity project workers who put the family back together again and helped them to heal. That boy’s behaviour changed in school.
These are some of the types of children that are being excluded from schools. They need to be dealt with by staff who have been properly trained by trained play therapists, who know how to deal with damaged children, and to be shown love, understanding and—yes—discipline too but not exclusion and rejection, which only cause long-term damage way into adulthood.
I welcome the fact that the Government have decided to retain exclusion appeals panels. However, the decision to strip them of the power to order reinstatement of a pupil decreases their ability to hold a school to account. Many believe that appeals panels with powers of reinstatement represent a vital safeguard against miscarriages of justice and offer a chance for parents’ voices to be heard.
As so eloquently stated by my noble friend Lady Walmsley, despite claims from the Government that the reinstatement of pupils subsequently undermines the authority of teachers, evidence shows that only 2 per cent of exclusions are overturned and that approximately 90 per cent of exclusions are simply not brought before appeals panels, highlighting that the situation is not widespread.
We heard the case of our famous Lewis Hamilton. Goodness knows what would have happened if his appeal had not been successful and he had not been reinstated in school. We would not have seen the brilliance of that champion and have felt that pride to be British.
It is crucial that teachers are properly held to account on exclusion decisions, particularly given the massive impact that those decisions can have on a child’s future. Therefore, I believe that the Government should allow appeals panels to reinstate excluded pupils in schools if an appeal is successful, and that the Bill should be amended accordingly.
Baroness Howarth of Breckland
My Lords, I apologise to the Committee for arriving late. Sitting on the M11 was not the best place to be; I would rather have been with all of your Lordships. I wanted to ask a series of questions of the Minister. I regret missing the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, because I always enjoy her speeches on behalf of children. We have just heard that disruptive children are challenged children; they are not very often evil children. However, they can be very difficult. From my time as a director of social services and an assistant director looking after assessment centres where some of the most dangerous and difficult children are contained, I know that there are children who cannot be on the school floor. Those children who destroy classes for teachers and other pupils should not be in school. But those are not the children we are talking about. We do not need to change the legislation for them, and we do not have to change the legislation to make it successful.
One of the points that I was going to make was made eloquently by the noble Lord; that is, in good schools, the work is done beforehand, with the child, with the family and with the involvement of the local community. In my local primary school up in Norfolk, I know that things get done beforehand.
There is of course a great lack of services for some of these children. We know that teachers are crying out for good psychiatric support, psychological assessment and therapeutic support. Those are the areas where we should look if we want to provide for the next generation. However, what concerned me when I was looking through the legislation, apart from its fairness, was how decisions would be made across the country. The Government are setting up a range of new sorts of schools which will be settling their ways of working. What will the criteria for exclusion be? Will the powerful head set the criteria? How will we therefore ensure consistency? Will a child be able to move districts and find that their behaviour gets them excluded in one area but not in another? How will we ensure consistency? If Ofsted will not be inspecting all schools, how will we achieve that balance from one area to another, as we can at the moment?
How will we ensure that an assessment is made by those responsible for children’s education and welfare to understand the circumstances leading to the problem? Who will carry out that assessment across the country? Most of all, what will happen to the children thereafter? We know that some will go to a referral unit. I was a social worker on the ground, if you like, in the days when my kids went off to the sin bin, as they called it. I am not against special provision if it is properly put together, but if it is a constant stream of children moving in and out, with some children not moving at all, I should like to be clear about the basis on which the children are being put together. What worries me most is that the heads of those special units can also exclude children. I am sure that the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, will express more than anxiety about what happens to children who will often have been in care and are showing difficult behaviour, for all the reasons we know.
I did not want to make a long speech. I simply wanted to ask that series of questions to get a clear picture of how this is going to work by the time we get to Report stage.
Lord Ouseley
My Lords, my name is associated with Amendment 41, which adds a provision to,
“direct that the pupil be reinstated”.
Much has already been said and I shall try to not repeat it and to be brief. My real concern is that we are talking about relatively small numbers of children with regard to reinstatement. There surely cannot be an argument that it adds to the bureaucracy. The Government clearly want to reduce the burdens on schools and heads. I cannot see the logic of why we are removing opportunities for appeal and reinstatement. That is why I support Amendment 41 and all that I have heard.
This is what concerns me most. I very much agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Storey, said about the processes for ensuring that we look after the needs of each child—educational, social, cultural and emotional—as part of a process of trying to avoid getting to the point of exclusion. That is an indication of what schools do, and they did it so successfully in the case of the school of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, that there was no exclusion. There are other schools like that and we are not talking about a problem that will wreck the school system if reinstatement occurs, especially as it occurs so infrequently.
What I am worried about is the labelling of groups of young people who are to be excluded. An important part of the process is the management of moves from one school to another and involves all the groups to which we have referred in this debate—those with special educational needs and poor backgrounds, black and ethnic-minority children, looked-after children and those who are in receipt of free school meals. They are the most vulnerable children. In the process that leads to exclusion, even if appeal is reached, it is those who have the power and who have already labelled these young people who still call the shots. Even when reinstatement takes place, we have already accepted that it is not necessarily in the best interests of that child to go back to the school from which he or she has been excluded. However, the inclusion of a natural justice element that demonstrates that fairness has occurred and that exclusion is not justified is an important part of our natural justice process, and we should ensure that we retain it.
It is important to get answers to some of the questions that have been asked. We need the information that would justify preventing the possibility of reinstatement. No basis for that argument has been put forward, and perhaps the Minister can provide the evidence that would justify the Government’s proposal and improve the processes.
Baroness Howe of Idlicote
My Lords, having listened to the arguments I have a great deal of sympathy with all these amendments. As noble Lords have already heard, the National Governors’ Association is broadly sympathetic. It has been stressed that we are talking about thoroughly disadvantaged children, the majority from the SEND group. The fact that it is a relatively small number has been drawn to our attention. I put my name to Amendment 43; I did not speak to it because the noble Lord, Lord Storey, had played out exactly what it said when we discussed it last week. That spells out all the areas that need to be gone through, particularly that the child concerned is able to understand the information that they are given. Combining that with the fact that there is a pilot scheme around the country, if it is ultimately decided via the process in the Bill that that is not the best place for the child, the cost of placing them in another school must be borne by the school itself. That is possibly how to meet that objective. We are talking about a small number of children who are pretty much all disadvantaged anyhow. It should be for the school with the right training and up-skilling of teachers to get it right in most cases, but that will not be appropriate in every case. Let us look at this alternative, and see whether there is an answer there.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston
I share the starting assumptions for this debate of the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, but I would be horrified if the Bill tried to make out that head teachers are always right. It clearly does not. The provision for a head teacher and governing body to be required to think again if a review panel found their decision to be wrong is a powerful way of ensuring that people are held to account.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hughes of Stretford, said earlier that this Bill sets a bad example to our children. I wholeheartedly disagree with that. To put somebody in a situation where they have to review their decision, and perhaps be confident and strong enough to say that their initial decision was wrong and they are happy to now reverse it, is a much better way of ensuring a proper process than somebody being forced to change their mind.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
First, would the noble Baroness not agree that, in that situation, most of us would expect an independent arbitration of that decision? Secondly, does she think that it is right that, in the event that the governing body thinks again and decides to stick with its original decision, which is thought to be unreasonable, it can then pay its way out of that situation instead of having to give the child redress and accept the child back into school? Is that a good example of what we should be showing children?
Baroness Stowell of Beeston
It is right that we reach decisions based on responsibility and that the head teacher and the governing body should be able to decide what is right for their school. If they are clear, for very clear reasons that they believe in, about what they feel is the right future for that child, they should be able to decide that and put in place the necessary new arrangements for that child.
I concur with the remarks that the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, made about piloting the new arrangements. Schools being responsible for the education of children whom they have decided they can no longer take care of in their own school is an important new provision, and one that I would certainly support.
Like the noble Lord, Lord Morris, I, too, am a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. As has been said several times today, the committee reviewed this part of the Bill carefully and reported on it in detail. It is worth me highlighting the fact that the committee divided on this matter. At that time, I abstained—I did not vote with the committee, because at the time I was not persuaded by the legal arguments one way or the other. After the committee, I looked again at the Bill when preparing for Second Reading, and the conclusion that I came to was that the reason why I had not been persuaded by the legal arguments either way was because this is an issue of principle. It is right that people in charge of schools—head teachers and governing bodies—should be able to make decisions for themselves. Obviously, there needs to be a review process, which this proposal provides for, but I want to see us having a system that is based on responsibility rather than people simply being able to exercise rights. For that reason, I do not support the amendments and I support the Bill as it is drafted.
Lord Lucas
My Lords, I am hopeful that my noble friend will answer the question that I asked him at Second Reading on the statistics behind this. I think that he quoted a figure of 600 pupils a year being reinstated. For the average secondary school, that is one every 10 years. What proportion of them are children who, it is accepted by everybody, have actually committed the sort of crimes that must mean their exclusion from school, such as serious bullying or drugs or bringing knives in? I am aware that a case was mentioned in the Sun a few years ago, but are there more than that? Why are we unbalancing the scales of justice to deal with such a tiny and infrequent problem?
My noble friend has already outlined the right approach, which is to make schools responsible for the future of the kids they choose to exclude, because most exclusions are due to problems with the school, not the kids. The example that I would choose is St George’s in Maida Vale. When I first got interested in schooling it was unbelievably awful, with children running around corridors and abusing and hitting teachers. There was a total paucity of education going on. It was the school, as noble Lords will remember, where the headmaster was murdered at the gates. Last year, it received grade 1 from Ofsted, with the same intake and no exclusions. Nothing has changed with the kids, but everything has changed with the school. That is what we should bear in mind when we think of exclusion as a punishment following something done by the kid, rather than as something caused by other people that is being demonstrated in what the kid is doing.
The Earl of Listowel
My Lords, I remember sitting in a school classroom in a secondary school that is five minutes’ walk from your Lordships' House and seeing one boy disrupt the whole class and the poor teacher clearly at the end of her tether at the end of the period. The boy moved to a different seat as soon as she turned her back, and it was a great joke, but it clearly caused her a lot of anxiety.
This is a very complex question, as this debate has shown. Further to what the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, said, in my experience many looked-after children have families who are not working well before they are taken into care. However, after that, the key stepping stone into care is their exclusion from school, which puts all the additional pressure on the family that the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, referred to. Excluding a child is a very grave step to take without the right means to ensure that the child goes somewhere appropriate, where they will get the support that they need.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Hill of Oareford)
My Lords, my noble friend Lord Storey spoke for us all when he said that we all agree that exclusion should be the end of the process. We have debated this point many times. I state again that that is absolutely the Government’s position. That is why we are holding exclusion trials. We are trying to reach a point where exclusion is a far less frequent outcome for pupils and that the number who end up in this category shrinks. That is what we all want. That point was also made by the noble Lord, Lord Ouseley. I strongly agree. My noble friend Lady Walmsley set out the case for exclusion appeals to go to tribunal with her customary clarity. Other noble Lords argued in favour of retaining a right for a panel to order reinstatement.
I shall start by restating what we are proposing in this clause, which provides for independent review panels that will be responsible for hearing appeals brought by parents against the permanent exclusion of their child. The panels will have to consider permanent exclusions very carefully. They will be free to reach their own conclusions and to conduct an independent fact-finding exercise. They may then uphold the decision, recommend that the governing body reconsider its decision to take account of the panel’s findings, or quash the decision and direct the governing body to reconsider the exclusion. If the decision is quashed, the panel will have to provide the school with the reasons for its decision. At that point the governing body will have to reconsider its decision. As several noble Lords have argued, in those circumstances most governing bodies would be likely to offer to reinstate pupils.
The noble Lord, Lord Morris of Handsworth, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, asked whether we assumed that the school would always be right. The answer to that question is no. If we thought that, we would not have gone for an independent review panel, as my noble friend Lady Perry pointed out. However, there may be local circumstances in which the detrimental effect on the wider school community of a pupil being reinstated means that the school decides not to do so. This, in essence, is what the whole debate boils down to, and is the root of the difference of opinion between us. As we have already discussed and will return to in more detail, in those circumstances the panel would be able to impose a financial penalty. In addition to the general safeguards associated with the independent review panel process, we are putting in place measures to protect the interests of vulnerable children, especially those with special educational needs. As we discussed earlier, parents will be able to request an SEN expert.
My noble friend Lord Lucas asked about scale. I heard my noble friend Lady Walmsley whispering but he may not have heard her. We are talking about a small number of cases. In 2008-09, there were 6,550 cases of permanent exclusion. Appeals were lodged in fewer than 10 per cent of cases. Of those appeals, around one-10th resulted in the pupil being reinstated, which is the “60 pupils” figure that we are talking about.
Noble Lords, including my noble friend, have asked why we are making changes when the numbers are so small. We do so for one simple reason: while the numbers are fortunately small, each case can create significant problems for the school, creating anxiety for pupils and undermining the position of staff. The noble Baroness, Lady Hughes of Stretford, spoke of schools being “left to their own devices”. Because of the review panel process, they would not be left to their own devices, but I am sure that she did not mean this. Her comments seemed to suggest that schools might have an agenda to exclude pupils, and I do not believe that that is true either.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
I did not mean that, and I do not generally think that schools have an agenda. However, the crux of the Minister’s argument seems to be that in most of those cases where a review panel comes back to the governing body and says, “We think that this decision is wrong or flawed”—or whatever—“so reconsider”, he expected the schools to reinstate the child. What evidence does he have for that assumption?
Lord Hill of Oareford
The evidence was a point made by a noble friend. It is reasonable to think that where the process is conducted properly and the independent review panel comes back to the governing body saying, “We think that you are wrong for this, that and the other reason”—so that the governing body is confronted with that evidence and realises that others have reached a different view, or that they have made mistakes in how they have gone about it—most people will listen to what is being said to them. Obviously I do not have hard evidence because we do not have the system in place.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, talked powerfully about the example of Lewis Hamilton. I understand that example. Because the numbers are so small, one ends up having anecdotal exchanges of that nature. When this was debated in another place, a letter from a chair of governors was quoted which reads:
“In February a violent incident occurred at our school and after an exhaustive investigation the Principal took the decision to permanently exclude both the pupils involved in the attack. In short, they had come into school after issuing threats on ‘Facebook’ and sought out an individual to beat up. Failing to find him, they subsequently violently assaulted another boy, leaving him with concussion and in a state of shock. The police wanted to pursue the matter further but the family of the victim were fearful of reprisals and refused to press charges. In March, an exclusion hearing took place and the Governor’s Disciplinary Committee upheld the Principal’s decision to permanently exclude both the pupils involved in carrying out the assault. The mother of one of the excluded pupils appealed and the IAP overturned our decision and directed that we should reinstate the excluded pupil … The whole school environment was deeply shocked”.
That is an anecdote, but is illustrative of the effect these decisions can have on other pupils and the school. I wanted to start the point about the exclusion trials because there may be an assumption that the Government want in some way to be gung ho or vindictive about this, or that we start from the point of view that heads are Victorian figures of authority who must never be questioned and their writ must always run. That is not our position. Our position is that there could be a small number of cases where the effect on the attitude of other pupils and staff is worth giving the school space to take that into account. The principal of Burlington Danes Academy gave evidence to the Education Select Committee in the other place, where she said:
“I am very pleased that the appeal panels have gone, having had a permanent exclusion overturned. A teacher was attacked with a knife and the child was able to come back to the school”.
Although incidents are fortunately rare, these events are not unique. Schools have to be safe environments where pupils can learn. To achieve this, as we have already discussed, schools need to be able to manage behaviour, and heads and governing bodies need to know that they can go about that with confidence.
I turn to the specific amendments on the First-tier Tribunal and the amendment about giving panels the power to reinstate. Clearly, requiring all cases to be taken to the First-tier Tribunal with a power to order reinstatement would defeat the purpose of Clause 4. Our proposals reform the current arrangements for exclusion appeal panels, remedying what we consider to be a weakness in relation to the power to force reinstatement. We believe that the new review panels will ensure quick resolution, which is in the interests of all parties.
I think that there was a question about the timing. We believe that the panel will have to meet and consider a case no later than 15 school days after the parent requests the review.
I was grateful to my noble friend Lord Storey for speaking to his amendment, which addresses an important issue about the amount of adjustment to a school’s budget that an independent review panel can set. Again, there are balances to be struck in wanting any financial penalty to be sufficiently high that the governing body would want to reflect seriously upon it. However, I understand my noble friend’s concern that the adjustment should take account of the size of the school and its total budget, as well as his point about a flat-rate penalty. Therefore, although there are arguments in favour of such a scheme because of its simplicity, I am happy to accept the principle behind his amendment and say that, when consulting schools and local authorities later this year on the new arrangements, we will include the issue of whether the penalty should take account of the size of schools—for example, having different penalties for primary and secondary schools.
Lord Peston
Will the noble Lord clarify a minor matter of logic? If he is saying that the review panel has the right to fine a school if the school does not go along with it, how can it be in the interests of any school to have its budget reduced when it is doing what it thinks is the right thing? Whatever we do, that seems to be about as absurd an idea as you could dream up. Who would suffer from having less money? Presumably, the school would buy fewer text-books or less of this and less of that. To me at least, none of this makes any sense. Why the Government have gone down this path, I have not the slightest idea. I have worked very hard to follow this issue since Second Reading but the fine business makes no sense to me whatever.
Lord Hill of Oareford
My Lords, the purpose is to compensate the local authority for the additional costs of the services that it would then have to pick up because the school was no longer providing them. That is the benefit.
We have heard important points raised about the Joint Committee on Human Rights and I shall make a couple of points about that. The JCHR set out its views on the compatibility of Clause 4 with convention rights. We disagree with the view that the proposal to establish review panels is incompatible with Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Our central legal argument is that the existing statutory framework around exclusion and educational provision for children who are excluded, whether on a fixed-term basis or permanently, is not determinative of a civil right, so Article 6 does not apply. In all the Strasbourg cases where civil rights have been found to engage Article 6, the civil right in question must have a basis in the domestic law of the state concerned. There is no domestic law right in the UK which guarantees the right to be educated in a specific institution. The right to an education, which is a right guaranteed at Article 2 of Protocol 1 of the convention, is not a guarantee of education at or by a particular institution. Article 13 of the convention requires that everyone whose convention rights and freedoms are violated shall have an effective remedy. As no convention rights are at issue here, we are clear that Article 13 is not engaged. We will shortly set out these arguments in more detail in a response to the Joint Committee.
I was asked about the consistency of school rules and the criteria for exclusion. The guidance is clear that a decision to exclude should be taken only in response to serious breaches of the school’s behaviour policy and if allowing the pupil to remain in school would seriously harm the education or welfare of the pupil or others in the school. The guidance is also clear that the head teacher should consider all the evidence, taking account of the school’s equal opportunities policies and, where applicable, equality legislation. We will continue to collect data on exclusions, which include exclusions by SEN and by ethnic group.
Lord Elton
May I ask a couple of questions of my noble friend? First, he referred throughout to permanent exclusion. The word “permanent” does not seem to appear in the text of the legislation. The direction was given to the Secretary of State in setting out the regulations, leaving it open to him to decide what sort of an exclusion the panel might make a judgment on. I assume there are important administrative reasons to minimise the appeals as well as practical ones. If it is an exclusion for a week or a fortnight, it will be over before the appeal is heard. For permanent exclusion, that is a different matter. Secondly, I would like to ask the question the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, was expected to ask and did not: what is to become of pupils excluded from a PRU, particularly if there is only one PRU available in an area? Thirdly, I am puzzled not to have received representations—I may be unique in this—from the head teachers’ organisations and I wondered whether they had expressed a view.
The Earl of Listowel
Before the Minister replies to those questions, perhaps it might be helpful to ask another question for information. How do the numbers of exclusions break down between primary schools and secondary schools? He may already have mentioned that but I would be grateful for that information.
Lord Hill of Oareford
On that specific point, I do not have those figures in my head and I will try to find them and send them to the noble Earl. In response to my noble friend’s first question, the new arrangements are intended to apply to permanent exclusions. So far as his other points are concerned—again, they are generally not in the Bill—in terms of the way forward with the exclusion trials and with a point that we are trying to take forward and which we will come to later on about improving the quality of alternative provision available, the responsibility for a child in the situation he describes is unchanged and remains with the local authority.
The Lord Bishop of Chester
Can I press the Minister on one point, following on from the noble Lord, Lord Peston, who drew attention to the philosophical difficulty of new subsection (6)? I notice that the review panel will have the discretion to impose a fine for an adjustment in budget but it is not a requirement that the review panel would do so. I am puzzled as to how a review panel is going to decide between one case and another and on what basis. You almost then have the prospect of review panels grading the substance of their requirement that a responsible body review it according to a scale of fines. This strikes me as odd. It is in the subjunctive—that the review panel,
“may, in prescribed circumstances, order an adjustment”—
and I wonder whether the Minister would expand a little more on what the “may” represents.
Lord Hill of Oareford
It is our intention to publish guidance to cover these issues which we will be able to then share with Peers so that they can see how that is proceeding. That will address some of these issues.
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, I am most grateful to the Minister for his reply and to all Members of the Committee who have taken part in this fascinating debate. I have a confession to make. I did not declare an interest at the beginning of this debate: I was once actually excluded. At the age of four, the head of my dancing class asked my mother to take me away because I was not prepared to stand in a row with all the other little girls and point my toe and wave my arms in exactly the same way as everyone else. I wanted to stand in the corner, be creative and do my own thing. I was not prepared to be a clone, so I was asked to leave. However, I remember feeling that sense of injustice because I had not been disruptive in any way; I had not been naughty; I just did not like standing in a row and doing the same as all the other little girls.
Therefore, I suppose that what we need to think about is the cause of the behaviour, and there have been many powerful speeches about the underlying factors that lead to these serious permanent exclusions. A large number of points have been made and I should like to take up a few of them. Much has been made by the Minister and my noble friend Lady Perry about the power of the independent review panel to quash the original decision and ask the school to reconsider, but what is the point of asking it to do that if there is no redress and if it continues with its wrong-headed decisions? The child actually has no right to any redress at all.
An innocent child cannot, in the current situation, be blamed for not wanting to be sent to a referral unit because only today there has been a report from, I think, Ofsted about the poor results that are frequently obtained by pupils in referral units. We must do something about the quality of alternative provision and I very much welcome what the Government are doing with the pilots that we talked about last Thursday. They have the potential very much to drive up the quality of alternative provision, and they are a very good idea.
What the Government are proposing is discriminatory because—not perhaps for the reasons suggested in the debate—we are setting up one system for children with special needs and a completely different one for children without special needs. In fact, we are taking away the current independent appeals panels and setting up something completely new to deal with only the 30 per cent of appeals that do not have any special needs connotations. That strikes me as being daft, particularly in the current financial situation. Why are we doing that? As the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, commented, we are dealing with very small numbers here. The vast majority of children behave well in school; the vast majority of cases of exclusion do not lead to an appeal; and three-quarters of the appeals are not upheld. We are talking about only 25 per cent of appeals being successful—and a very small proportion of those involve the reinstatement of a child where the school does not want it. We are talking about only 60 cases a year.
I ask the Committee: are we throwing away an important principle of natural justice for the sake of 60 cases out of 11 million children? I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, that this is an issue of principle—but not the principle that she enunciated. It is the principle that if you have been found innocent or if the punishment has been found to be excessive, you should have a right to reinstatement, as long as other factors do not outweigh that right. We have to bear in mind—I absolutely accept this—the effect on the rest of the school. I therefore draw noble Lords’ attention to proposed new paragraph (c) in Amendment 59, which states that one of the powers of the tribunal could be to,
“decide that because of exceptional circumstances, or for some other reason, it is not practical to give a direction requiring reinstatement, but that it would otherwise have been appropriate to give such a direction”.
That gives the tribunal the opportunity to say, “This child’s case has been made. We are not convinced that the child did what the child was supposed to have done”, or, “We are not convinced that exclusion is the appropriate punishment for it. However, we accept that if this child were to go back into the school, it would cause major problems for the rest of the school community”.
There may be several thousand people involved in that community. Therefore, for the sake of their best interests, and probably those of the child concerned—who wants to go where they are not wanted?—it might be better if the child went somewhere else, even if the case has been made and it is accepted that the decision was wrong. It could well be that that “somewhere else” can better meet the needs of the child. Therefore, that part of the amendment provides a very important power, which I should like to see given to the First-tier Tribunal that I am proposing.
I thank the Minister for what he said about Amendment 47—that the Government will look at the issue of the fine in the consultation. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Peston, that the fine does not make sense. You have just to ask yourself: who will suffer if money is taken away from a school? It will not be the child who is supposed to have misbehaved. He will have gone to some other school. It will be the children who remain in the school who will suffer if the school is fined. It really is not the sort of deterrent to schools expelling incorrectly that makes sense. I accept that reinstatement can often be difficult but I draw the Committee’s attention to proposed new paragraph (c) in Amendment 59, which would take care of that situation.
I have just one more point on the consultation over the fine. Will the Minister confirm that special schools and PRUs will also be consulted? They are often very small schools. The Minister is nodding; I thank him.
In conclusion, I ask the Committee to think about how adults would respond if, in an employment tribunal, a case had been made in favour of the employee and against the employer, finding that the response to what had happened had been disproportionate, but the employee was unable to get any redress at all. If it is wrong for adults, it is wrong for children. As has been said, children have a very strong sense of what is fair and what is not fair. A decision of this sort could turn a child totally against society. As one noble Lord rightly said, it could flip somebody who already feels disengaged or victimised—as though nobody understands them and everybody is against them, or as though they have no opportunities and are discriminated against—into becoming an extremely antisocial person. Although I accept that there are enormous difficulties in this situation, I ask the Minister to consider very carefully whether it is right to throw away a principle of natural justice in favour of doing something in only 60 cases a year out of 11 million children. It seems a disproportionate act by the Government. I hope we can have more discussions about it over the next few weeks. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Hill of Oareford
“In section 31A of that Act (consideration of adverse reports), in subsection (3)(c), for “exclusion appeal panel” substitute “exclusion review panel”.”
Baroness Brinton
Baroness Brinton
My Lords, I rise to speak to the amendments in the names of my noble friends Lady Walmsley and Lady Jolly. This is a very simple amendment to provide the safeguard that parents know about, and agree to, a same-day outside school-time detention being given. We recognise the benefits of same-day detention. For the child concerned, the punishment is swift and close enough to the judgment of the incident for there to be a clear link, and it is important for the school as it significantly reduces the administrative arrangements that are required if the detention cannot be taken for a day or more.
I am mindful of the evidence of Sir Alan Steer to the Commons Bill Committee. He said:
“It is nonsense to be discourteous and rude to parents with no notice detentions. You are actually exhibiting poor behaviour. It is thoroughly unreasonable and designed to annoy the parent. The vast majority of schools will not do it because it would run against their principles and how they operate”.—[Official Report, Commons, Education Bill Committee, 1/3/11; col. 51.]
I absolutely accept that the vast majority of schools would talk to parents and take the view of Sir Alan Steer but, sadly, not all would, and therefore we believe that two key issues would give serious cause for concern should no further measures be put in place.
The first is safeguarding. If children are kept in school for a detention and walk home alone without a larger group of children leaving together and without their parents’ knowledge, we argue that parents must have agreed to this delay so that they can make the necessary transport or meeting arrangements to ensure that their child travels home safely. The press has, very sadly, been full of the recent trial of Levi Bellfield over the murder of Milly Dowler. I want to make it absolutely clear that she was not detained at school but she travelled home later and via an unusual route. Parents are rightly concerned to know how their children get home and at what time so that they can be confident that they will arrive safely.
Secondly, same-day detentions cause a practical problem for rural schools. Many children can access their school only by bus or rail, and often there is only one bus that they can take home. For parents who do not have cars and are unable to collect their children, there is an equity issue about short-notice detentions.
Our amendment is very straightforward. It aims to protect children by ensuring that their parents give consent to the detention and are able to make arrangements for the child to get home safely. We do not want to be prescriptive about how that consent is made—schools will know how best to reach a parent urgently. I beg to move.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch
My Lords, I support Amendment 62, which very much follows on from Amendment 61 and has a similar intent to that described by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton.
We also recognise the arguments put forward by some school leaders that punishment is more effective if it takes place nearer to the time of the original incident. Therefore, we understand that there will be occasions when same-day detention is preferable if the necessary safeguards can be built into the child’s welfare. Indeed, that is why detention at lunchtime, which we introduced in previous legislation, is a very useful additional tool. However, to be safe, we regard it as essential that parents are properly informed for same-day detention when it is intended that it should take place after school.
Therefore, our amendment, in the form of a new clause, would require schools to give parents or carers reasonable notice of detention and to obtain an acknowledgment from the parent or carer within 24 hours. Where that acknowledgement has not been received, detention would still take place, but only after the original 24 hours—the current system.
A number of concerns have been raised about Clause 5 as it stands. For example, Ambitious about Autism made a point that I hope noble Lords will take seriously, which is that you need to prepare autistic children for the disruption to their plans and routines. Therefore, short-notice detention of children with autism is not only disruptive to their life and organisation but can cause them considerable mental distress.
Secondly, even Sarah Teather, during the progress of a previous education Bill said:
“For the record, we would not be in favour of removing the period of notice. It would be totally impractical”,
as the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, has said. Sarah Teather continued:
“In rural areas, especially on dark evenings, parents would not know what had happened to their child and would be extremely concerned. It is perfectly acceptable to give 24 hours’ notice, as it will allow parents to make other arrangements for travel … Anything else would be unacceptable”.—[Official Report, Commons, Education and Inspections Bill Committee, 10/5/06; cols. 855-56.]
Equally, we need to be aware of the needs of young carers who could be stopped from doing vital caring work at home, with no warning and no ability to make alternative arrangements. We need to be aware of the fact that some schools are not aware of the full caring roles that their pupils are carrying out when they get home, and the schools may thereby not be sensitive to some of the pressures that they are putting on the children.
The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, has made the case about rural areas and I shall not repeat it. Unamended, the clause could disrupt the relationship between schools and parents. The NUT made a good point when it said:
“Behaviour systems and policies always work best when they are fully supported by parents. Detention without notice does nothing to bring parents on-side”.
That is also important.
Our amendment therefore helps to redress the balance. It recognises the advantages of short-notice punishment while acknowledging the need to build parents into the disciplinary equation by requiring parents to be made aware of the sanctions the school intends to take. It fosters good relations with parents while allowing them to raise any genuine and practical concerns about a child’s late journey home. In the event that it is not possible to contact the parent or carer, it should remain that the default position is 24 hours’ notice. I hope that noble Lords will see the sense in both amendments.
Lord Lingfield
My Lords, I am sure that the Minister will confirm that this did not rise just out of a vacuum and that a large number of teachers and teachers’ organisations have indeed been in contact to support this piece of legislation. It is hugely important that where punishment is going to happen in schools it happens quickly in order to be effective. This legislation will not actually place a duty on schools to do this but simply provide a power to do it. Some schools could decide in their wisdom that they want nothing to do with having detentions under these circumstances. Others could decide that only certain members of staff under considerably constrained conditions may do so. Therefore, we can expect a variety of responses among schools in order to do this. However, there is absolutely no doubt that this power is needed by schools—or at least by some schools. It is part of a series of new tools for the toolbox that I am sure the Minister will agree he is trying to provide, and sends a message to teachers, pupils and parents that a lot of the misbehaviour that we have heard so much about is being combated. It is not one thing—there are other things, all of which are hugely important. They send a clear message to those people that they are going to be supported by government under these circumstances, and that teachers will not have to put up with the kind of misbehaviour that we have heard quite a lot about.
According to the thrust of the Government’s position, these decisions should be left to individual schools. We trust individual schools to make these kinds of decisions. Frankly, it is good so to trust them. Given that kind of trust, the response is always more professionalism. We do not need any more safeguards built into this. Where things are, there they should stay.
Lord Knight of Weymouth
My Lords, I will briefly make three points, unless something else occurs to me as I am on my feet. First, will the Minister tell us how many schools have actually asked for this? I have listened carefully to what the last noble Lord said, but in my three years as Schools Minister no school ever asked me for this power. I would be really interested in what evidence there is for a demand for it.
Secondly, I listened to what the noble Lord said about the fact they we should trust schools and leave it to them to decide whether to use the flexibility that they are being given in this Bill. I refer back to what the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, said about schools not necessarily fully understanding the circumstances of some of their pupils’ families; her example was whether or not they have caring responsibilities. I was shocked to talk to some schools where they did not know that parents might be in prison. All sorts of things happen that families do not necessarily want to go around talking about but which affect the nature of the home environment, and would then affect whether it would be appropriate to give a detention without notice on the same day after school.
Finally, on reinforcing the discipline from the school at home, when I was given detentions at the prep and independent private schools that I went to for things like forgetting my towel or—God forbid—being cheeky and a bit mouthy, which I know would shock noble Lords, there was always a letter home that went with the detention. That was always the worst part of the punishment: your parents knew that you had been given a detention. Giving 24 hours’ notice so that your parents are informed of the detention is a really important aspect of linking up the discipline of the school with home. We know that the single most important determinant of the success of a child’s education is the involvement of their parents in that education. I strongly believe that it is really important that we ensure that that linkage through the notice is there in every school.
Baroness Howarth of Breckland
My Lords, I wish to follow the noble Lord, Lord Knight, because I found it extraordinarily surprising that this Government, who stand very much for working with and alongside parents and making sure that there is accountability and responsibility at home, can suggest that they would give a detention without informing parents. Having worked with the Minister, Tim Loughton, on other issues and knowing how important it is for the Government that children should be safeguarded, I find it astounding that they can suggest that children can be detained in the evening and be allowed to go home without their parents knowing and without safeguards. I expect better.
Detention is not always about discipline. I got my detention for leaving my French homework on the bus and not producing it.
Baroness Benjamin
My Lords, I, too, support both these amendments. There are real concerns, as we have already heard, about the proposals to remove the requirement for written notice of detention outside school hours, given the safety concerns of parents for the whereabouts of their children, particularly if their children are at risk due to family circumstances or where they live or the nature of their journey from home to school. It is essential that the school gives parents notice if their child is to remain at school outside school hours and that the child’s safety and well-being are considered and given top priority.
Many have considered this proposal to be in direct opposition to the current insistence that the parents of excluded children must account for their whereabouts in the first five days of exclusion. It is only fair that, in return, parents are kept up to date by schools on their child’s whereabouts. I therefore support the amendment to retain the requirement for written notice of detention outside school hours.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough
My Lords, I rise very briefly to ask the Minister a specific question, which arose from the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, without any support or evidence at all to back up his claims. We should not have any legislation on the statute book unless it is actually going to do something—to improve or rectify a situation. The Education Act 2002 gave schools two powers. One was the right to earned autonomy and the other was the power to innovate. I am sure the Minister’s officials could tell him, or her, immediately how many schools since 2002 have applied under those powers to innovate to have detentions on the same day.
Baroness Garden of Frognal
My Lords, as we have all agreed, improving standards of behaviour in our schools is of great importance. We know that having a clear behaviour policy, which is consistently applied and includes positive incentives as well as sanctions, is essential to ensure good behaviour. This clause is one measure that the Government are taking to help schools to achieve this. Its intention is to allow teachers and head teachers to use detention in a way that is appropriate to the circumstances of their school and individual pupils to maintain a safe and orderly school environment.
My noble friends Lady Brinton and Lady Benjamin and other noble Lords have raised concerns about the safeguards, but safeguards are already in place to make sure that parents know what to expect with regard to detention outside school hours. Section 89 of the Education and Inspections Act 2006 requires that head teachers develop a behaviour policy in line with the principles drawn up by the governing body, and publicise it to parents annually. This policy must include all the penalties that the school uses to maintain discipline, including whether the school issues detention outside school hours.
The amendments in this group seek to place additional requirements on schools in relation to contacting parents when they wish to give a detention. I understand the intention behind the amendments. My noble friend and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, rightly consider that courtesy to parents and issues of child safety are of the utmost importance. Of course, I agree with them about that. However, noble Lords asked where these requests had come from. They may have read the briefing by the Association of School and College Leaders, which read:
“We welcome removal of the requirement to give parents 24 hours notice of detentions. We note that at second reading there was concern that this power could be abused. School leaders are well aware of the position of child carers, as well as other concerns such as children walking home alone in the dark and in the vast majority of cases will continue to give 24 hours’ notice. We are confident that schools can and should be trusted with this additional discretion”.
We have had meetings with school heads who support that to the hilt.
I believe that teachers and head teachers will consider the circumstances of their schools and pupils in setting their policies on detention so that they can promote good discipline but also safeguard children’s welfare and support good relationships with parents. However, I shall also set out the existing legal safeguards that protect children’s welfare if they are given a detention. Section 91 of the Education and Inspections Act 2006 requires that disciplinary penalties must be reasonable in all circumstances. When considering whether a disciplinary penalty is reasonable, teachers must take account of the special circumstances of the pupil, including—but not limited to—their age and special educational needs, or any disability they may have. That would include the concerns raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, about autistic children and their very special needs.
The Section 91 requirement applies when issuing detention outside school hours. This means that a detention will be lawful only if a teacher acts reasonably given the circumstances, including in relation to giving notice to parents. My noble friend Lord Lingfield raised the fact that this is a power, not a duty, that schools will have.
Lord Knight of Weymouth
Do those legal safeguards mean that the noble Baroness’s expectation is that parents’ recourse would be to the courts—and the expense of going to court—if, for whatever reason, they did not feel that they had been given notice that their child would not be at the school gates to be picked up and that had caused them to worry? Is there another third party to whom they could appeal?
Baroness Garden of Frognal
The noble Lord raises a valid point. There will be a school complaints procedure to which parents can normally turn in the first instance. Given the special circumstances in which this might arise, one would have thought that that would be the first line of action.
I also understand noble Lords’ concerns regarding the safety of children when travelling home from school, particularly in rural areas. I should reassure noble Lords that, in addition to the safeguards I have just described, Section 92(5) of the Education and Inspections Act 2006 makes it clear that, when considering an out-of-hours detention, teachers must consider whether suitable travel arrangements can be made via pupils’ parents. For some rural schools, out-of-hours detentions may never be appropriate, whatever the notice period, as has already been raised in discussion. I believe that head teachers will make sensible decisions in their individual circumstances.
In our debate on Tuesday, the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, described some of the difficulties that schools can face in working with a minority of parents. There is a risk that requiring parents to give consent for a same-day detention or to confirm that they are aware of it could, in a small number of cases, allow parents to obstruct appropriate disciplinary penalties. I should reassure noble Lords that the department has released new concise guidance on teachers’ legal powers to discipline. This guidance makes it clear that the school must act reasonably when imposing a detention, as with any disciplinary penalty. In addition, when deciding the timing, the teacher should consider whether suitable travel arrangements can be made by the parent for the pupil. I believe we can trust teachers to consider this and act appropriately.
In reply to the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, a study carried out for the Department for Education found that teachers reported a lack of support from parents, describing a “them versus us” mentality. That same study found that teachers felt that the removal of the requirement for 24 hours’ notice of detention would empower them. I can send the noble Lord and the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, a copy of that study. We stress that the vast majority of parents would be likely to be supportive if they could see that the detention was in the interests of their children. However, this measure is to take account of cases where that might not be seen as an appropriate action.
Lord Knight of Weymouth
Is it not the case that the amendment asks for parents to be given notice? It does not require consent. I completely understand that there may be problems over consent if the relationship between home and school is not great. The important thing is that parents know that their child will not get off the bus.
Baroness Garden of Frognal
Parents do not necessarily answer their phone. The fact that one has sent a letter home with the child does not necessarily mean that the child has passed it on—I can remember that being the case when I was a teacher. In some cases it was difficult to get hold of the parents to ensure that the message had been sent through. I come back to the point that, were there a difficulty at home, teachers and head teachers would be aware that it might not be an appropriate action to take. It would be taken only where it was deemed to be the right thing to do.
Baroness Massey of Darwen
Is the Minister aware that quite often teachers and heads are not aware that there might be a problem at home? My noble friend gave the example of young carers. Young carers often do not wish to be known as young carers. I find “appropriate” and “reasonable” quite difficult to grasp in these circumstances.
Baroness Garden of Frognal
In the case of pupils who were young carers, one hopes that that would be known by the schools, although I grant you that it might not be. Once again, we come back to the fact that detentions without 24 hours’ notice would occur in very exceptional circumstances. Teachers would ensure with the pupils concerned that there was no reason for it to be inappropriate for them to be detained in those circumstances. Teachers are already legally required to take appropriate and reasonable action in giving an out-an-hours detention and to consider all the relevant circumstances. I do not believe for one moment that they would be gung-ho. We should listen to head teachers when they tell us that this measure will help them.
My noble friend Lord Willis asked how many schools applied for a power to innovate. The answer is probably none, because few schools have ever applied to use the power for any reason. It would simply be something that they had it in their power to do if the need arose.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough
I am grateful to the Minister for responding so quickly and to the Box for finding the response. She makes exactly the point that I want to make; namely, that these powers already exist. You do not need additional legislation to have an impact here. If a school wanted the power, it could simply apply to the Secretary of State under the 2002 legislation and the Secretary of State would gladly give it to them.
Baroness Garden of Frognal
My Lords, there is currently a ban on giving a detention without 24 hours’ notice. That is why we are legislating here to enable schools to have the additional power if they wish to use it in very special circumstances.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough
I apologise if I am being incredibly stupid, but the 2002 Act gives the Secretary of State the right to grant to any school in England earned autonomy and the power to innovate. If you have the power to innovate, surely that takes precedence over any legislation, otherwise—I say with due respect—the 2002 Act becomes meaningless.
Baroness Garden of Frognal
With due respect to my noble friend, I think that it would be quite a time-consuming process for each school to apply to the Secretary of State for a power to innovate for a circumstance which would be likely to arise very seldom and which would need immediate action. Processes for expecting in advance to be able to do this are not practical.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough
I am sorry to take up the Committee’s time but this is important. It would not be done on every occasion. As a school, you apply for the power to innovate and you put it into your polices that you have the power to give a detention without notice—end of story. Why is new legislation needed?
Baroness Garden of Frognal
Each school would have to apply individually for that power to innovate. We are setting in legislation the fact that each school would not need to apply individually to the Secretary of State; they would have it as an additional power which they could use on the rare occasions that the school deemed that it was an appropriate way of dealing with a pupil’s behaviour.
Baroness Morris of Yardley
My Lords, the noble Lord is right. The power to innovate gives schools the right to ask whether they can be covered by this piece of legislation. You do that in advance; you do not do it because you want to keep a child in that night. I support what the noble Lord is saying, which is that the Government are making the case that only a small number of schools will use this power. If it is so important to them, looking across the array of legal powers they want to take themselves, if they think the most important thing is that they can keep children in on the same day, the power is there to do it. The noble Lord is absolutely right. The point is that this legislation leaves so many loopholes and so many risks of children not being safely looked after. We do not need to take that risk. If a school thinks it is important to them, they can apply for the power to innovate in advance. My understanding is that they have the power for five years.
Lord Hill of Oareford
I am the Minister who is in receipt of applications for powers to innovate. I have not been overwhelmed over the last year and a half by applications for powers to innovate. It may be there but the point is that for it to be there it is a more complicated process than it ought to be. Every school would have to apply individually. They apply to officials and officials put up submissions and Ministers decide and opine and then the power to innovate, like Zeus, is given. It is time-limited.
As a way of dealing with the issue, if one accepts that this is a permissive power, as it clearly is, and if you say to schools that all those that might want to use this power have to go through the rather cumbersome and protracted process of applying for a power to innovate, no one will go through the process of applying. They will say that this has been made difficult for them, whereas something that is simple, which gives them the opportunity and which applies to all—to choose either to use or not to use—with safeguards in place, seems a more rational way than making every school try individually.
Baroness Howarth of Breckland
Could I respectfully say to the Minister that this is not about powers and process, it is about message. If the message you want to convey is that you want to support schools and head teachers in whatever powers they wish, that is a message that will go out. But it will not be generally helpful in forging relationships between families, communities, parents and schools or indeed between children and their teachers. That is what it is about. It is about ethos and message. A better message is that these powers do exist. I am a strong believer in discipline in schools. Children learn much better if you have discipline. You need these sorts of structures in schools. But it is unhelpful to put into statute something which every speaker in this Room, even those who think we should do something, sees as unsafe and as poor communication with parents. I hope the Government will re-think how they convey that message of support to teachers without putting children into danger.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch
Before the noble Baroness sits down, I want to be clear what she is saying. Is she saying it is okay to have short-notice detention and not to tell the parents, because that seems to be the message? That raises all the concerns that people around the Room have raised. By all means have short-notice detention but make sure the parents are told. It seems she is saying it is not necessary. All our amendment is doing is to make sure the parents are told. That is a safeguard—the check and balance that is needed. I have not heard a convincing case why we should not insist that parents are told.
Baroness Garden of Frognal
We are talking here about a detention which might be as short as 10, 15 or 20 minutes after school. In that case there would not be time to get hold of most parents to tell them their child was being detained. If all the safeguards were in place to indicate that there would be no danger or damage to that pupil in detaining them, it might be a short, sharp shock that would just rectify a situation that was getting out of control. It is simply an additional power that the school would have, without all the delays. It will build up into a much bigger issue if you then wait and send a letter back to the parents or try to contact them. The whole thing might escalate into a much bigger punishment than giving a brief and immediate punishment on the spot to a young person who had committed some misdemeanour where all the safeguards were in place to make sure that that child would not be at risk for being kept back for a few minutes at the end of school.
We are obviously taking account of transport and all the other circumstances where this type of detention would not be appropriate. We are doing so in response to head teachers, who have indicated that they would welcome this power. As the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, said, this is, in a way, a message about something that could be available to them should they need it in very specific circumstances and when appropriate with all the safeguards surrounding it.
We hear the strength of feeling around the Room about this measure but I hope that noble Lords will see that it is a very measured proposal. Teachers would not be inclined to abuse the system but it could be extremely helpful in some circumstances to give an immediate punishment. It would show a young person that they had stepped out of line and that such a punishment was appropriate.
With that explanation, I hope that the noble Baroness will feel able to withdraw the amendment. However, we certainly have taken on board the debate on this matter in Committee and the strength of feeling that it has aroused.
Baroness Brinton
My Lords, we have had two debates on this amendment. The latter one that has emerged about the power to innovate and accessibility to current legislation for schools has been interesting. I urge the Minister to reconsider whether the existing law enables the Government to achieve what they want to happen. Should it not do so, I shall want to come back to some of the comments made by other noble Lords today.
There are key safeguarding issues relating to short-notice detention outside school time. That is the fundamental concern behind both these amendments. It is a question of trust in teachers, as espoused by the Ministers, or safeguarding children. Frankly, I think that the balance there always has to be in favour of children. I absolutely take the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, and others about children who act as carers. Children may also have non-caring roles that they need to fulfil or other commitments outside school with classes to go to where their non-attendance would cause problems. There are many things that schools do not know about where a short-notice detention out of school time could cause very serious implications for a child.
Parental support is absolutely vital, as many noble Lords have commented. Since the beginning of Second Reading, we have talked repeatedly about partnership between parents and schools. Parents’ support for outside-school-time detention must be a priority, not least because that gives them the chance to make alternative arrangements and it also gives them a chance to say to the school, “In this instance, it is not appropriate to do it straight away”.
I have to take issue with my noble friend Lord Lingfield about this being a new tool in the toolbox. It is a very weighty tool and an absolute sledgehammer to crack a nut. The Minister cited Section 91 of the Education and Inspections Act 2006, as well as another Act, and was confident that all the legislation was in place and that all we were being asked was to trust teachers. However, this amendment and Amendment 62 set out a simple and clear way of making it absolutely unavoidable for a school to contact a parent and get a response. My noble friend Lady Benjamin talked about the importance of a letter going to the child’s home. She is right that in this day and age there are much faster ways of contacting parents, including by text and mobile telephone. Even five or six years ago, as a parent I got messages from school as my eldest had accidents at school and was required to be taken to A&E. If something is that urgent, frankly the school can make contact. If the school is required to contact parents, they must do so.
I come to the final point about a nine year-old at primary school walking home late in November without their parents’ knowledge. In the main, most schools would not want that to happen, but there are occasions when it might. That is why I come back to safeguarding. If it is safeguarding versus trust, safeguarding must come first.
Baroness Garden of Frognal
That simply would not happen. It would not be the case that a nine year-old was kept back late in school and allowed to walk home on their own under these circumstances. That is not how this measure is either intended or framed.
Baroness Brinton
Whether it is a nine year-old, an 11 year-old or a 12 year-old, the same safeguarding issues are still absolutely there and valid. I am afraid that the problem with the plethora of legislation that was quoted earlier is that it is too easy to miss. There were comments earlier about the message that the Bill sends out about this. There is a clear message from both of these amendments that children’s safeguarding comes first, which is why parents should be notified.
I hope that Ministers will take into account much of the discussion that we have had today, and will able to come back at later stages of the Bill. For now, however, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
My Lords, when we talked in a previous debate about the Bill’s approach of removing what the Government see as burdens from schools, I said that I and my colleagues had approached this issue not simply by arguing, as we go through these detailed debates, that everything that the Government want to take out should be put back. I hope that the Minister can see that we have been selective and judicious with our amendments in this regard.
Like the duty to co-operate, Clause 6 would repeal a duty on secondary schools to co-operate with other schools to promote good behaviour, discipline and attendance, and also to make an annual report to the Children’s Trust on how they have done so. I move the amendment only because, like the duty to co-operate, we think that the repeal of this particular duty on behaviour and attendance partnerships will have such a negative effect on some of the things that the Government actually say that they want to achieve.
The amendment would reinstate the duty to enter into behaviour and attendance partnerships but remove the duty to produce an annual report. We have no difficulty supporting that part, but the duty to co-operate with other schools in partnerships to tackle behaviour, discipline and attendance are very important, not least because of the debate we had not long ago on exclusions and that entire discussion about behaviour and discipline. Everybody in that debate, including the Minister, said that we want exclusions to be a last resort. We want schools to work to prevent exclusions by having a strong, robust but comprehensive approach to inculcating good behaviour and dealing with discipline problems in a creative way so that they do not have to exclude pupils. That is what behaviour and attendance partnerships are all about.
They came into being following Sir Alan Steer’s review of behaviour, in which he said:
“It remains my firm view that all secondary schools—including new and existing Academies, Foundation schools and Pupil Referral units—should participate in behaviour partnerships”.
I know that the Minister may well come back and say, “Look, we think partnerships are a good idea but we want schools to participate in them voluntarily. We don’t think this duty is a good idea because, to be meaningful, a partnership is best when everybody is committed and enters into partnership voluntarily”.
What Alan Steer’s review pointed to was the fact that good collaboration between schools over these issues is often prevented by what are perceived, by other schools in the area, to be unfair practices by a minority of schools over such things as admissions and exclusions. The resentment that that engenders because of some schools behaving unfairly and not collaborating with others means that the whole approach to partnership is damaged and fragmented, and that it becomes very difficult to get partnerships going. He also said that such partnerships sometimes need a helping hand to become established. They need the kind of momentum that a duty on all schools equally to participate can create.
The Earl of Listowel
My Lords, briefly, I support what the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes of Stretford, has just said. It seems eminently reasonable to support such a mode of working—of sharing the burden of the most difficult children among a group of schools. From speaking to head teachers, I have not experienced that model. However, I have spoken to the head teacher who was responsible for something called the Greater Manchester Challenge in the Greater Manchester area. It gathered together teachers and head teachers in Manchester to support each other. I understand that there is something similar in Greater London. This, perhaps, was one of the strengths of the previous Government. One of the good things that they brought forward was a mode of encouraging heads to work together to produce better outcomes for children.
One sees that the new coalition Government are moving in the opposite direction. There is a lot that we will support in that. Perhaps we can all support greater autonomy and respect for individual professionals, but I would be very sad if, in the process of that move, we went from one extreme to another and we lost some of the good things that came out in the years of work that the previous Government put in. To my mind, it would be very sad to lose that co-operation and recognition that some problems are bigger than any one school can deal with.
The Minister may say that there are new modalities in developing these sorts of collaborative approaches. I recall what his noble friend Lady Ritchie said in the previous Committee session when she expressed concern, as the person responsible within the Local Government Association for the safeguarding of children, that the academies programme has given rise to concerns about fragmentation. There is a swing in the pendulum from one extreme to another. Some really good things came out from the previous swing in the direction of collaborative working, and I should be grateful to the Minister if he can reassure the Committee—as I am sure that he will—that he recognises the importance of schools working together to deal with these issues, and say what new mechanisms he is helping to bring into place to make it work for children in the future.
Baroness Morris of Yardley
I shall speak very briefly in support of the amendment because it is perhaps one of the most important that we will discuss in Committee. I know that we can return to the issue at a later stage. I very much support what my noble friend Lady Hughes said—out of all the obligations that schools have been freed from, this is probably one of the most important to discuss. My reasons for saying that are twofold. I completely accept the need for schools to be independent and I acknowledge and recognise that the Government are working to push that agenda as far as they can. Can the Minister say whether the Government also accept the need for schools to be interdependent? Does he understand the concept that sometimes schools cannot do well for their own children because they are not interdependent with other schools in the system?
If the Government accept that, I have a second question. Of all the things that schools can do, the thing that can most harm a neighbouring school is the exclusions policy. That is what makes exclusions different than a lot of other things. I am sure that the Minister and the Government fully understand that the actions of one school can make it difficult for another to raise standards. That is the powerful case for leaving there the obligation and duty to be part of the partnership. It is, first, about the interdependency of schools as well as the independence and, secondly, it is about understanding that the actions of one school can be very detrimental to the ability of the other to raise standards. Will the Minister reflect on that in her response?
Baroness Garden of Frognal
My Lords, I understand and have much sympathy with the intention of the amendment to promote partnership working between schools to improve behaviour and to remove bureaucratic burdens, and with the views put forward by the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris. I agree that working in partnership to improve behaviour and attendance can help schools to meet the needs of their pupils. Very many schools are already doing this very effectively. We heard from Sue Bainbridge from National Strategies, who worked on behaviour in schools for the previous Government. She said:
“One really good example of partnership working is in Tower Hamlets. No one told those schools to work together; they decided to work together. They share their data now. They not only openly share data with heads and senior leadership teams, but flag up the youngsters who are causing them concern. They ask each other for help with strategies to address a problem.”
The Education Select Committee when conducting research into their report Behaviour and Discipline in Schools, published this February, observed:
“During our visit to Leicester City Council, local partners were confident that there existed an established culture of less challenged schools supporting those with greater challenges in terms of pupil behaviour. Therefore, the removal of the requirement to form BAPs [behaviour and attendance partnerships] was expected to have little impact on local partnership working”.
The fact is that Section 248 is not yet commenced. Therefore, schools that are part of a behaviour and attendance partnership have been doing so on a voluntary basis. No arrangements were planned to monitor or enforce the requirement for schools to form partnerships, and no resources have been allocated to schools to help them with the administrative burden that that would have imposed.
One feature of behaviour and attendance partnerships is that schools pool resources to buy in specialist resources, including SEN provision. There is no reason why this should not continue, because it has taken place without any need for this section of the Act. These examples—the noble Earl came up with an example as well—demonstrate schools’ willingness to work together on behaviour without being required to do so.
Of course, we must hold schools accountable for the outcomes that they achieve for their pupils. Our reforms to the Ofsted inspection framework, which will focus it on the core functions of a school, will ensure that schools are held accountable for the behaviour of their students. How they achieve good behaviour is for each school to decide. If poor behaviour and attendance is identified as a key issue for a school, the management and senior leadership team should prioritise this and take appropriate action. In looking at the effectiveness of a school’s leadership and management, Ofsted will consider how they work with other schools and external partners to improve pupil outcomes.
We have already discussed in debates on previous clauses the Government’s overall approach to improving behaviour in schools. As noble Lords know, one element of this is our trial of a new exclusions process, where schools take responsibility for the education and attainment of pupils whom they exclude. The trial will give us a further opportunity to explore how schools can work effectively together and with others to reduce exclusions and how government can incentivise them to do so.
Perhaps I may respond to a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris. In another place, Kevin Brennan said in a debate on exclusions that he would raise the issues of how—oh, I am sorry. All schools and admissions authorities are required by School Admissions Code to participate in the locally agreed fair access protocol to ensure that children without a school place, especially the most vulnerable, are found a place at a suitable school as quickly as possible.
I hope that I have demonstrated that repealing the legislation will not affect existing partnerships or stop new partnerships from forming. Behaviour and attendance partnerships appear to have flourished without ever becoming mandatory. This part of the legislation has never been put into force. I look forward to seeing this continue in future. I hope that the noble Baroness will feel able to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
My Lords, I thank the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, and my noble friend Lady Morris for their contributions, emphasising as they did the importance for all schools of collaboration and partnership working, and the great contribution that they can make and are making to the creative management of some of the most difficult problems of behaviour, discipline and attendance that schools are addressing.
I am sorry to say that I was not greatly convinced by the Minister’s response. We hear constantly from Ministers that such requirements on schools are regarded by the Government as bureaucratic burdens. I do not think that they are. They have been necessary in order to inculcate the kind of behaviour that we want from schools. The fact that the legislation has not yet been implemented in full does not mean that its repeal will not have any effect. Schools were anticipating this legislative requirement; it was the whole direction of travel of the previous Government. The fact that schools are doing it effectively now—some of them; not all of them—does not mean that the duty to engage in partnership is no longer required. As I said in my opening remarks, Alan Steer pointed out that some schools behave very badly, particularly in relation to exclusions. As my noble friend Lady Morris said, when that happens, it greatly affects all the other schools in the area. His clear conclusion was that all schools needed to be in these partnerships and that all schools should have that duty placed upon them.
I am not convinced that repealing the requirement will not have a negative impact on the partnerships that exist at the moment. We have to look at this matter in the round. We have heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, today about messages. Taken together, a lot of the messages in the Bill say to schools, “It’s not just about your independence. You can act in isolation. You don’t have to co-operate with the local authority; you don’t have to co-operate with the health service; and you don’t have to co-operate with each other in the development of solutions to these difficult issues”.
Lord Collins of Highbury
“Prejudice-based bullying
(1) Any school to which this section applies shall collect and publish information on the extent of bullying related to any of the protected characteristics.
(2) The section applies to any maintained school, Academy within the meaning of the Academies Act 2010 and to such other schools as may be prescribed by regulations.
(3) For the purposes of this section—
(a) “bullying” includes negative behaviour directed at an individual or group which is intended to cause either physical, emotional or relational hurt or damage;(b) “the protected characteristics” has the same meaning as in the Equality Act 2010.(4) The Secretary of State shall prescribe what information is to be collected for the purposes of this section and how it shall be published.”
Lord Collins of Highbury
In moving the amendment, I acknowledge the support that I have had from both Stonewall and the Equality and Human Rights Commission in preparing it.
At Second Reading, I highlighted that homophobic bullying was reaching epidemic levels in our schools. I made it clear that this type of bullying affects young people regardless of sexual orientation in all schools including faith schools, academies and free schools. Stonewall recently published disturbing polling evidence revealing that nine in 10 secondary schoolteachers say that pupils, regardless of their sexual orientation, currently experience physical homophobic bullying, name-calling or harassment in their school. One in four teachers says that this happens “often” or “very often”.
The Government’s schools White Paper states that,
“tackling bullying is an essential part of raising attainment”.
However, while debating provisions within the Bill giving teachers the power to tackle bullying when it happens, we should not forget that schools must be in no doubt that they have a fundamental responsibility to prevent such bullying happening in the first place. Schools need to be environments where young people feel comfortable in reporting homophobic bullying. The amendment proposes that a requirement be placed on schools to record and report incidents of prejudice-based bullying. The requirement would apply to all schools, including free schools and academies.
I welcome the provisions in the Bill which attempt to deliver on the commitment to tackle bullying as set out in the White Paper, The Importance of Teaching. Nick Gibb, Minister of State for Schools, confirmed at Second Reading in another place:
“The coalition Government are committed to tackling all forms of bullying in our schools, including homophobic bullying, and the Bill makes a start by tackling the root cause of bullying—poor behaviour in our schools”.—[Official Report, Commons, 8/2/11; col. 261.]
There is scope in the Education Bill to do more explicitly to tackle identity-based bullying, which, as I have detailed, is a significant and growing problem.
Both Stonewall and the Equality and Human Rights Commission recognise the importance that government places on freeing schools from unnecessary bureaucracy and regulation. Therefore, a new requirement for data collection should not be proposed lightly—and I do not propose it lightly. However, the evidence of the size of the problem, its persistence over time and its impact on young people’s lives suggest that this is a proportionate and necessary measure that will enable Ofsted, parents and pupils to hold schools to account for their progress in tackling bullying.
The EHRC evidence shows that reporting on racial bullying is already widespread, with 75 per cent of local authorities collecting data from their schools on the extent of racial and ethnic bullying. Therefore, in my opinion, it would be straightforward for existing collection and reporting mechanisms to be extended to allow for the collection of data on other forms of bullying, such as bullying on the basis of sexual orientation and religion or belief.
Another concern is the lack of data gathering to monitor incidence of prejudice-based bullying by schools, perhaps compounded by new draft guidance issued by the Department for Education. This guidance provides information on preventing and tackling bullying and streamlines previous advice, but ultimately leaves decision-making on whether to keep written records to schools. In my view, keeping records is an essential tool to tackling bullying. It is an evidence-based approach to tackling this problem. The public sector equality duty requires schools to eliminate unlawful discrimination, harassment and victimisation and to consider how they could positively contribute to the advancement of equality and good relationships. As such, they are required to analyse the effect of their policies and practices on all the protected grounds.
Prejudice-based bullying is clearly one of the key issues affecting pupils, and a requirement to record and report across all protected grounds would help schools to meet their duty to support improvement in educational experiences and outcomes for pupils. I beg to move.
Baroness Massey of Darwen
My Lords, I thank my noble friend for this amendment. He makes many powerful points about homophobic bullying. This is a very serious issue. Research has shown that many young people who are gay feel excluded and even suicidal when they are bullied because of their sexual orientation. Bullying has become a very much more complex issue in recent years. It can happen to any child, and some more than others. The person who is doing the bullying also has problems, as well as the child who is being bullied. We have to tackle all that complex mix.
Mobile phones and the internet, in and out of school, have driven some young people who are bullied to suicide, not just to suicidal feelings. We need to look at this very seriously. The issue of keeping records is important, but I would go back to something that I remember Graham Allen saying recently. One thing is having the firemen to deal with a situation but, before that, we need to have smoke alarm systems. I want to talk about the smoke alarms here, not literally but metaphorically.
We need to teach about bullying, in PSHE or wherever, and address the reasons why some people are bullied, why some people do the bullying and the feelings involved there. That is the first point. We need to discuss bullying with pupils in school and have them express their feelings about it. It is also a matter of what is happening in lessons and within the school’s own ethos: how does the school tolerate this?
There is another issue about having a school policy on bullying and on behaviour generally. We mentioned school councils the other day, and I gave the example of the school where I am a governor having a council which sets for each classroom, in an agreed form, the classroom behaviour code. This should be encouraged by schools because it is devised by the pupils themselves. Where the pupils have an issue and make the policy—on bullying, for example—it is much more likely to be effective. While I agree with my noble friend about keeping records, it is also important for schools to have a policy on bullying which is kept to and agreed by the pupils.
Baroness Whitaker
My Lords, I support my noble friend’s amendment for all the reasons that he set out so comprehensively, but also because identity-based bullying is a particularly prevalent experience for Gypsy and Traveller children. Indeed, it is thought to be responsible for much of the 20 per cent drop-out rate at secondary level. I have heard harrowing examples from Gypsy and Traveller members of the UK Youth Parliament about their own and their siblings’ and cousins’ experience, which included sometimes indifference, or even collusion, on the part of the teachers.
About three-quarters of local authorities collect information on racial and ethnic bullying. I am not sure that they always think that bullying Gypsy and Traveller children is ethnic bullying. In any case, the schools which do not supply the information or collect examples of that and other identity-based bullying most need their practice exposed and improved. It will surely help to address poor behaviour and, as my noble friend says, it will not be an onerous addition to raise the standard of the worst to the best. I hope that the Minister will entertain the possibility of accepting this amendment.
Baroness Howe of Idlicote
My Lords, briefly, I support the amendment and the reasoning behind it. We seem to have been through this process on a number of occasions during the passage of a number of different education—indeed, other—Bills. Above all, it constantly takes me back to the business of early intervention, setting standards and leadership within schools. I am back again to Graham Allen. All his theories and ideas are exactly what we should be thinking about.
Things such as Sure Start have done a great deal to show us the way forward. Equally, some schools have taken positive steps with early mentoring for every new student who comes in, with a positive responsibility—through the ethos of the school and the head teacher—to look after and integrate a new child into the school community. All these things are necessary, not least, as has already been mentioned, in a society where particularly nasty practices can take place using phones and photography—not to put too fine a point on it—thoroughly disturbing, if not worse, the life of a young child emerging into the world.
We may not have the right answer here. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response. This is an important issue and I am glad that it has been raised in this context. Of course, it is not just homophobic bullying; it is a whole range of issues. We all need to keep an eye on them.
Baroness Brinton
My Lords, I also support this amendment. It is a helpful move to ensure that schools, Ofsted, the Government and responsible bodies within our wider communities are aware of prejudice-based bullying as a result of anything in these categories.
Severe bullying in any form is wrong and much has been done in recent years. I know from my own time in Cambridgeshire in the 1990s that we had trained staff in every school not just to spot bullying but to support other staff in the implementation of anti-bullying policies. School councils existed to work with pupils even at a primary level to talk about the issue. One of the fundamental problems over the years has been that some schools have refused to admit that bullying exists in their schools. That is why collecting data becomes extremely helpful.
Over the last decade or so, I have also had the privilege of seeing the work of the Red Balloon Learner Centres, which are set up specifically to help children so severely traumatised by bullying they can no longer go to mainstream schools. Their intention is, and they mainly succeed, to get these children and young people back into mainstream school within two years of being unable to attend. These children have been so badly affected that it is not just about being afraid of going into school, but they stop learning as well. That is critical. As has been mentioned already, some threaten to take their lives and very sadly some have taken their lives.
I have one concern about the amendment, however. Those schools who deny bullying is a problem are probably less likely to accept that there is, for example, homophobic bullying going on in their schools. Guidelines to schools, therefore, should be absolutely clear to make sure that there is a requirement on schools to really think about incidents that are reported and what the root cause is. Let me give you an illustration why. I know a young man who, when he was 12, was taunted repeatedly for being gay and he found it impossible to manage at school. He also, incidentally, had a disability. His confidence plummeted, his educational performance was also significantly reduced and it took some time for these incidents to be taken seriously by the school, which prided itself on its pastoral care. Once it accepted that there was an issue, things swung into action. But by that time his confidence was at a seriously low ebb.
If required to report the bullying, I doubt that school would have picked it up in the first year of those incidents and the impact on the young person concerned was significant. Fortunately, in his case a move elsewhere gave him the chance to recuperate and his life was turned round, mainly by his own self-confidence once the bullying had stopped. Once he got to FE college, he championed the young Liberal Democrats’ Homophobia is Gay campaign within his college, much to the astonishment of his family, but it gave him confidence and allowed homophobia to be discussed at his FE college. He is now happily at university and doing extremely well.
The reason I cite that illustration is that it is often more complex than it appears when somebody falls into a particular category. That is why any guidelines need to recognise that often there may be more than one category and that would need to be recognised.
As has already been mentioned, the recent Equality and Human Rights Commission report and evidence on prevention and response to identity-based bullying is illuminating. Two-thirds of young lesbian, gay and bisexual pupils have experienced direct bullying. That this rises to 75 per cent in faith schools is a shocking statistic. Despite my concern about reporting, monitoring will help to improve the situation and it is right that it must be by all schools, including free schools and academies. It is evident that racial bullying is being reported. As has already been commented, 75 per cent of local authorities are now collecting data. Let us protect all children and young people in the prejudice-based groups, including sexual orientation, disability and religion or belief.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
My Lords, I also support the amendment moved by my noble friend. He made a powerful speech at Second Reading and raised a very important issue, not least because it is still overlooked in this day and age and is still a difficult issue for some people to address. As the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, has just said, Stonewall and other organisations have reported on a very high incidence of bullying of lesbian, gay and bisexual pupils. A feature of such bullying is that it is often hidden from adults because it takes place through text messages, social media sites and so on. It is often covert. However, as has been alluded to, the impact on young people can be absolutely traumatic. They fear going to school and being attacked, all of which impacts on their learning, sense of security and well-being. We have heard of some tragic cases in which people have harmed themselves or tried to commit suicide as a result.
There are three reasons why we ought to support this amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Collins. First, it would ensure that important first steps are taken to discover the extent of prejudice-based bullying through the recording of incidents. That is a picture that needs to be fleshed out. Secondly, having to record the incidents would, in itself, raise awareness of and sensitivity to the issue among teachers and schools. Thirdly, as we have heard, there is an apparatus and a system in place to record ethnic and other kinds of bullying, to which this could be added without much onerous work or demands being made on schools or local authorities. Those are three powerful reasons. I hope the Minister will find that he can support the amendment.
Lord Lexden
Does the noble Baroness also endorse something to do with recording that is tremendously important—that is, discussion? Discussion should not be of the covert kind to which she referred, but brought out more openly by kind and sensitive teachers who are in touch with the temper of these times, which have changed so markedly over the past few years. Teachers are now in a position to handle these matters sensitively and to encourage more general discussion of them in schools, reaching a fuller, more mature, more balanced and good understanding.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
I agree wholeheartedly with the noble Lord’s point, which reflects that of my noble friend Lady Massey. These issues should be discussed more openly in the round through personal, social and health education and other discussions that take place in schools. If such bullying happens to them, pupils will then feel safer and more confident in declaring what has happened to them.
Baroness Howarth of Breckland
My Lords, I briefly add a point about this being a Forth Bridge issue. It is perpetual and we must work at it all the time. I am interested in what the Government’s strategy for tackling bullying in schools is. The previous Government certainly had a strategy, which I assume the current Government will carry on and build on.
When I was involved with Childline, bullying was the most significant issue for children. I understand that this is still the case now that the NSPCC runs Childline. It came above safeguarding, relationships and issues to do with friends. It had an emotional impact on children. I know this because I spoke personally to hundreds of them over the telephone about their view of themselves, particularly young children from ethnic-minority communities, for whom this was a very confusing issue. More recently, we know that homophobic bullying has become much more rife, with names being called in the playground. Therefore, I recognise that collecting statistics may not be the Government’s way of taking this forward but I should like to hear more about what they are doing strategically. This is not something that needs a plan for today or yesterday; it has to happen all the time.
I remember advising the head of a school in the south of England where a young man had taken his own life. He said, “But we don’t have bullying in this school”. I said that the healthy position was to recognise that every school has bullying, but to have a strategy to deal with it that involves its pupils. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say about the strategic position.
Lord Hill of Oareford
My Lords, first, like others, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Collins, for raising this important issue and, if I may say so, for doing it in a very thoughtful way and getting the debate off to such a good start. He and other noble Lords have described the terrible impact that bullying can have on a child. I agree with him and other noble Lords that schools, pupils, parents and the Government must work together to tackle bullying in schools, and prejudice-based bullying in particular.
We set out in our White Paper, as the noble Lord mentioned, our clear expectation that schools should take a tough and firm stance on all forms of bullying. They should seek to identify what bullying is happening in their school and take steps to support pupils who have been bullied and prevent it happening in future. To support schools, we have issued the guidance to which the noble Lord referred, setting out their legal powers and duties, the principles that underpin the strategies used in successful schools, and the specialist organisations that can provide information to help schools to understand and tackle different types of bullying. This guidance makes it clear that primary legislation, introduced by the previous Government, already requires head teachers to determine measures to prevent all forms of bullying among pupils. The Equality Act 2010 further requires them to eliminate unlawful discrimination, harassment and victimisation and to consider how they can positively contribute to the advancement of equality and good relations.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, said—and I agree with her—bullying is a problem which happens to children and young people in schools on a spectrum of severity and for all sorts of reasons. The noble Lord’s amendment addresses a particular kind of bullying, which is particularly horrid, but if one is on the receiving end of bullying all kinds of bullying feel completely horrid and vile. It is, as has already been explained, a complex issue that is too often hidden from parents and teachers, as noble Lords have said. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Collins, that in order to tackle bullying schools must have a good understanding of what is driving bullying in their schools. That is a point that the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, made as well. We need a much broader approach. Schools must also understand the types of bullying that are a problem. It is crucial that they create an environment where pupils know that bullying is not tolerated and feel able to report it where it occurs.
The nature of bullying changes over time. If the noble Lord, Lord Rix, were here, he would talk about the concerns that he and others had about the rise in bullying of disabled children. If we had been here 10 years ago, we probably would not have had a debate about the rise in homophobic bullying. Therefore, understanding the issues and how they change over time is extremely important and will require different action in different schools. I have been told that 35 per cent of bullying goes unreported, so any system that relies on reporting alone cannot give a full picture of what is happening in a school.
The most effective schools use a range of approaches to monitor bullying. They combine evidence from incidents reported with other sources of information, such as anonymous surveys of pupils, surveys of parents and making use of school councils. We want to see more schools take a sophisticated approach that allows them to understand the problems in detail, address them and improve their approach based on evidence of what works. The new, more focused Ofsted framework will encourage schools to do this. Inspectors will have more time to look at how schools address poor behaviour, including bullying. That greater focus will flush out some of these things. The report that Ofsted will produce will provide information to parents about the detail of a school’s approach and how effective it is.
All that having been said, on the specific amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Collins, I fear that there are potential practical pitfalls with requiring all schools to collect and publish information about bullying in one way. That point was alluded to by my noble friend Lady Brinton. Information about bullying is by its nature fairly subjective, and the amount of bullying recorded will not necessarily depend on the amount of bullying taking place. I can envisage a situation where a low number of recorded incidents could mean that a school was exemplary at tackling bullying. Alternatively, it could mean that staff were not aware that it was going on or that children were afraid to report it.
Lord Collins of Highbury
I thank the Minister for his remarks and all noble Lords for their contributions to this positive debate. In moving the amendment, I did not want to give the impression that bullying was not a complex issue; it is complex, and we need to develop positive policies. I know from my own personal experience that often the first defence from homophobic bullying at school is to be a bully yourself. That is what we have to address.
The world has moved on. We are about setting standards. What happens in school carries on in later life and affects behaviour outside school just as much. I still can walk past a school with my partner and suffer taunts from inside the school. It is that sort of behaviour that we have to try to change.
I was not attempting to say that this was about targets or registering the amount of bullying; it is not about that. This would be just one tool to support the policies that I hope the Government support. If we do not have it, some kinds of schools in particular may hide behind the idea that the problem does not exist.
I welcome the Minister’s comment that he will look further into this, particularly with the commission and other organisations. In that setting, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Puttnam
“( ) This section shall only come into force if its provisions have been approved, by a simple majority, in a vote of registered teachers.
( ) For such a vote to be valid, 50 per cent of registered teachers must have voted.”
Lord Puttnam
My Lords, the purpose of this amendment is to challenge the Government but in effect also to challenge the profession itself. During Second Reading, I and the Minister disagreed on one issue. I suggested that the Bill challenged the professional status of teachers and diminished them, while he felt otherwise. If there are two overused phrases in this Bill and in discussions on education generally, they would have to be “world-class education” and “professionalism” in relation to teaching. I have not done a word count on the Bill but it is literally littered with the words “profession” and “professionalism”, normally prefixed by the words “enhanced” or “increased”.
It is the refuge of a pedant to look in the OED but the words are very clear. Under “professional” and “professionalism”, it says:
“Reaching a standard or having the quality expected of a professional person or his work; competent in the manner of a professional”.
Or there is,
“raises his trade to the dignity of a learned profession”.
A professional is:
“One who belongs to one of the learned or skilled professions; a professional man”.
As someone who comes from outside politics, I have never ceased to be amazed by the sometimes brilliant ability of politicians to oppose, which in my judgment is only matched by the apparent hopelessness to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors. It is something that I have observed over the past 15 years and I have no reason at all to think that I am wrong.
I declare an interest as a former chair of the General Teaching Council. I make two points. I genuinely loath government by assertion, which is what we are dealing with here, whereas I celebrate government by evidence. We came in in 1997 on a mantra of evidence-based policy-making. Sadly, that had died by the millennium. None the less, it was a good idea in its time. Creating policy involves learning lessons from the past and gathering evidence from the present. In support of my contention that scrapping the GTC was the coward’s way out, I started looking for lessons from the past and I found more than I could ever possibly have hoped for. In the process, I have become a quasi-authority on the formation and development of the General Medical Council.
I have an advantage over the Minister in that I have looked through a number of interesting and riveting documents from the Library on the development of the General Medical Council—and I shall certainly hand them to him. What strike you immediately are the extraordinary parallels between the development of the GMC and the hoped-for development of the GTC. It is also interesting to see that throughout its history the GMC relied on lessons learnt, and mistakes made, by the development of the legal profession, which in turn relied entirely on the very ragged process of the development of the clergy. Only Henry VIII tried to interrupt this learning process—at least, until now. I will not go into that at this stage, although I certainly could.
The parallel is quite extraordinary. For example, there has always been only a minority of pressure within the profession for increased professionalism. Prior to 1858, when the law was passed in this House, the bulk of doctors did not think that it was necessary that they be regarded as professionals. They were perfectly happy with the way things were and thought that the market operated very satisfactorily. Throughout the history of the GMC, there was very little agreement on the level of the retention fee that ought to be charged to be a member of what was termed a profession.
Here I come to a challenge to the profession itself. I bow to no man in my belief that this is an important profession and that all my futures, and those of my children and grandchildren, are entirely dependent on several generations of outstanding teachers. That is very clear throughout the Bill. It cannot be squared with an attempt to scrap the embryonic professional body that we attempted to create, inadequately, in 1997.
Another fascinating parallel that I dug up a moment ago is that the inadequacy of the original legislation for the GMC in 1858 was described as a sort of disgrace because the public were ill served as the legislation was watered down to a point where they could not rely on the professionalism of an individual doctor. Noble Lords may think that I am overstating this parallel but I think that it is a very important one.
For 153 years, a great deal has been learnt about turning the medical profession into a respected professional body, frequently in the face of fierce opposition from within. I am not pretending that the GTC was remotely what I would have liked it to be—dreadful mistakes were made—but you do not scrap a professional body; you build on it and enhance it. You improve it and nurture it and sometimes you have to cajole and maybe kick it. But our aim is to have a far more professional and far more effective body of teachers adhering to a set of responsibilities.
Finally, I say this to the Minister. If the profession does not want the proposals in my amendment—and I have deliberately used the form of balloting for which the Government clearly have a preference in settling disputes—you will hear not one more word from me. But let the profession decide whether it wishes to be professional, whether it wishes to acknowledge the obligations that go with being professional and whether it wishes constantly to prove itself to the point where we have a generation of teachers of whom we can truly be proud. I beg to move.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch
My Lords, a few of the amendments in this group are in my name and it may help the debate if I speak to them first. I apologise for interrupting. I shall speak to Amendments 64A, 64B, 73A, 73B, 73C and 73D.
We have considerable sympathy with the intent of noble Lords who have supported Amendment 64. We believe that there is a need for government to send out a much stronger, more positive message to the teaching profession about their value and status. Therefore, we believe that a body carrying out the key functions of the GTCE should remain in the Bill.
Like my noble friend Lord Puttnam, we fully acknowledge that the GTCE has struggled to fulfil parts of its mission. However, in abolishing it, we are in danger of losing other functions which it has delivered well and which would be lost to the profession as a whole. For example, in abolishing the GTCE we will deny the teaching profession a self-regulated professional body on a par with virtually every other professional body in this country. As the GTCE itself says:
“The Bill would remove the professional infrastructure that is standard for other professions such as medicine, law and nursing, and for other teachers”.
Equally, teachers themselves are calling for the continuation of such a body. For example, the NASUWT says the abolition,
“will damage the status of the profession”.
Meanwhile, as we have heard, the Government talk endlessly, and quite rightly, about raising the status of the profession. However, if they are serious, it would surely be a regressive step to take away the professional body.
The Bill describes how certain functions will transfer to the Secretary of State and others will stop completely. I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hill, for his letter of 13 June setting out in more detail which of the GTCE functions will stop. In that letter he said:
“The GTCE functions which we do not propose to continue include: maintaining the register of teachers; investigating cases of professional incompetence; undertaking a range of surveys and research about the teaching profession; disseminating research and statistics; supporting teachers’ continuing professional development”.
Taking some of those examples, we believe that it is vital to maintain a professional register of teachers, as other professions do and, indeed, as the comparator bodies in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland will continue to do. The register of those qualified and entitled to teach in our schools has been successful in enabling employers to make recruitment checks. Under the Government’s proposals, all that will be held is a database of those prohibited from teaching.
Organisations such as the Association of School and College Leaders and the National Association of Head Teachers have made it clear how much they value a register of all qualified teachers that is accessible by schools. The NUT echoes that, saying that it would be a waste of resources if this work were abandoned now. The ASCL said that abolition of the GTCE and discontinuation of the registers removes the public’s guarantee that all registered teachers are,
“eligible, suitable, properly qualified and of good standing”.
It is not just the public’s but parents’ rights to the same guarantees that matter. For example, as part of my other life, I carry out some paid work for the General Medical Council, and I listened with great interest to what my noble friend had to say about it. Not only have I seen how much doctors value the General Medical Council’s register but I have seen how important it is for patients to access details of their doctors’ registration in an open and transparent way. Surely parents deserve the same rights? In a recent survey, 93 per cent of parents want teachers to be regulated, to have an agreed level of training and to be registered with a regulatory body before taking up a teaching post.
Lord Quirk
My Lords, if the only the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, had been in charge of briefing for the Opposition in the other place in February, such a massive and very welcome defence of the GTC might well have given this Bill a different course as it has proceeded through Parliament.
Even now, having heard the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, we seem still to be assuming that the GTC is no good. We know that it has not been the huge success that those of us who spoke for it 15 years ago naively anticipated, but it has not been a complete failure either. The GMC, the historic model, has been discussed by the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam. Let us not forget that, even at the present time, the GMC’s wheels sometimes grind a little greasily, particularly over the competence of individual practitioners. That does not mean that any patient would want to see the GMC abolished and its role devolved to Andrew Lansley. The GMC is strong in its institutional mechanisms and it can put right the defects that are inevitable in any human institution. That is true for the GTC. I do not know much about it, and I certainly do not know as much about it as the noble Lord, who directed it during its first, uneasy infant steps. The GTC, I am reliably informed by people inside it, knows that it is not working properly. It knows what is wrong, why it is wrong and how to put it right. The solution surely is to fix the GTC, not to abolish it and then have a string of amendments such as we have in front of us today replacing the bits of the GTC that we see as so essential and putting them into somebody’s hands in the Department for Education. Surely the time has come really to think, “If this is a failure and if we did wrong 15 years ago, let us look to see whether this is true”.
In his Second Reading speech, the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, who said that teachers in the private sector of education, for whom this Bill is not intended, are very keen to join the GTC. In January this year, research was published that showed that more than 90 per cent of parents wanted the profession to be regulated by a body such as the GTC and not by the Government. During all their speeches in this House and the other place, Ministers such as Mr Gove and the noble Lord, Lord Hill, have talked continuously about trusting the profession and letting teachers use their professional judgment. The amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, says, “Let teachers be the judge”. Let us go to the teachers and ask—as we had thought and hoped that we would—whether they want to be regulated by someone in Whitehall or are big enough to start regulating themselves properly.
Lord Lingfield
My Lords, I will not take you back to Henry VIII, as the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, did. I sympathise enormously with his position. He did a magnificent job in trying to get the General Teaching Council off the ground. The issue of the GTC arose long before the noble Lord did, but rather after Henry VIII, in so much as the publication of Nicholas Nickleby by Dickens in, I think, 1840 so shocked the Victorian mind concerning conditions in schools that moves towards a general teaching council were started almost straight away. As the noble Lord told us, and the noble Lord, Lord Quirk, repeated, the General Medical Council was a great spur to teachers to get moving to get their own profession. What went wrong?
What went wrong was something that went right. In the 1860s and 1870s, as these moves were going on, teachers’ unions and associations started to get their act together. Quite rightly, they were there in order not to protect the customer—which is what a general teaching council and a general medical council are about, by improving professionalism—but to stop teachers being exploited by employers. That is how the unions came together. Unfortunately, these two things became conflated, and they stayed conflated throughout the 20th century. All the moves towards a general teaching council, which were successful in Scotland, died away because of the conflation of ideas on what a union would do and what a general teaching council should do.
I remember being sent by the then Secretary of State, Mark Carlisle, to talk to all the union leaders, because he rather thought that a general teaching council would help to improve professional standards. It was very clear right from the beginning that it was all about how the unions would get certain seats on such a council and what power they would have, and what power they would have to give away.
When it comes to the noble try by the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, to get that together, we find exactly the same thing. As he said at Second Reading:
“Some of the unions that claimed to want a GTC backed off the moment they realised it might involve power-sharing, and the Government of the day were extremely ambivalent”.—[Official Report, 14/6/11; col. 754.]
Governments of every shade have been ambivalent throughout the history of bids for a general teaching council because they were absolutely unwilling to hand the reins of teacher supply to an outfit that would come to be dominated by unions. Today, if I remember correctly, some 36 of the current General Teaching Council’s 64 members have strong union connections. Therefore, the conflation is still there.
Baroness Jolly
My Lords, I am happy to support noble Lords’ Amendment 64 and the thrust of Amendment 64A in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Hughes and Lady Jones. At Second Reading, I went on record to defend the GTC for England. On these Benches, we support the removal of quangos that are unnecessary or whose functions are retained elsewhere. However, that clearly will not happen in this case. We will be left with little more than a list of teachers who are no longer fit to practise. There will be no remnant of a professional registration body.
It is said that a society is measured by how it cares for the vulnerable—the elderly, the disabled, those who are ill and children. A teacher has the future of a child in his or her hands. Nurses, doctors, lawyers and social workers have registration bodies that act independently of the Government. Only last week, I heard of plans by the Nursing and Midwifery Council to include the registration of healthcare workers. What is therefore special about teachers in England that this is denied to them? The elegant Amendment 64 calls for the members of the profession to reject the Government’s proposals, should a majority of them so wish, thus maintaining the status quo. Amendment 64A outlines a professional registration body as it should be through proposed new paragraphs (a) to (e), and it is a proposal of which teachers could be proud.
Consequently, on these Benches we support the intention of Amendments 64 and 64A. The noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, made the point that the GTCE had not worked so far. That is absolutely no reason to dismantle completely something that should exist. It is incumbent on us to leave it there and try again.
Lord Knight of Weymouth
My Lords, I shall be relatively brief; I suspect we shall want to adjourn fairly soon. I was pleased to put my name to the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Puttnam, not just because there is a reasonable presumption that you should always agree with one of the people who proposed you at your introduction but because he is, as ever, right. As we have heard, the amendment suggests that teachers themselves should vote on whether the GTCE should continue. I looked up what the Secretary of State, Michael Gove, said on 2 June last year, when he announced the scrapping of the GTCE. Incidentally, I understand that the people working there, including the chief executive, were at the time as surprised about it as everybody else. Michael Gove said that the Government trust the professionals. This amendment trusts teachers to decide whether they want their professional body to continue.
The other half of the amendment uses the proper threshold. This should appeal to the Government, given that on 26 June, on the “Andrew Marr Show”, the Secretary of State Mr Gove confirmed that Ministers are looking at minimum thresholds in the context of strike ballots. In respect of such a ballot, which I am assuming that the Minister will say he supports, because it is so much in the spirit of where this Government are going, I would argue for the retention of the GTC, but with reform as necessary. Why the GTC? Because, in the end, professionalism is important. Again, I looked up the words of the Secretary of State in November last year in his forward to the White Paper. He said:
“At the heart of our plan is a vision of the teacher as our society’s most valuable asset”.
He went on to say:
“There is no calling more noble, no profession more vital and no service more important than teaching”.
Who could disagree with his words?
The Secretary of State’s actions cause me a little more concern. Given his commitment, if he so believes in them and their professionalism, it is a surprise that teachers have voted overwhelmingly that they have no confidence in this Secretary of State. Perhaps that is because of the reality of his attacks on that professionalism. Look at what he is doing to the pension scheme. When the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, was in his place, he renegotiated the teachers’ pension scheme and made it effective and funded. They see that attack. They see anyone being allowed to teach in free schools, and they see a mum’s army being asked to come in and teach during the strike. If he was Health Secretary, would he have had said the same about nurses, and that mums should go and replace nurses in hospital if there was a nurses’ strike? If he was the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, would he ask them to do the same if there was a firefighters’ strike? I suspect not. I suspect that he would respect their professionalism more than he respects teachers.
Then he wants them arbitrarily to close their professional body. As others have said, would he have closed the General Medical Council if he was Health Secretary? No he would not. He would respect their professionalism and their professional body. The other shocking consequence of the abolition of the General Teaching Council is that the teaching agency will take on only the disciplinary functions of the GTC, as we heard in a speech of my noble friend Lady Jones. Can he confirm this? Does this seriously mean that there will no longer be a register of teachers? If so, this is an extraordinarily reckless move by the Government. I assume that the logic is that it is now up to schools to decide whether anyone can teach and what they are paid, and it is all part of this wonderful freedom that we are now going to give head teachers. Hence the assumption is that everyone is eligible to teach unless they fail a CRB check. I find it incomprehensible as to how that will work—and not just in relation to the relationship with Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland and making sure that people can move freely, as was pointed out by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones. I just do not understand how the teaching agency will exercise its disciplinary functions without a register or how this move will improve teaching standards. I see it only lowering teaching standards. There are opportunities to use a register to raise standards. You could introduce a right to continuous professional development to teachers and, in return, they would have to re-register, so that we could ensure that they continued to receive training and raise their professional standards.
Finally, I repeat the point that this is part of the power grab by the Secretary of State. He will be directly responsible for recruiting, training and disciplining teachers as a result of this Bill. That is a massive change. It makes him very vulnerable to problems, when problems occur, as they inevitably will. But that is his problem.
These are just some of the arguments and reasons why I would reform the GTC to distil its statutory functions down to those coincidentally in Amendment 64A, proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones. We could also think about the composition of the council and how it can be reformed better to represent the customer rather than the producer of education. With reform, I think the GTC can be an effective organisation, but I am happy to be hands-off about this and to leave it to teachers—hence my support for the amendment. If teachers do not want their professional body, they should be trusted to get rid of it.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough
I rise partly to apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, for calling him Lord Lucas earlier. I am sorry for that. I blame my Front Bench for giving me the wrong information. I do not want like the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, to go back to the Middle Ages and end up at 1858 with the General Medical Council or indeed to revisit Nicholas Nickleby and the Dickens novels. I would like to start in 1963 when I became a teacher. It was the proudest day of my life when I got my first teaching post and went into a secondary modern school, Middleton County Secondary Modern boys school in Leeds. I spent 34 years in the teaching profession and I regarded it not only as a profession but as the most noble and decent thing that I have done in my life. If I had my life to run over again, I would do exactly the same thing.
One thing was always missing, however. Those of my friends who, unlike me, did not leave school early to try to play football and fail before going into teaching but who became doctors, lawyers or dentists all had a professional body which not only were they proud of but which decided the standards by which they ran their profession and which they met.
It was interesting that last Thursday we had two of your Lordships, the noble Lords, Lord Ramsbotham and Lord Hill, proudly talk about having to visit the dentist. I do not know whether it was an enjoyable experience for the Minister but it certainly was for the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, who was speaking perfectly well today. I suspect that when they went to the dentist they wanted to know that the dentist was registered as a dentist with the General Dental Council, which was set up by the Dentists Act 1956. If they had any doubt, they could have gone on the internet, looked at the register and confirmed that the dentist was qualified, registered and hopefully competent. They would not have liked to go on to the web and seen a phrase saying, “It might be a dentist. The only information we have is that he has not been barred for misconduct and that at some time in the past he did some training”.
That is what we are talking about. Let us remember that this Bill comes from the White Paper, The Importance of Teaching. If the importance of teaching is to say that we are not even prepared to let you as a profession have your own register to decide the standards by which you operate, the standards by which parents have confidence in you and the standards by which society has confidence in you, then God help us.
I can say to the Minister that the dentist that he visited last week was taught by teachers. They got the training necessary to go off to university and to train as a dentist from the teaching profession as it stood. I say to my noble friend that the GTC was set up by the Teaching and Higher Education Act 1998 and that I sat on that Bill. To be fair to the Minister, the Labour Party at the time was not desperately keen on it either. I can remember proposing an amendment to that Bill which set up the register, because the original proposal—the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, will agree—was to have a GTC but with the Secretary of State having the register. It was through good argument during the passage of that Bill that we persuaded the then Government that essential to a GTC must be a register of teachers who were not only trained and competent. That was the very basis of it.
I support much of what the Minister wants to do in saying to schools that they are going to have greater autonomy, that head teachers will have greater autonomy and that the Government are going to set up all sorts of different organisations, although we may or may not agree with some of them. But to say that the one group of people who cannot have autonomy are the teachers themselves as part of the teaching profession is sad indeed.
As the noble Lord, Lord Knight, mentioned, for the Secretary of State to say in his White Paper that there is,
“no calling more noble, no profession more vital and no service more important”,
than teaching and then, at one stroke of the pen, say, “Ah, but you are not even worthy of having your own teaching council”—my goodness, Minister, you really do need to think again.
Baroness Garden of Frognal
My Lords, the Grand Committee normally finishes at 7.30 pm. We have gone into overtime on this. If any other Lords wish to speak, could they please be very brief to make quite sure that we are not going too far into overtime? My noble friend Lord Lexden has an amendment in this group, but otherwise might we please have a plea for brevity for the convenience of the Committee?
Lord True
My Lords, I note what the noble Baroness said. Briefly, I add to the tributes paid to the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, and others, and the work that they have done. I am slightly surprised that some of my noble friends have supported his amendment. As I read it—and this may be something that the noble Lord wishes to reflect on or help us with when he responds—it slightly has the character of a wrecking amendment, or certainly one leading to a disincentive to take part in a decision on the future of the GTC. The amendment says:
“For such a vote to be valid, 50 per cent of registered teachers must have voted”.
As I read it, the assumption would be that the provision was part of the law of the land. Therefore, in order to frustrate the will of Parliament, as its effect would have been if the Bill had been enacted, those who were unconcerned or perhaps led to boycott the vote could decide the outcome of a ballot such as the noble Lord proposes. Having heard the eloquent statements about the ringing importance of the body in this debate, that is a very negative way of looking at it. I would therefore find it hard to support the amendment under any circumstance. It lacks confidence in the case being put, and is potentially a wrecking amendment in that it sets a threshold that would easily fail to be achieved by dint of a boycott, which is something that we should not wish to encourage.
Lord Lexden
My Lords, having made clear my general support for the concept of the GTC at Second Reading, I will quickly make three points. The noble Lord, Lord Quirk, kindly mentioned the upsurge of support that occurred in independent schools, with which I was then connected as general secretary of the Independent Schools Council. It was marked and reflected many things, but above all it was in response to the quite extraordinary enthusiasm and determination with which the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam went about the initial work of laying the foundations for the GTC.
Secondly, I emphasise on behalf of independent schools, with which I remain informally connected, the importance that they attach to the maintenance of the register in any circumstances which may exist in the future. Finally, I make the simple observation that there will be a GTC in Scotland, a GTC in Wales and a GTC in Northern Ireland. Will it not look very odd not to have a GTC for England?
The Earl of Listowel
My Lords, having for some years taken an interest in the low status of professionals working around children, particularly the low status of social workers, I have always been drawn to the model used in the health service and in the law. Senior practitioners in the health service very much have the responsibility for bringing on new blood, having an impact on the supervision and development of juniors. There is the same approach, particularly in law, with pupillage. It is retrograde to move away from a position where teachers were perhaps beginning to take more control over their continual professional development. The GTC might have allowed for that. As all noble Lords have said, it seems extremely ironic and strange when the Secretary of State says that teachers are the key to improving outcomes above all things and then takes away the professional body for teachers without offering a strong replacement. I look forward to the noble Lord’s response.
Lord Hill of Oareford
My Lords, on the status of the teaching profession, I agree with everything that has been said. The issue that we are debating today is whether professionalism can be captured only in some national regulatory body or whether it can be found in other parts of the wood.
I was very struck at Second Reading when the noble Lord, Lord Knight, spoke of the success of Teach First as being great achievement of the previous Government. He could have spoken about the work of National Leaders of Education or Local Leaders of Education, or the work of the National College, which are all very good examples of professionals working to raise standards and help other professionals. He could have mentioned the growing numbers of academies taking on responsibility for helping other schools in chains or clusters. Those all seem to be aspects of a profession taking responsibility for itself. I may be wrong because I was not around at the time, but I am not sure how prominent the role of the GTCE was in taking forward Teach First, National Leaders or partnership working between schools. Having a national body of that sort does not deliver professionalism, raise standards or deal with important issues about continuous professional development. The Government believe that we need a regulatory system that is credible, effective and provides value for money—I think that there is acceptance for that today.
I do not take any particular pleasure in the ending of the GTCE. I know that it was started with high hopes and that there were many who had wanted it, as we have already heard, from the 19th century. The noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, both today and at Second Reading, spoke eloquently of the practical problems that it faced at its birth—I think that the phrase he used at Second Reading to describe his appointment was “hospital pass”. However, what is clear—I do not want to labour this too much—is its record. Since the GTCE was formed in 2000, nearly two-thirds of local authorities have never referred a case of incompetence to it, despite employers having a statutory duty to do so. Since 2001, the GTCE has concluded only 82 competence hearings and struck off 15 teachers for incompetence. The majority of our teachers, we know, are highly competent professionals, and we would not question that, but it seems unlikely that in the whole 10 years there have been only 15 incompetent teachers.
One fact that struck me as evidence of the attitude of teachers towards the GTCE was the point raised by my noble friend Lord Lingfield; that is, of the modest £36.50 annual registration fee, the taxpayer has to subsidise £33. That does not seem to be a very powerful sign of a profession that feels strongly about the role that the GTCE performs.
The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, made reference the views of the NASUWT. I recognise that its views can change over time, and they clearly did, because the general secretary of the NASUWT has said:
“I have frequently said that if the GTCE was abolished tomorrow few would notice and even less would care. I have absolutely no doubt that the Secretary of State’s decision will be warmly welcomed by teachers across the country”.
The key question is that posed by the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam; namely, what should replace the GTCE if one accepts that it has not delivered in the way that he and others had hoped at its beginning?
Perhaps I may set out what we are proposing. It is, in essence, the following. A smaller, more cost-effective body, the teaching agency, would deal only with matters of misconduct. Hearings would be heard by a panel made up of representatives of the profession and independent lay people, with a right of appeal, as now, to the High Court.
Issues of incompetence would be dealt with separately. I have always thought that the GTC’s current sanction for incompetence was a surprisingly nuclear option. Rather than a slow, cumbersome process that led painfully to a national process and ultimately—for 15 teachers—to barring from the profession, we think it would be better to have a much more flexible, local system whereby issues are resolved more quickly. We can all think of people who have not made a go of it with one employer, but who flourished somewhere else. We are therefore keen to move to a system with all the same protections in employment legislation whereby employers can exercise judgment, address problems more swiftly, and help teachers to improve.
We have been carrying out a review of the professional standards for teachers, which will give employers clearer national benchmarks for performance and conduct. We are currently consulting on simplified arrangements for performance management and tackling poor capability. That will streamline the system and remove the current duplication that employers have found is a barrier to tackling performance issues. We will also strengthen the training and support available to school leaders, so that head teachers and aspiring heads are better prepared for their management role through a revised national professional qualification for headship. We think that these measures will leave the powers to deal with teacher incompetence in a more appropriate place and help head teachers to exercise those powers more effectively than the current regulatory system does.
So far as conduct is concerned, none of this is to say that we think there is no role for a national regulator. On the contrary, we are clear that where teachers are guilty of serious misconduct, they should be referred to the national regulator for potential barring from the profession. That mechanism is cumbersome for head teachers and the regulator, because every case where a teacher is sacked for misconduct must be referred, even though the vast majority of these cases do not warrant barring. The new arrangements will be more effective by giving employers discretion, while still ensuring that the most serious cases are referred. Where cases are referred to the regulator, the Bill gives the Secretary of State a new power to make interim prohibition orders. This power was always intended for use in the very rare cases where it is in the public interest to bar an individual from teaching while an investigation is under way. Amendments 64AA, 65A 65B and 65C have been tabled by the Government in response to your Lordships’ Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee’s recommendations that the safeguard for this power be put in the Bill.
Noble Lords have asked for reassurance that the element of discretion that we are introducing will not lead to a weaker and less consistent system. It is of course important that the new system protects pupils and maintains confidence in the teaching profession. Let me say straightaway that the proposals make no change to the duty on all schools to refer any cases of serious misconduct relating to children to the Independent Safeguarding Authority.
I should also draw your Lordships’ attention to the fact that the Bill provides for referrals to the Secretary of State from members of the public. Where a parent or other member of a community disagrees with the judgment of a head teacher who has not referred a teacher dismissed for serious misconduct, they may make the referral themselves. This provides a further safeguard that teachers in the most serious cases will not in some way slip through the net.
I turn to the important issue of the Register of Teachers, which a number of noble Lords raised, including the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, my noble friend Lady Jolly, the noble Lord, Lord Knight, and my noble friend Lord Willis of Knaresborough. The Government said in another place that we would consider the arguments in favour of making available data about teacher qualifications. We have listened to what the head teachers’ unions have said—that point was raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch. I have also listened to the case eloquently made today by noble Lords, particularly by my noble friend Lord Willis of Knaresborough. It is right to say that the teaching agency will maintain a database of teachers who have attained qualified teacher status and who have passed their induction period. That seems to be an eminently sensible point and we will take it on board. That database will be available online to employers from April 2012.
Some amendments concerning surveys and statistics—CPD and so on—were spoken to by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch. The Government will continue to commission research and to support the effective management, assessment, planning and development of the teaching profession. We are in the process of considering what the data and research needs of the new teaching agency and the department will be.
The CPD part of the GTCs’ work is currently shared with the TDA, and in future work on CPD will form part of the remit of the new teaching agency. However, as I have already said, over time we would tend to see more and more of that work being delivered by schools.
With regard to some of the more technical issues, the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, raised the question of information-sharing between the GTCs in the devolved Administrations. Officials in the department recently met their counterparts and the GTCs from Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland to discuss this issue. We have an agreed approach to sharing information between the four nations and will continue to meet regularly to discuss that.
On cash reserves, I agree with the noble Baroness that, if money was originally paid to the GTCE for the benefit of teachers and some of that money is still available, it should continue to be used for a similar purpose. If there were any cash reserves, we would use them for the benefit of teachers and the teaching profession—for example, to contribute to the continuing administration of the regulatory function, which a large proportion of the GTCE’s fees was spent on.
I recognise that my answer is disappointing to the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam. I never like to disappoint the noble Lord, for whom I have great respect. I hope that what I have been able to say about the register will provide some reassurance to noble Lords who I know were concerned and that, taken together, my response will enable the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Puttnam
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hill. I certainly do not want to detain the Committee but wish to make two points. I was very impressed by what the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, said and was very impressed at Second Reading by the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Lexden. I should like to touch on those for one second. As both of them know, I am conscious of the fact that the job I took on was very much a question of standing on the shoulders of giants. I had read a lot about but, sadly, never met Sir Alec Clegg, and I knew John Tomlinson very well. These were great men. They were noble and decent, and my job was to try to deliver something of their vision. I fought hard and successfully, and I think that it was a good move to bring the independent schools on to the GMC. I could not have had two more heroic figures than Ian Beer and Elizabeth Diggory to support me, and I feel very strongly that, were they both here today, they would not wish to throw in the towel at this point.
I also want to touch on Scotland, which both noble Lords mentioned. I spent a fair amount of time in Scotland and took a lot of advice from the then chairman of the Scottish GTC. He said, “Give it time, laddie. Give it time”. He was right. We needed to give it time but we have not given it sufficient time. I should possibly have listened to him even more. No one is pretending that Scots unionists are any person’s pushover; they have intense pride in the profession. My amendment is simply intended to challenge the English teaching profession to show similar pride, similar determination and a similar commitment to getting their act together. It requires them to create something of which they and we can be proud, and we can be very proud that we protected it when it was under pressure. For the moment, I am happy to beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Hill of Oareford
Lord Hill of Oareford
“Interim prohibition orders2A (1) Regulations under paragraph 1 may make provision for the Secretary of State to make an interim prohibition order, pending the Secretary of State’s final decision under section 141B(2).
(2) Regulations about interim prohibition orders must provide that an interim prohibition order may be made only if the Secretary of State considers that it is necessary in the public interest to do so.
(3) Regulations about interim prohibition orders must provide that the Secretary of State must review an interim prohibition order—
(a) within six months of the order being made, and(b) within each subsequent six month period,if the person to whom the order relates makes an application to the Secretary of State for such a review.”
Lord Hill of Oareford
My Lords, this may be a convenient moment for the Committee to adjourn until Wednesday at 3.45 pm.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Haskel)
My Lords, the Committee stands adjourned until Wednesday at 3.45 pm.
House of Lords
Lord Hanningfield
The Lord Speaker (Baroness Hayman)
My Lords, I have to inform the House that the Clerk of the Parliaments has received notification from the court manager at the Maidstone Combined Court Centre informing him that Lord Hanningfield was sentenced on 1 July to a term of 9 months' imprisonment.
NHS: University Health Centres
(13 years, 4 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Gardner of Parkes
To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether NHS university health centres are being disadvantaged by the weighting of the registered list size and the introduction of prevalence quotas for the quality and outcomes framework.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health (Earl Howe)
My Lords, no. Payments to practices are based on an agreed calculation of health need and on equitable funding. The funding formula recognises patient numbers, with adjustments for the characteristics of the patient population and practice circumstances. The disease prevalence formula in the quality and outcomes framework provides fair rewards to all practices, but with stronger incentives for them to identify and treat patients with the greatest health need.
Baroness Gardner of Parkes
My Lords, I thank the Minister for that Answer, but is he aware that, although some practices in university centres receive support from the university, others are linked to GP practices which run services as a separate contract? Many of those have looked into the finances and found that it is so disadvantageous to them that they are not considering renewing or extending their contracts to supply what I consider to be necessary services. What will the Minister do?
Earl Howe
My Lords, naturally, before preparing myself for this Question, I looked carefully into the way in which university practices are funded. The advice I received is that there is no reason to be concerned on that front. Many university GP practices are funded quite generously. Where they can lose out is over the quality and outcomes framework, which is targeted mainly at elderly patients with long-term chronic conditions, so it is not surprising that university campus practices do not earn the extra money that they could. Nevertheless, we believe that there is no case for making an exception for university practices in the way that they are funded.
Baroness Thornton
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness on getting her head around the system of weighting for payments to GPs for their patients. It contains such gems as,
“An overall weighted listsize for the PCO is generated as the sum of Practice Weighted Listsizes for all Practices in the PCO, and this PCO Weighted Listsize is used together with the PCO Weighted Population”.
I will not go on, but I congratulate the noble Baroness. Given the mental health problems that students often face, is the Minister confident that the system of weighting takes proper account of that medical issue, which is certainly more prevalent than the chronic conditions that he mentioned in a community general practice?
Earl Howe
My Lords, the characteristics of each GP practice will naturally vary according to the patient population. Although a practice situated on a university campus may have higher numbers of patients who require mental health advice and support, there may well be fewer patients in need of other services. I am not aware that there is a particular issue of underfunding of university practices in relation to the mental health burden. As the noble Baroness will know, the QOF was adjusted in 2008 with a two-year time delay, so university practices have had a chance to adjust and prepare for the change.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
Are university health centres gearing up to deal with cases of anxiety and depression among students at English universities who wish to go to Scottish universities for a further degree and who find that they will have to pay the full fees, unlike students from other countries in Europe? Is that not a disgraceful, discriminatory proposal by the Scottish Government? Can this Parliament not find a way of outlawing such discrimination?
Lord Patel
Can the Minister say what assessment has been made of the impact of the QOF on the outcomes for patients, whether university patients or otherwise?
Earl Howe
My Lords, there is no doubt that the QOF had many beneficial effects when it first began, and we recognise those. However, there is a general feeling that it needs to evolve and refocus itself more on those things for which it was originally intended, which were to promote quality and better outcomes in patient care.
Baroness Jolly
My Lords, student health does not quite fit the national pattern. Who is currently responsible for public health campaigns within the student body and, with the advent of clinical commissioning groups, is their future assured?
Earl Howe
My Lords, my noble friend will know that public health campaigns and health improvement efforts are currently being commissioned and directed by primary care trusts. That will continue until such time as local authorities take responsibility locally for the public health endeavour.
Lord Richard
My Lords, is the noble Earl aware that very few people in the House understood the Question and, with great respect, even fewer people understood the Answer? Does he not think that his department has an obligation to put out policies that are at least comprehensible to the people whom they are meant to affect?
Earl Howe
I can only apologise to the noble Lord, but he is right that it is a very complex topic. The simplest way in which I can explain the issue around the QOF, which is an element of the way in which GP practices are remunerated, is to say that before we had a situation where practices with large lists but little recordings of those conditions which QOF is aiming at, such as university practices, were receiving relatively higher reward than practices with smaller lists but higher levels of chronic disease and, as a result of the changes, the true prevalence is being used to weight the payments for all practices. The overall effect is to redistribute the total resource for the QOF among GP practices in a much fairer way.
Sri Lanka
(13 years, 4 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to support calls for an international inquiry into events in Sri Lanka during 2009.
The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Lord Howell of Guildford)
My Lords, since the end of the military conflict, the United Kingdom and other members of the international community have consistently called for an independent, thorough and credible investigation into the allegations that war crimes were committed by both sides. We expect to see progress from the Sri Lankan Government by the end of the year. If there is no response, we will support the international community in considering the options available.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his response. Does he agree that the report of 40,000 civilians killed in the last month of the war and reports of other atrocities indicate that the position of the Sri Lankan Government is just not tenable and that these allegations need to be investigated fully and, if proven, the perpetrators brought to justice?
Lord Howell of Guildford
I certainly agree that hideous atrocities and crimes were committed. The UN panel report is very revealing, as are other reports. It is the view not just of the United Kingdom but, I think, of the whole international community that there is an essential need for the Sri Lankan Government and others to be open and prepared to examine the past in an open and unbiased way in order to find at least a basis on which better unity can be created in the future. The noble Lord is absolutely right that to try and bury these things in the past will lead to more suspicion and difficulty, and that is not the way forward.
Lord Alderdice
My Lords, the previous Government are to be commended on appointing the right honourable Paul Murphy and Mr Chris McCabe, a former Northern Ireland Office official. It is hard to imagine a more diplomatic, courteous or experienced team. Despite that, President Rajapaksa and his Government showed no interest in engaging with them. Can my noble friend tell the House whether there is any improvement in relations between the Government of Sri Lanka and Her Majesty’s Government? If not, is it likely that we will be able to achieve any engagement and understanding, either directly or through Commonwealth colleagues, or will we have to resort to pressure from the international community, including the United Nations? How will we deliver the kind of inquiry that the noble Lord mentioned earlier in his reply?
Lord Howell of Guildford
We all very much hope that it will not go that way and that there will be an improvement in relations, which have not been good thanks to an attitude which seems determined to try to put up a wall, as it were, rather than embrace the opportunity that the UN panel report offers. Clearly we do need a clear inquiry. The so-called Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission is at work and maybe it will be able to contribute to more openness. However, the pattern is not good, and I would be misleading my noble friend if I said that there had been much improvement recently; there has not.
Lord Knight of Weymouth
My Lords, I welcome what the Minister said about wanting substantial progress by the end of the year. If substantial progress has not been made, what is Her Majesty’s Government’s position on the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting taking place in Sri Lanka in 2013? Is the Minister in conversation with other Commonwealth members about whether that should then take place?
Lord Howell of Guildford
Of course, this is a matter for discussion among Commonwealth members because it will come up for decision at the Heads of Government Meeting 2011 in Perth at the end of October. It is a concern. Our aim is to see that the Sri Lankan Government in Colombo live up to and reinforce the ideals and shared values of the Commonwealth and therefore prepare themselves for being a suitable host for the CHOGM in 2013. There is a long way to go, but that is what we are going to work for.
Lord Tebbit
My Lords, does my noble friend not agree that the Government have no jurisdiction over Sri Lanka, that there are many awful things that happen all over the world over which we have no jurisdiction, and that it might be more appropriate if Her Majesty’s Government dealt more effectively with the things that are going wrong within their jurisdiction rather than going on endlessly—as do other noble Lords—about matters that are outside the Government’s jurisdiction?
Lord Howell of Guildford
I see the theoretical and perfect logic of what my noble friend is saying, but the facts are the facts, and the facts are that there are large populations in London and elsewhere in this country that are intimately and politically concerned with this issue. If it goes badly wrong, it affects us all in our domestic arrangement as well. To debate whether it is inside or outside the jurisdiction is fine in theory but in practice, if that wonderful country of Sri Lanka continues to be deeply divided and is not able to heal the wounds of the past, that will directly affect us and our interests in a very precise way, regardless of whether we are juridically in charge or not.
Lord Liddle
Does the Minister agree that the recent decision of the UN Human Rights Council to block the recommendation of its commissioner to press for an international inquiry into Sri Lanka was disappointing if not shameful? Does he agree that we have a problem when so many of the world's most powerful emerging nations—here I am in contradiction to the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit—put protection of the principle of sovereignty above any state's duty to protect its citizens; and that we in the United Kingdom should use whatever influence we have as a nation to persuade these nations that sovereignty is not absolute and that all countries of the world share a common obligation of humanity to uphold human rights?
Lord Howell of Guildford
Those are very splendid sentiments with which I could not possibly disagree. There are a few practical issues to resolve before we can rise to those heights, but I fully appreciate what the noble Lord magnificently aspires to. The decision of the UN human rights commission was disappointing. The commission is not always able to meet the aspirations of those of us throughout the world who are concerned with human rights and the advance of civilisation.
Health: Stroke Care
(13 years, 4 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Wheeler
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what actions they will take to address geographic variations in stroke care identified by the Royal College of Physicians and detailed in the National Stroke Audit Report 2010.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health (Earl Howe)
My Lords, the 2010 audit shows ongoing improvements in stroke care in England. To achieve the high-quality care described in the national stroke strategy and the NICE quality standard, the NHS is continuing to implement the accelerating stroke improvement programme. This aims to go further and faster in delivering improvements in stroke care across England.
Baroness Wheeler
I thank the Minister for his response and his recognition of the tremendous progress that has been made in the past three years with the national stroke strategy. I am sure that he agrees that progress has been most marked where strategic health authorities have provided strong leadership to drive forward strategy. With their abolition, how will the new system, through the subnational elements of the NHS commissioning board—the clinical senates—help facilitate the necessary improvements, and where will accountability lie? Also, I am concerned that the future of the stroke strategy team at the Department of Health seems to be uncertain. I have heard that the national clinical director for strokes will shortly stand down. Will the Minister confirm this and explain, if that is so, who will be responsible for providing strong leadership on stroke improvements at national level both in the short term and under the proposed new system?
Earl Howe
My Lords, clinical leadership is at the heart of our reform plans for the NHS, both at local and national levels. As regards the national director, our officials are currently considering how best to reflect that leadership at national level as part of the work being done to develop the new NHS commissioning board. I say to the noble Baroness that I see the NHS reforms as presenting an opportunity for much stronger partnership working between primary care commissioners and secondary care specialists. The NHS outcomes framework will enable us to track the overall progress of the NHS in delivering improved outcomes, and commissioners and providers will be supported by advice from the stroke networks under the auspices of the board. Therefore, we will have the opportunity in future to drive consistency and quality throughout stroke care in England.
Lord Wigley
My Lords, does the Minister accept that, in addition to the availability of facilities in all geographical areas, the other essential ingredient in getting a successful outcome is the level of knowledge that individuals have of the symptoms that might indicate that a stroke is about to happen? What initiatives have the Government in mind to improve public understanding and education in that matter?
Earl Howe
The noble Lord is absolutely right. I am sure that he will know of the FAST campaign, which stands for face, arm, speech and time to call 999, as the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, used to tell us. We conducted a renewal of that campaign in March. We believe that it is an extremely important way of raising public awareness of the urgency of the situation. We will keep that programme firmly under our eye and renew it as we feel necessary.
The Lord Bishop of Blackburn
My Lords, it is well reported that the incidence of stroke and TIA in the north-west is higher than the national average. It is sad to note that, in my diocese of Blackburn, none of the hospitals in Lancashire manages to come into the best 25 per cent. I am very satisfied with the noble Earl’s Answer about the improvement that has taken place, but can he ensure that there are suitable specialists in place to provide a comprehensive stroke service throughout the country?
Earl Howe
The right reverend Prelate is quite correct to point out that there is variation in the country, as one would expect, not least in the area of rehabilitation after a stroke. The most encouraging progress we have seen throughout the country has been on acute stroke care, but we now have work to do on the rehabilitation side. As it happens, I was in the north-west some weeks ago and saw some encouraging work going on in the area of telecare, whereby stroke physicians can assess and diagnose a patient remotely, sometimes from their own living room. This will make an enormous difference, particularly where there are distances to travel for stroke specialists. I believe we should encourage those initiatives where we can.
Lord Smith of Clifton
My Lords, with regard to stroke in young people, what specific policies is the Minister’s department pursuing, particularly bearing in mind that most strokes in young people are caused by sickle cell disease?
Earl Howe
My noble friend makes an extremely important point about strokes in young people. It is of course true that, thankfully, fewer young people suffer these strokes, but he is right that sickle cell presents a warning sign. There are clear guidelines for ambulance crews and doctors more generally relating to those who have sickle cell disease. We had a debate a while ago on this topic in which the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, made some extremely important points which we continue to bear in mind.
Lord Winston
My Lords, various reports show that the mortality for stroke can be as high as 30 per cent. Sadly, in the United Kingdom mortality is higher than almost anywhere else in Europe, although there is great geographical variation all over the world. One of the issues that Professor Peter Rothwell, of the University of Oxford, has pointed out is that speed is the essence of success. Therefore, it is not merely a question of informing patients, but of making certain that the right availability is present in our hospitals. If we do that we can reduce the risk of a further stroke by 80 per cent and probably, as he says, reduce the cost to the National Health Service in primary care by somewhere between £100 million and £200 million annually. Would the Minister be kind enough to explain how that will work in the future of the health service?
Earl Howe
My Lords, the noble Lord is quite right in all that he says. I would just point out that the official statistics are rather historic and it is important that we take stock when the revised figures are before us in some months’ time. As regards how best practice will be driven when the health service reforms are in place, I would repeat my earlier comments about the ability of the NHS commissioning board to drive forward higher quality, informed by the new quality standard produced by NICE. More particularly I think we can do a lot through the tariff. At the moment, best practice tariffs are starting to play a role in encouraging and driving best practice at hospital level.
Baroness Thornton
My Lords, tomorrow is the 63rd birthday of the NHS. Would the Government give the NHS the birthday present of eliminating local differences in stroke services by implementing the recommendations in the stroke strategy? In that way, when we all break into song next year when the NHS is 64 years old, we will actually have achieved something very important.
Earl Howe
It is very appropriate that the noble Baroness should remind the House of the NHS’s 63rd birthday. I can think of few better presents than that which the noble Baroness has outlined. I can say only that the efforts within my department, and indeed throughout the NHS, continue unabated to ensure that stroke patients are treated to the highest possible standards and that unacceptable variations are eliminated.
Olympic Games 2012: Tickets
Baroness Garden of Frognal
My Lords, 2.2 million Olympic tickets—that is, one quarter of the total—are allocated separately from the UK public application process. Within that, 12 per cent are for purchase by the 205 national Olympic committees, 8 per cent are for purchase by sponsors and stakeholders—global and domestic—and 5 per cent are for purchase by the International Olympic Committee, international federations and other global sports bodies, international broadcast rights holders and prestige ticketing partners. This reflects the host city agreement signed with the IOC in 2005.
Lord Dubs
My Lords, in this instance, the Minister’s Answer makes the whole thing sound even worse than I thought. She will be aware that there is an enormous sense of unfairness among people in this country about the way the tickets have been allocated. Will she confirm that the DCMS is getting 8,815 tickets? I put it to her that the best way of allocating tickets would have been to give every applicant two tickets before multiple applications were dealt with?
Baroness Garden of Frognal
My Lords, the government allocation is 8,815 tickets, which is 0.1 per cent of the tickets available. I will not go into the detail of how that breaks down at the moment. On the allocation of the tickets, no one had ever before attempted to sell 3 million tickets at one go. Trying to weight applications would have added a layer of complexity which would have made the whole thing almost impossible. LOCOG had no way of knowing how many applications would come in, so it followed other rules rather than the weighting one.
Lord Moynihan
My Lords, while all of us associated with the London Games have, I believe, the humility to recognise that public expectation setting regarding tickets was unduly high and that lessons can be learnt, would the Minister nevertheless agree that it is welcome news that the British Olympic Association has secured the right to buy two tickets for every living British Olympian for their own sport and two further tickets for other sports and that many volunteers will benefit from the decision of Olympic governing bodies of sport to use a substantial part of their allocations for athletes, families, friends, supporters and, above, all volunteers?
Baroness Garden of Frognal
I entirely agree with my noble friend. It is good that the tickets are being spread as widely as they are and that former Olympians have been included in that. Of course, we recognise the disappointment for those who did not get tickets, but there will be plenty of other activities going on over Olympic week, and the Paralympic tickets have yet to come on stream. We hope that everybody will be able to participate.
Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale
My Lords, particular concerns have been expressed about these Games in relation to the immediate families of the participating sports men and women. I have personal experience of the distress that this causes to the mothers and fathers of active Olympians from the UK who, having perhaps sacrificed an incredible amount in their lifetimes to ensure that their son’s or daughter’s ambitions can be realised, cannot then watch them participate. Would the Government consider encouraging public bodies and corporate sponsors, which have so many tickets, to share some of their allocation with those immediate families to ensure that they have the benefit of seeing the result of all those years of sacrifice?
Baroness Garden of Frognal
Indeed, I entirely agree with the noble Lord’s idea, which sounds an excellent system for those who have not already managed to get tickets through another method. Having families and friends around is of key importance to people who have done so much hard work to try to get themselves to Olympic standard.
Lord Glentoran
My Lords, I have just read a leading article in the Sunday press which makes it clear that, from the leader writer’s point of view, never have tickets for an Olympic Games been spread and given out so well and never has an Olympic Games had all the tickets sold out a year in advance. Nor could the journalist could remember a more democratic process for delivering tickets to the Olympic Games and all the different sports in any recent Games. I believe that the way that LOCOG has set about this this year is absolutely super. I hope the Minister agrees and will tell me that she has read the article. If she has not, I hope she will.
Baroness Garden of Frognal
My Lords, I have read the article. I agree that Britain should be proud of what LOCOG has done with ticketing.
Baroness Doocey
My Lords, 1 million fans applied for tickets and were disappointed that they failed to get them. At the same time, local authorities have each had 100 tickets for the 100 metres final, the diving finals, the cycling finals, and the opening address. Does the Minister agree that this surely goes against the spirit of Olympic fairness?
Baroness Garden of Frognal
My Lords, there have been allocations to local authorities, certainly to those surrounding the Games and those that have been most involved with them. The allocation of the tickets has been done in the fairest way possible given the numbers and the interest in them. With regard to the opening ceremony, the Government actually have 212 tickets, which out of a capacity of 80,000 is probably not too extravagant.
Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean
My Lords, the noble Baroness was kind enough to say that she thought my noble friend’s idea about trying to ensure that parents are able to see their children compete was a good one. Can she assure the House that Ministers will now take active steps to do everything they can to ensure that my noble friend’s idea is actually acted upon—not just a good idea but one that Ministers will carry forward?
Baroness Garden of Frognal
My Lords, Ministers are not actually involved with the allocation of tickets, which is a matter for LOCOG. All we can do is advise that there are some people who perhaps are more worthy of tickets than others, but beyond that we have to leave it to LOCOG to do the allocations.
Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill
(13 years, 4 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
16:03 - Division on Amendment 34A - Ayes: 165 / Noes: 219 - Amendment 34A disagreed.
Lord Harris of Haringey
The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (Lord Strathclyde)
My Lords, before the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, has the opportunity to move his manuscript Amendment 15A, I need to give the House some procedural advice as Leader of the House—it is a very rare occurrence but one that I need to do. I have to inform the House that the Clerk of Public Bills has written to advise me that this amendment is inadmissible and that the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, has tabled it against the advice of the clerks. Paragraph 8.56 of the Companion provides that in such rare circumstances it is for me to ask the House to endorse the opinion of the Public Bill Office, and I readily do so.
I suspect that most Members of the House will not have had an opportunity to consider the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Harris. It reads:
“Page 3, line 14, at beginning insert ‘Subject to section 159(2A)’”.
The Public Bill Office advises me and the House that the amendment is about commencement, not the subject of the clause itself—namely, the Mayor of London’s Office for Policing and Crime. The reason the noble Lord, Lord Harris, may have been tempted to attempt this procedural manoeuvre is clear: he is seeking to advance a vote on the commencement of the London provisions of this Bill. That is a matter of political tactics, but tactics, or the policy, are not why I rise to address the House this afternoon. I wish only to deal with a matter of procedure.
The clerks have advised that this amendment is inadmissible under the Companion and I invite the House not to allow the noble Lord, Lord Harris, to move his manuscript Amendment 15A. The difficulty is of course compounded because the amendment is a manuscript amendment. The Companion also provides that,
“the disadvantages and inconvenience attaching to the moving of manuscript amendments on Report are even greater than at Committee stage”.
I have to agree that this is not how we should go about our business. In short, the PBO has advised the House that this first amendment is inadmissible and I invite the House to agree. However, I reassure the House and the noble Lord that he will have every opportunity to speak to the issue he wishes to raise in the proper place when Clause 159 is debated. I therefore invite the noble Lord, Lord Harris, not to move his amendment. If he chooses to do so, and the Companion does not prevent him doing so, the amendment is in the hands of the House.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, if it is in order, I would like to respond to what the Leader of the House has said. It is very difficult sometimes to determine why particular amendments are moved in a particular way and at a particular time. There were a number of reasons for my seeking the indulgence of the House to put forward this manuscript amendment at this time. The first is the question of relevance. There is a specific proposal at the moment that the implementation and creation of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime should proceed in advance of that for the rest of the country and should take place in October 2011, rather than October 2012. Therefore, my manuscript amendment is designed to make clear that preparations, some of which will be costly, should not go forward at this time.
The second reason I felt it necessary to bring forward the amendment in this way was that I had anticipated that there would be an amendment, either from the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, who moved such an amendment in Committee, or from the Government, about the transitional arrangements for the introduction of the Mayor’s Office, and, indeed, of the offices for policing and crime commissioners. A detailed look over the weekend made it clear that such transitional details were not being put before the House and therefore I thought that it was important that we have this opportunity.
The final reason for putting it before the House is that there are, of course, important security issues associated with this. I am slightly bemused about where we are today because I also tabled an amendment on Friday which does not appear either in the list that we received this morning of amendments supplementary to the Second Marshalled List, nor as a manuscript amendment. It seems to have gone into some void in the Public Bill Office, but it, too, was relevant to this point and might have assisted the House had we had it before us. It was also clear from my manuscript amendment that this related to an amendment later on the agenda in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey. That, I know—and, of course, she will speak for herself should we get to the point of debating this amendment—is about security of this country during the Olympics period and whether or not the disruption that will be caused in administrative arrangements is sensible at that time.
Those are my reasons for putting forward this amendment and I hope that the House will agree that they are valid reasons, notwithstanding the inconvenience that I am sure it puts the House to. No doubt the noble Lord will wish to respond and I hope that I will then be able to move my amendment.
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, I do not think that there is any quarrel about whether or not these issues can be debated. The decision of the clerks is about where the debate should take place. Perhaps I may read out the advice about the grounds of inadmissibility, which is very clear and simple. In the view of the Public Bill Office the manuscript amendment is not admissible on the grounds that it is not relevant to the clause to which it is tabled. That is the first rule under paragraph 8.59 on page 132 of the Companion.
The manuscript amendment would make Clause 4,
“Subject to section 159(2A)”,
as set out in Amendment 310 to Clause 159, which would affect the commencement of Chapters 1 to 6 of Part 1. In the view of the clerks, this amendment is not relevant to Clause 4 as it affects commencement, which is the subject of Clause 159. In addition, Amendment 310 covers Clauses 1 to 79, several of which have already been debated.
My purpose is simply to bring to the attention of the House the strongest possible and clearest advice of the clerks, which is that this is inadmissible. In parenthesis, I can also tell the noble Lord that a transitional government amendment will be tabled today relating to Schedule 15. It will be debated in its proper place next week. It is up to the House and the noble Lord to decide what he wishes to do with his amendment but the advice from the clerks, and therefore the advice that I give as Leader of the House, is completely clear.
Lord Harris of Haringey
I am grateful to the noble Lord the Leader of the House for that further clarification. I am grateful also to hear that an amendment on transition is being tabled today. I say, in parenthesis, as was the noble Lord’s point, that this demonstrates the problems we have had with this Bill; that is, the late tabling of government amendments and the problems that we have in terms of determining exactly the intention of the Government in terms of various clauses, which is one of the problems that we all face. No doubt we will hear again an apology from the noble Baroness, Lady Browning, about the problems that the Home Office have faced and we will accept it with the usual good grace.
However, the noble Lord has said that this amendment, in the view of the clerks, is irrelevant to where it is placed. It is placed after the line, which states:
“There is to be a body with the name ‘The Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime’ for the metropolitan police district”.
The amendment would insert,
“Subject to section 159(2A)”.
The amendment is tabled there because currently detailed work is going on about the early implementation and the introduction of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime in the London area. This is in advance of the Bill receiving Royal Assent, with a view to trying to get the implementation from October or shortly thereafter. That is why it is relevant to the place it is in and why I moved it in respect of this line in Chapter 2. It is not irrelevant to that point, which is why I moved it. The clerks may not see the relevance. Perhaps because of the hurried telephone calls that I had while inspecting security arrangements at Heathrow airport this morning, we did not have an opportunity to discuss it in detail. The amendment is about ensuring that we do not press ahead in advance of legislative authority.
May I move the amendment?
Lord Strathclyde
Before the noble Lord continues, there is no point in having this debate on whether the amendment is admissible. The advice from the clerks is clear. Now the House will need to take a view as to whether the noble Lord should continue.
The Lord Speaker (Baroness Hayman)
Perhaps I may be of assistance to the House. At the moment, no other Motion is before the House and the noble Lord’s amendment has been called. Normal procedure would be for him to move his amendment.
Lord Richard
Perhaps the Leader of the House could help me. From the muttering around the House, it would seem that there is a feeling that perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Harris, should not move his amendment in view of the clear indications given by the clerks. However, I am not clear about what the procedure should be now. Should there be a Motion before the House as to whether the amendment should be moved, on which, if necessary, the House can divide? How does it work? I never came across this particular type of issue when I was Leader of the Opposition or Leader of the House, or since. I should be grateful if the noble Lord could enlighten me.
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Richard, and indeed to the Lord Speaker.
It is true that there is a lacuna in the procedure and when I discovered this about half an hour ago I suggested that the Procedure Committee should look at it. In the normal course of events, there is an underlying assumption in the Companion that the mover of the manuscript amendment would feel so moved as to not move the amendment. However, as I said earlier, under the terms of self-regulation the amendment is ultimately in the hands of the House. There is no Motion before the House. There is the possibility of a closure Motion or indeed the Motion that the noble Lord be no longer heard. Both are quite heavy-handed. I dare say that if the noble Lord insisted on moving his amendment the House would take a pretty dim view of it, and if he tried to convince the House of the merits of his case I suspect he would not succeed.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton
My Lords, can the Leader of the House advise me? I wish to vote in support of my noble friend’s amendment but I am not clear, on the advice of the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, the Leader of the House, whether any subsequent Division would be about the procedure or the content of the amendment. If it is about the procedure, surely the Lord Speaker has indicated that the Motion before the House is the amendment, and therefore because I support the amendment I want to support it in a Division. However, I take seriously the advice that has been given, so I am sure the Leader of the House can advise me, even though he might not approve of my voting intentions.
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, the proper advice I would give the noble Baroness, who I know is a stickler for such things, is to advise her noble friend not to move the amendment this afternoon, given the very clear advice of the clerks, and to speak to his amendment when it comes up in the proper place later on Report.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, I hope I have been of service to the House in identifying a lacuna in the Standing Orders. I hope therefore that this will be an opportunity for us to look in detail at some of these difficult procedures. All I was trying to do was to avoid unnecessary duplicate expenditure in advance of legislative authority and to enable the House to debate the security of the nation. However, the Leader of the House has three times at least reiterated the firm advice of the clerks on this point, and I would be foolish to persist beyond that. I assume, however, if I wished to bring forward this self-same amendment at Third Reading there would now be no objection to me so doing.
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, I would have no objection so long as the amendment at Third Reading were written according to the rules.
Lord Harris of Haringey
“(3) There is to be a Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime for the metropolitan police district.
(4) The Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime is to be elected, and hold office, in accordance with Chapter 6.
(4A) The person who has been given the title of deputy mayor and particular responsibility for policing and crime by the Mayor of London at the time this section is brought into effect is to be the occupant for the time being of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime.”
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, fractionally earlier than I had anticipated, I move Amendment 16, which is in my name. It is a series of amendments—I apologise to the House for their complexity but I have done my best to try to make them as clear as possible—that would enable the people of London at the same time as they elect—
Baroness Anelay of St Johns
My Lords, please leave the Chamber quietly. The noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, has waited a long time for this moment. I know we want to listen to him.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, I waited a long time to move the previous amendment rather than this one. I had anticipated an opportunity during the debate to prepare myself more thoroughly for Amendment 16.
The purpose of this amendment is to enable Londoners to vote, on the same day on which they would elect the Mayor of London, to elect the deputy mayor for policing and crime. The Government have told us that the Bill is about the importance of transparency and more effective clarity about who is responsible for policing. They have said, for everywhere outside London, that there is an advantage to there being direct elections for the person who has responsibility for the governance and oversight of policing. For London, though, they have proposed a completely different construction. There would be no direct election; the Mayor of London would choose an individual to become the deputy mayor, who would have responsibility for policing and crime.
The Government have helpfully tabled some amendments that indicate that in the event of that person not being an elected Member of the London Assembly, there would be a confirmation hearing and the Assembly could veto that appointment by a two-thirds majority. In the event of that person being a Member of the Assembly, the Assembly would have the right to hold a confirmatory hearing but would have no power of veto.
A confirmatory hearing is not the same as direct election, and the only circumstances in which there would be a veto by the democratically elected representatives of all London would be where the mayor of London had appointed an individual who did not hold a democratic mandate in the London Assembly. We are therefore talking about the Mayor of London being able to appoint his poodle or his Rottweiler, whichever model you care to take, to have responsibility for the oversight of policing in the London area.
London has the largest police force in the country with some of the heaviest responsibilities, particularly for counterterrorism and security. However, the Government are saying that, despite it being their objective everywhere else in the country that there is proper governance and clarity, and despite the benefits of direct election of the person with that responsibility, that will not apply in London.
My understanding is that the Government are suggesting this because the responsibility will rest with the Mayor of London. However, the current Mayor of London has discovered that it is not possible to combine the role of being mayor with having personal direct responsibility for the oversight of the Metropolitan Police. That is why, having given a manifesto commitment—I know that the current Mayor of London does not cast aside manifesto commitments lightly—he decided after just a few months that in fact he would not continue to chair the Metropolitan Police Authority and have that personal day-to-day oversight role but would ask one of his London Assembly colleagues to do so.
In circumstances in which the present incumbent is saying, “I cannot combine these duties effectively”, why are the Government saying, “That’s the model that we want to see in the London area”? Why are they saying that it is not necessary in London to have the benefits that we are assured that direct election will bring? That is why I have put forward this group of amendments.
I have also sought to resolve some of the other questions that arise. I have proposed how the electoral system would operate and how, in the event of the deputy mayor being incapacitated and unable to continue his functions, the Mayor of London would act. The simple principle that is most important in these circumstances, though, is that there be direct election, and my understanding was that that was what the Government wanted, and that they believed in the principle of direct election. If it is right for the rest of the country—we are told that the Government are going to reinstate this when the Bill returns to another place—why is it not right for London? What have the Government got against the people of London that they do not believe those people should have the right to elect the person who has responsibility to oversee and be responsible for the governance of policing in the London area? I beg to move.
Lord Rosser
As my noble friend Lord Harris of Haringey has said, this group of amendments provides for a deputy mayor of policing and crime in London to be responsible for the Metropolitan Police in much the same way as the Government intend their police and crime commissioners to have that responsibility outside London. The Mayor of London would no longer be the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime.
The amendments also provide for the deputy mayor of policing and crime to be elected, with an election being held in 2012 and in each subsequent fourth year. The amendments carried in your Lordships’ House at the beginning of Committee on this Bill removed the requirement for the proposed police and crime commissioners outside London to be elected but left the situation in London largely unchanged. We have heard from the Government that they expect the posts of police and crime commissioners to be full time. Indeed a change has recently been made in relation to a deputy being appointed.
Therefore, the police and crime commissioner in, say, Wiltshire will be engaged full time purely on the role and responsibilities of that position, but in London, which has by far the largest police force in the country, the elected mayor, who has the ultimate responsibility for policing at present, does not devote his time and energy full time to his police role for the simple reason that as mayor he has a large number of other roles and responsibilities. One would have thought that in London the case for a full-time police and crime commissioner was stronger than anywhere else.
The mayor gets over the problem in London by appointing a deputy mayor with responsibility for the police but still retaining in theory ultimate control himself. However, it is quite clear where the real power lies—that is, with the deputy mayor because the mayor does not have the time to keep up to date with what is happening in the Metropolitan Police and to undertake the strategic and other responsibilities of the position because of his commitments to London as a whole. The Government have said that their objective is to increase accountability and transparency, but accountability and transparency are not increased if the in effect police and crime commissioner in London is in reality appointed by the mayor, who does not have the time to do the job himself but who in theory has to pretend that he can be like a police and crime commissioner elsewhere in the country and devote his efforts full time to that role.
We need to take steps to ensure that there is no dubiety over who is in reality—as opposed to in theory—the police and crime commissioner in London, and recognise the true situation by having a deputy mayor who has that role, and with it both the time and the authority of police and crime commissioners outside London. These amendments provide for elections for deputy mayor at the same time as for mayor. The current holder of these responsibilities is ultimately the elected mayor, and the amendments propose to move those overall responsibilities for the police from one elected office holder to another who has the time to do the job in full. I hope that the Government will recognise the contradictions between the situation in London and the situation outside London, as my noble friend Lord Harris of Haringey stated, and by accepting this amendment bring the two much closer together.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Browning)
My Lords, the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, would prevent the mayor from holding the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime and would instead create an elected deputy mayor for policing and crime to hold that office. Consequential amendments would apply to the deputy mayor similar provisions to those for PCCs in respect of elections and suspensions. While I understand the approach taken by the noble Lord, Lord Harris, I set out in Committee the reasons why I do not agree with these amendments.
While it is the Government’s policy to introduce a directly elected police and crime commissioner into every force area in England and Wales outside London, the Government do not intend to introduce a new, elected person to hold the police to account in London for the very simple reason that the whole of London already elects a single person to take responsibility for strategic issues such as policing—the Mayor of London.
While I hear what the noble Lord says, the mayor is in the unique position of having responsibility for a whole force area and, as such, it seems sensible for him to have the overall responsibility for holding the police to account. Under the amendment, both the mayor and the deputy mayor have a direct democratic mandate across a whole force area, although in practice of course they could have different ideas about what should happen. That cannot work and would cause a lot of conflict. It is right and fitting that the mayor takes on the formal responsibility for holding the Metropolitan Police to account, and should in turn be accountable directly to the public for how this is done. However the mayor delegates in this area, the mayor, as with PCCs, is still responsible for the decisions that are taken and, as such, is answerable to the public as an elected representative.
I know that in Committee the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, was concerned about the dilution of the democratic principle, but I stress that this can come only through the mayor himself or herself. The mayor is elected by all Londoners, and he or she alone may hold the mayor’s office under this Bill. As such, the democratic principle is clear in the Bill. On that basis, I hope the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw these amendments, although I know that he believes in them passionately, and support the government amendments that we shall discuss later. I will not go into great detail as we shall come to them later in our deliberations, but I remind the House that the government amendments require confirmation hearings for the position of deputy mayor to be binding where the candidate is not an Assembly Member, in that the Assembly would have the power to veto the appointment by a two-thirds majority.
Any Assembly Member whom the mayor wished to appoint would be subject to a non-binding confirmation, as already set out in the Bill. I hope, therefore, that on reflection the noble Lord will withdraw the amendment.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for the way in which she has responded and for reiterating the Government’s position on these points. As I said in my opening remarks, I am grateful for the amendments that have been put forward on confirmation hearings and the deputy mayor’s role. However, a veto power of a two-thirds majority of the London Assembly is not a very powerful mechanism. My experience in four years on the London Assembly—I believe that it was the case for the subsequent seven years—is that the two-thirds majority threshold has never been achieved in matters to do with the budget. It is difficult to see how that would not be the case in these circumstances, where it is likely that the elected Mayor of London will have a sizeable block of members supporting his or her position on most issues. Therefore, although confirmatory hearings are helpful, they are not the same as direct election.
The noble Baroness also argued that the mayor is elected for the whole force area, but one of the problems is that the Mayor of London’s writ is not the same as that of the Metropolitan Police. The noble Lord, Lord Brooke, confronted me at a previous stage as he was deeply concerned that I might be trying to undermine the position of the City of London Police. The fact is that the Mayor of London has responsibility for two force areas and is elected not just by the electorate who are served by the Metropolitan Police but by the electorate who are served by the City of London Police. Therefore, the noble Baroness’s arguments do not stand up.
Baroness Browning
My Lords, when we discussed this in Committee, we established that the City of London and the force area that covers it represents a very small percentage of the electorate living within its parameters.
Lord Harris of Haringey
That indeed is the case. That is why I was almost incredulous that the Government believed that it was sensible that the City of London should have its own separate police force.
I appreciate that the Corporation of London has enormous antiquity and I know about the noble Baroness’s passion for medieval constructs, as we discussed the other evening, and the question of corporation sole. So, given that the Corporation of London is a construct even older than corporation sole, I shall not press that point.
However, on the issue of boundaries, the Government have to be clear about what the situation will be outside London. If the Localism Bill runs its course and the referenda locally produce it, you will have some very powerful directly elected mayors in major cities outside London. I do not believe that the directly elected mayors of the great cities of Manchester and Birmingham will not feel that they should have significant influence on the arrangements for policing in their areas. Of course they will not cover the entire police area, but I do not think that the Government’s proposal simply to have them sitting on the police and crime panel will be sufficient. The Government cannot get away from the fact that you will have conflicts between directly elected mayors and the people responsible for governance. In those circumstances, if that is going to happen outside London, the Government should have the courage of their convictions about the importance of direct elections and allow that to happen in London.
As I understand it, the Government’s vision is that there should be direct elections for these important positions everywhere in the country, but London is missing out. That is unfortunate and extremely unhelpful. I am disappointed that the Government are not prepared to consider and accept the amendment. However, I shall consider carefully what the noble Baroness has said today. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Browning
“(h) the exercise of duties in relation to the safeguarding of children and the promotion of child welfare that are imposed on the Commissioner by sections 10 and 11 of the Children Act 2004”.
Baroness Browning
Baroness Browning
My Lords, this group of government amendments essentially corrects some drafting oversights and errors to ensure that the Bill is consistent with other legislation. I am happy to touch on each amendment in order to provide clarity for the House.
Amendment 23 removes a duplication prohibiting a PCC from also being deputy mayor for policing and crime. Amendment 82 corrects a drafting error that would mistakenly have granted the deputy mayor greater delegation powers than the holder of the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime. Amendment 170 changes a reference to the Greater London Authority to the London Assembly. This was simply an error as the police and crime panel will be a committee of the Assembly and not of the whole authority.
Amendments 244 and 309 follow the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee's recommendations by requiring that any regulations issued in respect of collaboration, or a failure of local authorities to participate in the formation of police and crime panels, are made by affirmative rather than negative resolution.
Amendment 270 removes an inconsistency in the Bill where one provision amends a paragraph in the Police Act 1996 in relation to the Secretary of State's power to issue orders in relation to transitional arrangements for the alteration of a police force area, and another provision repeals it. The amending provision is the correct one so the repealing provision is being removed from the Bill.
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, I take this opportunity to put on record my thanks to the Bill team. I raised a number of questions on this group and am very happy to have had their answers. I feel no need to raise the points in debate. I am extremely grateful.
Lord Rosser
As the Minister has indicated, these are relatively minor and technical amendments that correct some drafting errors. As she said, they also reflect the recommendations of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee that any regulations dealing with mandatory collaboration or the consequences of a failure by local authorities to participate in the formation of police and crime panels should be made by affirmative rather than negative resolution. We support the change to these regulations being by affirmative rather than negative resolution, thus requiring the specific approval of your Lordships' House.
Baroness Browning
“(1) The Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis must appoint a qualified person to act as chief finance officer, if and for as long as—
(a) that post is vacant, or(b) the holder of that post is, in the Commissioner’s opinion, unable to carry out the duties of that post.(2) For the purposes of sub-paragraph (1) a person is qualified to be appointed to act as chief finance officer if that person is qualified to be appointed to the post under paragraph 1.
(3) A reference in any enactment to the metropolitan police force’s chief finance officer includes a reference to a person acting as chief finance officer in accordance with sub-paragraph (1).”
Baroness Browning
“(2A) But the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis may not borrow money.
(2B) Sub-paragraph (2A) does not require the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis to obtain the consent of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime in order to enter into a contract or other agreement with a person—
(a) by virtue of which the person becomes, or is, a member of the metropolitan police force’s civilian staff, or(b) which otherwise relates to the person’s membership of that civilian staff (including the terms and conditions of the person’s membership).”
Lord Beecham
Lord Beecham
My Lords, this group of amendments seeks simply to ensure that local authorities are consulted by the police and crime commissioner, along with the police and crime panel, in connection with any preparation or variation of a crime plan. Surely it is axiomatic that a close working relationship between the police and other authorities, particularly local authorities, is essential in dealing with matters of community safety and law and order. A wide range of local authority functions clearly impinge on the duties of the police and vice versa, so it is clearly desirable, if not essential, that in the preparation of any police and crime plan, given the commissioner’s responsibility to liaise and work with a wide range of statutory bodies, local authorities should be among the prime consultees.
The Minister has charmed the House over the past few weeks. I hope that her charm will be matched by a willingness to accept that this is a constructive amendment, designed to ensure the closest possible working relationship between the two most important arms in any approach to the issues which this Bill seeks to address and which the relevant authorities have to address on a day-to-day basis. I hope the Minister will accept these modest but important amendments to reinforce that relationship. I beg to move.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
As my noble friend inferred, we are debating the Localism Bill through which the Government wish to give more freedom to local authorities. As part of that we are seeing the Government present local authorities with an opportunity to have some of the constraints around their leadership role in a local area taken away from them so that the local authority is seen as having a leadership role which is not necessarily tied into statutory responsibilities. We are also seeing in that Bill a requirement on the 11 largest local authorities in England to hold referenda next year on whether there should be an elected mayor. The Government are therefore acknowledging the importance of local government and its place in the wider community. I support my noble friend’s amendments because they seek to ensure that when draft police and crime plans are prepared or varied, the local authority has a right to consultation. In our first discussion my noble friend referred to the potential of an elected mayor in Birmingham. I find it quite remarkable that we have the prospect of the elected mayor in Birmingham not having an ability to be statutorily consulted by the police and crime commissioner when it comes to a police and crime plan or a variation. This is a symbol of the importance of local government and I hope the noble Baroness will accept my noble friend’s amendment.
Lord Soley
This issue is an important one and relates back to what I have said before on crime prevention. It took many years to get a good relationship between the police and local authorities on crime prevention and we should not lose that again. Local authorities and the police work together and when the police listen to what locally elected people and local authorities have to say, there is a much better chance of reducing crime and coming up with good crime prevention schemes. So I strongly support my noble friend’s amendments.
Baroness Henig
I have Amendment 47 in this group. I will be very brief. This is about partnership arrangements and improving the link between policing bodies and other partners, particularly community safety bodies. I note the Minister’s Amendment 43 on behalf of the Government specifying that the local policing body has to have regard to the priorities of the statutory partners—
Baroness Henig
I apologise. I am so relieved. I was desperately looking through my notes to see if there had been a major omission.
Baroness Browning
The amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, provide for local authorities to have the same degree of involvement as the police and crime panel in the police and crime commissioner’s preparation of the police and crime plan. In Clause 6 the PCC is placed under specific duties to send the plan to the PCP and have regard to any report or recommendations made by the PCP in relation to the draft, to give a formal response to any recommendations from the PCP, to afford as much time as reasonably possible for the PCP to consider and review the plan, and to review the plan in light of any recommendations made to the PCC by the police and crime panel.
That is already quite a lot of involvement with the PCP, which is made up of and structured with a representative of every local authority at whichever level, whether it is a two, three or one-tier local government structure. Through the representatives on the police and crime panel—we have discussed the need for those other than local government representatives, but looking specifically at those members—I would expect the views of the local authority to be taken forward by those representatives so that specific local authorities’ views on the plan or any other matter are reflected on the panel.
For each of those duties, the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, wants the same duty to apply to each local authority within the force area. That would add bureaucracy for the PCC, because the PCC must negotiate to deliver their plan. At the moment, the core of that negotiation is with the police and crime panel. I also think that it would undermine the core responsibility of the PCP in being the check and balance for the PCC in developing the plan. The burden that will be placed by adding the extra tier is particularly disproportionate. I would expect people on the panel to communicate back to their local authority. For example, if the local authority was concerned, that concern would be expressed through their representative on the police and crime panel. That is why we have extended the scope of the panel to include a representative from every authority, compared to the current structure, where not every authority is represented.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, can we come back to the place of Birmingham, which I know is dear to your Lordships’ heart? Let us assume that the referendum takes place next May and that a year later we have an elected mayor of Birmingham. Is the noble Baroness seriously suggesting that the relationship on the draft police and crime plan is between the panel and the PCC, and that the elected mayor for Birmingham has to go through the panel to make representations? I do not think that that stands up.
Baroness Browning
I would hope that elected mayors would be represented on the panel. I see no reason why they should not be. Nothing in the Bill says that they should not and I would expect that link to be formed through those elected mayors. They would not be excluded from the panel. I do not know whether that satisfies the noble Lord’s concern. They will clearly have positions of great authority within the locality and therefore would have that input through the police and crime panel. They would clearly be important in holding to account the police and crime commissioner, and I would expect an elected mayor to have that representation. I will wait to see whether the noble Lord believes that to be a solution to the problem he has raised.
I have no doubt that each representative on the panel will consult their local authority colleagues on the plan in advance of the PCP formally submitting its advice and recommendations to the police and crime commissioner. It is for that very reason that we are placing a duty on the police and crime commissioner: the requirement at subsection (7) for the PCP to be given a reasonable amount of time to consult on the draft plan.
For clarification, it would not be a question of the PCP having the plan submitted to it for a day or two and then having to decide on it. We have included the need for adequate and reasonable time in the legislation.
For the PCC to undertake consultation with a large number of authorities outwith the PCP would, I believe, be bureaucratic and time-consuming. Also it recognises the power which we expect the PCP to have in terms of scrutiny. However, if the PCP utilises its membership, it can, on behalf of the PCC, make a constructive and supportive contribution. Through that local authority membership, it will be able to co-ordinate the views of the authorities and provide an agreed set of recommendations which, I remind the House, the PCP must have regard to.
I appreciate the intention and am grateful to the noble Lord for his kind remarks. However, I am going to disappoint him on this occasion—he is probably thinking “yet again”. I hope that the way in which the Government are seeking to enable the PCP to be involved in supporting the police and crime commissioner is a little clearer, and that the noble Lord will consider withdrawing the amendment.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, tempted as I am, I shall not withdraw the kind remarks that I made about the noble Baroness—I shall resist the provocation. However, the answer is extremely disappointing. It seems to take little account of what is needed to develop a whole-systems approach to the issues of crime, disorder, crime prevention and community safety. This is not a one-way street. These matters cannot be tackled just by police authorities, under whatever form they take; there has to be a collaborative exercise between the police and the other agencies, especially local authorities.
The Minister is effectively saying that a mayor or council leader can be a member of a scrutiny committee because that is all that the PCP is: it is not an executive body and has no power to commit anything at all. Frankly, I would be very doubtful whether a mayor or council leader of any significant authority would have the time or the inclination to serve as a member of such a body. Moreover, we need the full engagement of the area’s local authorities with the police in order to develop joint approaches and possibly joint programmes. That is not something that can be done at one remove. You do not send someone to a scrutiny panel to negotiate on behalf of your authority, particularly if it is a large unitary or county authority.
Baroness Browning
I say for the sake of clarification that I would not in any way expect the police not to have contact with local authorities. We are not talking here about the chief officer’s role and communications with local authorities; we are talking about the gateway which the PCP provides for all local authorities in that force area to be represented on the panel.
Lord Beecham
We are indeed. We are also talking about how the commissioner makes those significant strategic decisions, as he would have responsibility for the police’s part of what is not just a policing matter, but a matter which transcends the boundaries between police authorities, however constituted, and local government. This is a two-way street and one way is blocked by the Government’s apparent refusal to recognise that there has to be a partnership arrangement between police authorities and local authorities. I am really at a loss to see why the Minister and particularly her advisers are intent on blocking the way towards a collaborative and potentially fruitful relationship, which cannot be assisted by the way that the Bill is currently drafted. If that is the Government’s position, I am afraid that I must test the opinion of the House.
Reform of Social Care
(13 years, 4 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health (Earl Howe)
My Lords, with the leave of the House, I shall now repeat a Statement made in another place by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Health. The Statement is as follows:
“Mr Speaker, with permission, I wish to make a Statement on the reform of social care. This coalition Government have from the outset recognised that reform of the care and support system is needed to provide people with more choice and control, and to reduce the insecurity faced by individuals, carers and their families. By 2026, the number of people over 85 years old is projected to double. Age is the principal determinant of need for health and for care services. It is estimated that in 20 years’ time, 1.7 million more people will have a potential care need than do today.
People often do not think about how they might meet those costs in later life. They assume that social care will be provided free for all at the point of need, but since the establishment of the welfare state this has never been the case. Currently people with more than £23,250 in assets, often including their home, face meeting the whole cost of care themselves. The cost of care can vary considerably and it is hard for people to predict what costs they may face. The average 65 year-old today will face lifetime care costs of £35,000. However, as the Commission on the Funding of Care and Support notes, costs are widely distributed: one in four will have no care costs, but one in four will face care costs over £50,000 and one in 10 over £100,000.
The lack of understanding of how the system works and the uncertainty about costs means that it is difficult for people to prepare to meet potential care costs and there are currently few financial products available to help them. This means that paying for care can come as a shock to many families and can have a severe impact on their financial security.
Change is essential. That is why we took immediate action by establishing the Commission on the Funding of Care and Support last July. It was tasked with making recommendations on how to achieve an affordable and sustainable funding system for care and support for all adults in England. In response to its initial advice, we allocated an additional £2 billion a year by 2014-15 in the spending review to support the delivery of social care as a bridge to reform. This represents a total of £7.2 billion extra support for social care over the next four years, including an unprecedented transfer of funds from the NHS to support social care services that will also benefit health.
Since then we have taken forward wider reform. In November last year, we published our vision for adult social care setting out our commitment to a more responsive and personalised care and support system that empowers individuals and communities, including the objective that all those who wish it should have access to a personal social care budget by 2013, and in May, the Law Commission published its report, after three years of work, on how to deliver a modernised statute for adult social care. Making sense of the current confused tangle of legislation to deliver a social care statute will allow individuals, carers, families and local authorities more clearly to understand when care and support will be provided.
Andrew Dilnot’s report comes at the same time as the final report from the palliative care funding review, which I received last week. Tom Hughes-Hallett and Sir Alan Craft have made an excellent start in looking at this complex and challenging issue. We want to see integrated, responsive, high-quality health and care services for those at the end of life. We will now consider the review team's proposals in detail before consulting stakeholders on the way forward later this summer. We will also consider how best to undertake substantial piloting, as recommended in the report, in order to gather information on how best to deliver palliative services.
We are also responding to events at Southern Cross, which have caused concern to residents in Southern Cross care homes and their relatives and families. We welcome the fact that Southern Cross, the landlords and the lenders are working hard to come up with a plan to stabilise the ownership and operation of the care homes. We have also been clear that we would take action to make sure there was proper oversight of the market in social care. That is why, through the Health and Social Care Bill, we are seeking powers to extend to social care the financial regulatory regime we are putting in place in the NHS, if we decide it is needed, as part of wider reform.
A central component of those reforms will be the long-term funding of care and support. Over the past 12 months, Andrew Dilnot, the chair of the Commission on the Funding of Care and Support, together with the noble Lord, Lord Warner, and Dame Jo Williams have engaged extensively with many different stakeholders. They brought fresh insight and impetus to this most challenging area of public policy. We welcome the excellent work of the commission and its final report. I would like to thank Andrew Dilnot, the noble Lord, Lord Warner, and Dame Jo Williams for the work they have undertaken. It is an immensely valuable contribution to meeting the long-term challenge of an ageing population.
The report argues that people are unable to protect themselves against the risk of high care costs, leaving people fearful and uncertain about the future. The commission’s central proposal is therefore a cap on the care costs that people face over their lifetime of between £25,000 and £50,000; it recommends £35,000. Under the commission’s proposals, people who cannot afford to make their personal contribution would continue to receive means-tested support, but it proposes that the threshold for getting state help with residential care costs would rise from £23,250 to £100,000. People would make some contribution to their general living costs in residential care, but this should be limited to between £7,000 and £10,000.
The commission also proposes: standardised national eligibility for care, increasing consistency across the country; universal access to a deferred payments scheme for means-tested contributions; improvements in information and advice; improved assessments for carers and better alignment between social care and the wider care and support system; and to consider changing the means test in domiciliary care to include housing assets. It makes recommendations about how, as a society, we will organise and fund social care. We will now take forward consideration of the commission’s recommendations as a priority.
The commission recognises that implementing its reforms would have significant costs that the Government will need to consider against other funding priorities and calls on constrained resources. In the current public spending environment, we have to consider carefully the additional costs to the taxpayer of the commission’s proposals against other funding priorities. Within the commission’s recommendations, it presents a range of options, including on the level of a cap and the contribution people make to living costs in residential care, which could help us to manage the system and its costs. That is why we intend to engage with stakeholders on these issues, including on the trade-offs involved.
Reform in this area will need to meet a number of tests, including: whether proposals would promote closer integration of health and social care; whether proposals would promote increased personalisation, choice and quality; whether proposals would support greater prevention and early intervention; whether a viable insurance market and a more diverse and responsive care market would be established as a result of the proposals; the level of consensus that additional resources should be targeted on a capped costs scheme for social care; and what a fair and appropriate method of financing the additional costs would be.
The Government have set out a broad agenda for reform in social care. We want to see care that is personalised, that offers people choice in how their care needs are met, that supports carers, that is supported by a diverse and flourishing market of providers and a skilled workforce who can provide care and support with compassion and imagination, and that offers people the assurances they expect of high-quality care and protection against poor standards and abuse. Andrew Dilnot’s report was never intended to address all these questions, but it forms a vital part of that wider agenda.
To take it forward, we will work with stakeholders in the autumn, using Andrew Dilnot’s report as the basis for engagement as a key part of a broader picture. This engagement will look at the fundamental questions for reform in social care: improving quality, developing and assuring the care market, integration with the NHS and wider services, and personalisation. As part of that we want to hear stakeholders’ views on the priorities for action from the commission’s report and how we should assess these proposals, including in relation to other priorities for improvement in the system. As the right honourable Member the Shadow Health Secretary and I have discussed, we will also engage directly with the Official Opposition in order to seek consensus on the future of long-term care funding.
We will then set out our response to the Law Commission and to the Dilnot Commission in the spring, with full proposals for reform of adult social care in a White Paper and a progress report on funding reform. It remains our intention to legislate to this effect at the earliest opportunity. The care of the elderly and vulnerable adults is a key priority for reform under this Government, and I commend this Statement to the House”.
My Lords, that concludes the Statement.
Baroness Thornton
First, my Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement today. It is difficult to imagine a more important issue for us to consider. Care of the elderly and vulnerable is probably the most difficult and intractable problem facing our society. It is one that we have to resolve; we cannot afford to let it go on and on unresolved. We can all agree about this.
It should be a cause for celebration and pride that one in five of us alive in Britain today will now live to be 100, and that our children can expect to spend one-third of their lives in retirement. Instead, thousands and thousands of us approach old age in fear—fear that we will need care that will not be there or will not be good enough, fear that our savings will be wiped out by an open-ended cost, fear that we cannot protect our families from this cost, and fear of becoming a burden or being left alone. That is why we on these Benches welcome the Dilnot report and the Statement.
These proposals contain many important elements that were in the plans that we set out when we were in government in our care White Paper prior to the general election. I join the Minister in congratulating Mr Andrew Dilnot and his colleagues, my noble friend Lord Warner and Dame Jo Williams on the excellent job that they have done. I know that many of the organisations concerned with this issue—Age UK, the Alzheimer’s Society, Care UK and others—have been very impressed by the way in which the commission has carried out its tasks, but they are now, quite rightly, very keen to ensure that the momentum created by this excellent report is not lost. Many noble Lords will have seen the letter, signed by 32 of these organisations, pleading with us not to pass up this opportunity. I welcome the Minister’s confirmation that detailed and important involvement of stakeholders will continue.
I am very impressed with the way in which all the members of the commission have seen it as their mission to explain to the widest possible audience what lies behind their recommendations and why they have reached the conclusions that they have. I know that my noble friend Lord Warner has been in major media contact since the early hours of this morning; many of us will have been treated to the masterclass from Andrew Dilnot on the “Today” programme.
In response to the report my right honourable friend Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour Party, has said on behalf of the Labour Party that we would be willing to put aside our party’s pre-election proposals in order to try to find a solution. I invite the Minister to agree with me that it is just as well that politicians sometimes ignore the cynicism and negativity of commentators, such as Mr Nick Robinson of the BBC, who I heard recently, and show an understanding of the importance of reaching a national consensus on these matters. We will all need to show the kind of determination that my right honourable friend the leader of the Labour Party is showing. Will the Minister comment on suggestions in the media, including from members of the Conservative Party, that suggest that the Treasury is already lining up to kill these proposals? I hope that this is not the case and that the tweet today quoting Stephen Dorrell as saying that the Government must show willingness to find the money for Dilnot’s long-term care overhaul is more accurate.
The last thing Britain needs is for Andrew Dilnot’s proposals to be put into the long grass, or even the medium-cut grass. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that we must address. It is what the Government do with it now that counts. My right honourable friend the leader of the Labour Party has made a big offer to the Prime Minister to put politics aside and to work to see a better long-term system of social care put in place for elderly and disabled people in our country. We on this side are willing to talk to and work with the Government and all other parties to do so, because we know that any system of care must give all of us the long-term confidence to know what will be on offer for us and our families. It requires the Prime Minister to give a lead, because agreeing an affordable and sustainable system involves important parts of government beyond the reach of the Health Secretary. It requires the Prime Minister to give a guarantee that the Government will not kick Mr Dilnot’s recommendations into the long grass, because the system needs urgent and lasting reform. Will the Minister give us that guarantee today? If the Government are serious, we in the Labour Party are serious. If the Government are serious, we need to hear what the plan is going to be as we move forward.
Mr Dilnot recommends a White Paper by December this year, but this already seems to have slipped to the spring. Will the Minister say which is it? Will he also tell the House when we can expect a draft Bill—are the Government aiming for this to be in the next Queen’s Speech? In the absence of the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell of Surbiton, will the Minister confirm that the Government welcome and will take forward recommendation 6 on the portability of care assessments? Will the Government be supporting her Private Member’s Bill on this? Does he agree that cross-party talks are required and that the Prime Minister should give this lead? How and when will this start?
Finally, I know the Minister agrees that there is a need for the House to have an opportunity to have a more thoroughgoing debate about this matter, the report and its recommendations. I hope that we can also join forces in trying to secure that opportunity.
Earl Howe
My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Baroness for her welcome of both the commission’s report and the Statement that I repeated. I believe that the commission has not only provided us with an excellent report but has instilled a sense of impetus in this agenda. We must not lose that momentum now. She referred to the prospect of cross-party talks, and I can only repeat that the engagement that we seek in the coming weeks and months will fully extend to the Official Opposition. We recognise the value of building a broad coalition of support on an issue as important as this. As she rightly said, there has to be security for the longer term so that we can provide citizens with the understanding and predictability that they rightfully expect of the system.
Reforming adult social care remains a top priority for us, but it is complex. As the Statement indicated, a number of related questions need to be addressed. Andrew Dilnot’s report provides recommendations on only one of these questions: how we pay for care as a country. It is our intention to set out our plans for wider social care reform in a White Paper in the spring. The noble Baroness is right that the timetable has slipped from that which we originally indicated, but that is not for sinister reasons. We think it is important to engage as widely as possible on these recommendations. There are many different views and we need to understand them.
Last week, the Alzheimer’s Society called for an open debate on the Dilnot proposals, with which we agree. As I have said, we are committed to a White Paper in the spring of 2012, which will include our response to the Law Commission’s report on the legal framework for social care, and we will publish a progress report on the funding. We remain committed to legislating at the earliest opportunity to take forward the proposals in the White Paper, although naturally I cannot give the noble Baroness a specific indication on the timing of that. That, however, is our ambition.
The noble Baroness referred to portability. In November, in our vision for adult social care, we made clear that we want the greater portability of assessments, which could help people who use social care to move without unnecessary multiple assessments and uncertainty. We also said that we would consider how to pursue this in the light of the work of the Law Commission and the Commission on Funding of Care and Support. We are considering both reports carefully. It is too early for me to say precisely what reaction we will give to the Bill sponsored by the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, but we look forward to debating it. I am sure that that Bill will enable us to drill down to some of the more difficult aspects of portability, with which I know that the noble Baroness is all too familiar.
As for a more general debate on these important issues, I well understand the noble Baroness’s wish to have such an opportunity. I will of course relay that desire to my noble friend the Leader of the House. It is not in my hands, and as she knows the available time for general debates of that kind is rather limited at this time of year, but we will see what can be done.
Baroness Oppenheim-Barnes
My Lords, I was extremely pleased to hear this Statement and to hear it in the form that it has come. It must be well over 20 years since I first started writing to various Prime Ministers about the dreadful case of a constituent who had to sell his house—his life savings went into the house—to go into a care home, who said, “This cannot be fair. People who never bothered to save or to put money aside are getting the same treatment I am being charged for”.
On the other hand, and this illustrates the difficulty of the problem, the view of the taxpayers, also expressed to me, was, “Why should we have to support the inheritance of the sons and daughters of these people?”. There were two completely separate points of view that were very difficult to reconcile. As the problem becomes bigger and more urgent all the time, it is extremely brave of the Government to embark at this stage on a Statement that refers to the priority that will be given to this problem, and I welcome that very greatly.
Earl Howe
I thank my noble friend Lady Oppenheim-Barnes for those remarks. The House will know that her experience of these matters goes back many years. She is right; these thorny issues have been with us for a very long time and we have to get a grip on them. There is, as I made clear earlier, a clear imperative to inject certainty and predictability into the system, but there is also a need to strike a balance between the state and the individual. That principle was one that the Dilnot commission articulated—overreliance on the state would be unsustainable and arguably unfair, and overreliance on the individual presents obvious problems of a different sort. It is that balance that we need to identify.
Lord Lipsey
My Lords, as a member of the Royal Commission on the funding of Long-Term Care for the Elderly, which so singularly failed to find any consensus—my fault, no doubt, as I signed the minority report—I welcome the Dilnot report very much as bringing us nearer to the kind of political consensus on this issue that is intrinsic to its final solution.
However, we should not take the proposals in Dilnot as written in stone. There are severe problems of cost and the fact that they do so much more for the very rich members of society and so much less for the middle. Will the Minister—who has rather wisely stretched out the consultation period on this—assure the House now that although Dilnot’s fundamental architecture has a great deal to be said for it, the Government will keep a very open mind on the details throughout the process ahead?
Earl Howe
I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, and broadly my answer to him is yes. They are clearly a set of well considered recommendations which we think are eminently worthy of serious study as a basis for cross-party consensus. However, I will not be tempted to pin my colours to any mast that the Dilnot commission has erected because it is important that we have this consensus as far as we can generate it, and that will mean looking at the detail and at individual recommendations on their own merits, maybe taking forward some but not others, and maybe looking at a staggered timetable. These are all questions that we have to resolve between us.
Baroness Barker
My Lords, I am in danger of agreeing with the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, which is something that always worries me, as he knows. I, too, welcome this. After 13 years of the Labour Government trying in various ways to approach this problem we have, with this report, an architecture that is very important, although I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, that there a great many technical matters within it that should be open for negotiation.
The report and the extent to which its objectives are achieved rely on two areas: first, a broad political consensus that it is a fair approach to take to the problem; and secondly, as the Minister said, a number of specific technical issues, the main one being that there should be a consistency in the criteria between eligibility for state provision and any insurance-based cover. That is perhaps the biggest single factor in determining whether the entire system will work. What work will be done with stakeholder groups, including carers and older people, and the private insurance business on that specific point? Only by resolving that can we enable individuals to have the security of knowing when the state will pay for their provision and when they as individuals will be expected to contribute.
Earl Howe
My noble friend has highlighted a key issue. We know that it is important to people that access to care services is fair and that resources are used wisely. However, the commission is clear that it believes that local authorities should continue to play a key role in the funding and delivery of social care, so we need to consider carefully how to achieve the right balance between national consistency and local flexibility. That is a very difficult question.
During the coming period of engagement in the autumn, we will want to take views on that matter. I remind my noble friend that in the light of recommendations made in CSCI’s review, called Cutting the Cake Fairly, which I am sure she will remember, the department issued guidance to local authorities on eligibility to support fairer and more transparent and consistent implementation of the criteria. We fully appreciate, however, that the concerns on that front continue; the current eligibility framework is subjective and it is difficult for individuals to understand what they might be entitled to in advance of an assessment. We will consider whether to take forward work on a new assessment framework following discussions with stakeholders.
Lord Myners
My Lords, the Government deserve credit for establishing the commission and choosing Mr Andrew Dilnot to chair it. I welcome the constructive way in which the Minister has summarised how the Government intend to take this forward.
I have two questions arising from the Statement. I shall ask them in the sequence in which they arose from the Minister’s announcement. First, he observed that financial markets have no answer to this problem. That is quite extraordinary. Our colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Turner, in his capacity as chairman of the Financial Services Authority, told us that much of what goes on in the City is socially useless. Here is an area where the financial community in the City could be socially useful, yet it seems to be turning its back on the opportunities to create long-term annuity products appropriate to meeting people’s expenditure requirements in the later period of their life. Will the Minister raise this with the Treasury and the FSA and consider establishing a working group to investigate particularly whether EU legislation on capital requirements for variable annuities is frustrating a market response?
Secondly, the Minister mentioned Southern Cross. There is much concern in the country about Southern Cross and I am grateful for the Minister’s Statement. Will he confirm that no resident of a Southern Cross home will be required to move against their wishes from the home in which they are currently being cared for?
Earl Howe
I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Myners. I shall address his questions in the opposite order. We have been clear about the situation at Southern Cross: we hope that a resolution will emerge as a result of the current discussions between Southern Cross, its lenders and its landlords. However, we have been equally clear that the residents of the care homes are our prime concern. It is not possible for me to give an absolute assurance that no resident will be required to move, but I can say that we will ensure that if a resident is required to move, there will, in accordance with best practice, be plenty of time to ensure that suitable alternative accommodation is available. It is a fact of life that care home residents sometimes do have to move, but it is our ambition that no care home resident of Southern Cross should move. I do not intend to sound in the least complacent about this because we have set a clear sense of direction to the parties involved that we hope to see this settlement reached.
The noble Lord, Lord Myners, is right about financial products. I have noted over the past 10 years with some disappointment the dearth of suitable financial products to enable people to save for long-term care. The commission has analysed extremely ably the barriers that currently prevent the establishment of an effective market for financial products and we want to consider how best to promote a more effective market for such products. We will consider the commission’s recommendations carefully, of course. An effective market in this area would be extremely helpful. It may help people to become more aware of the costs that they may face in later life, which in itself would be useful, and to take steps to prepare for these. I will bring the noble Lord’s remarks to the attention of my colleagues in the Treasury in the sense that he indicated.
Lord Newton of Braintree
My Lords, I declare an interest as chairman of the Suffolk Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust and the immediate past chairman of Help the Hospices. I agree with my noble friend Lady Oppenheim-Barnes. Indeed, this has been a running sore throughout my entire political lifetime since I was first elected as an MP in 1974. The right metaphor now might be a ticking time bomb in one of those James Bond films getting quite close to where it actually goes off, or does not quite. This is potentially seriously, socially divisive and difficult, so I hugely welcome both the report and the tone that has been adopted by those on the two Front Benches. It is essential that we should seek political consensus, otherwise there will be big trouble for all of us.
Lastly, and more specifically, I come to my question: does my noble friend accept that there are also health implications in the demographics as well as social care implications? A growing number of people are presenting with mental illness problems—dementia, in particular—at mental health trusts, and indeed in acute trusts in the A&E departments, with a knock-on effect on requests for assistance from mental health trusts and their clinicians. There is a serious need for health resources to be directed towards some aspects of this problem as well as to a solution to social care problems. I hope that my noble friend will take that on board.
Earl Howe
I am grateful to my noble friend and agree with all that he said. The early part of the Statement demonstrates very graphically the demographic aspects of this matter. He is of course right that there are clear health implications in all of this, which is precisely why the work that we are doing in the department lays such emphasis on the need to integrate health and social care commissioning and provision and on the need to place a greater emphasis on prevention both in health and social care. That is also why we have channelled substantial additional funds from the health budget to support social care over the next four years. There is a clear interest for the health service in wishing to see a stable and fair system of social care provision, so I identify absolutely with everything that my noble friend has said.
Lord Lloyd of Berwick
My Lords, the emphasis in the Statement is very much on the care of the elderly, some of whom will be disabled. What I am not clear about is whether the report also covers care of the disabled who are still young, who are currently covered by the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act, which was sponsored by the noble Lord, Lord Morris of Manchester, 40 years ago. Is that also up for grabs, as it were, among the tangle of legislation which is being considered?
Earl Howe
My Lords, this area was not overlooked by the commission. Indeed, the commission has made a specific recommendation as regards the cap on costs, which it believes should be, as a generality, somewhere between £25,000 and £50,000, although it has come down in favour of a £35,000 figure. That figure is lower for those who require long-term care at a much earlier age. The noble and learned Lord is right that this area should not be neglected, and I am sure will not be neglected.
Baroness Pitkeathley
My Lords, does the Minister agree that although the sum of £2 billion mentioned by Andrew Dilnot may strike fear into the heart of the Treasury at a time of financial constraints, it is a puny sum when you compare it with the £119 billion contributed by the main providers of care—the family carers? Therefore, I am sure he agrees that the support offered to family carers in the report is extremely welcome. Will he reconfirm the Government’s commitment to continuing to work with the stakeholder groups, as the Dilnot commission has so admirably done, particularly as the advice and information service for families is developed as we go forward?
Earl Howe
My Lords, I cannot stand here and claim that an additional £2 billion is a trivial amount of money; it clearly is not. That is why it was made clear in the Statement that we need to make some difficult decisions over priorities in public spending. As regards carers, for whom the noble Baroness has done so much in her career, I am sure she will accept from me that we recognise the value and contribution that carers make. We recently published Recognised, Valued and Supported: Next Steps for the Carers Strategy, which announced an additional £400 million over four years for PCTs to pool with local authorities to provide carers’ breaks. In our carers strategy we indicated that assumptions should not be made about who will provide care and to what extent. There has been a 21 per cent increase in the number of carers receiving information. We want to see greater flexibility and portability of assessments for carers. The agenda in this area is proceeding and we shall not forget it amidst the concerns over funding. It is every bit as important as getting the funding system for paid residential long-term care right.
Baroness Shephard of Northwold
My Lords, I, too, welcome the political consensus that is bathing us in its glow this afternoon. Several noble Lords have spoken, and so has my noble friend, of the importance of engaging individuals in taking responsibility for their own care. I am sure that he is very aware of this, but does he realise how important it is for there to be a clear financial framework so that individuals and their families can take decisions concerning their own care? That is the important starting point given in the Dilnot report. It is an indicator—I do not know how the Government will treat it—which provides admirable clarity. Wrestling with the complexities of the different organisations involved will come later. However, I remind my noble friend that those complexities are already struggled with by individuals and their families when making these plans. An espousing of the financial certainties of the report would be a great move towards enabling individuals to take charge of their own futures.
Earl Howe
I am grateful to my noble friend, who has put her finger on an extremely important aspect of the debate. Much of the thrust of our proposals on the NHS revolves around the personalisation agenda, which applies in equal measure to social care. This is about the call to arms that Derek Wanless sounded a few years ago about the need for people to take ownership of their own healthcare if we are to have an affordable and sustainable system over the longer term. That process can be aided and boosted in a number of ways, not only by the rollout of a greater range of financial products but also through mechanisms such as personal budgets, which empower patients inherently, and through telecare, on which this country leads the world in the advances we have made and in the potential that exists for those in receipt of health and social care in their own homes to take ownership of their condition.
Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill
(13 years, 4 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Browning
The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Browning)
My Lords, I now move on to the next group of amendments. I am sorry, I think I have the wrong notes here.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, we are on the group starting with government Amendment 35. It would be helpful if the noble Baroness introduced the government amendments. We could then have a debate and she could then wind up.
Baroness Browning
The noble Lord is quite right. I apologise. Perhaps noble Lords will allow me a second or two to find the correct notes.
The government amendments in this group—Amendments 35, 41, 43, 48, 49, 50 and 240—relate to Clauses 6, 7 and 11 and Schedule 11 and seek to strengthen the relationship between the police and crime commissioners and community safety partnerships in their force areas. Amendment 241 corrects a minor drafting error where the Bill referred to the incorrect clause of the Crime and Disorder Act 2008. I hope noble Lords will take that as a straightforward correction of a legitimate error.
The proposals originally set out in the Bill were debated quite fully and I acknowledge that the relationship between the police and crime commissioner and the community safety partnerships is crucial. It ensures that the public are getting a service that is joined up, coherent and addresses the needs that have been identified locally. We have already set out in the Bill a reciprocal duty for the police and crime commissioner and the responsible authorities comprising community safety partnerships, which include local authorities, to co-operate in order to reduce crime and disorder, including anti-social behaviour, substance misuse and reoffending. This is still the overarching principle of the relationship, which is one of reciprocity and mutual reinforcement. These amendments follow this same principle but also seek to ensure that the police and crime commissioner and the community safety partnership are working together to address community safety priorities. The proposed amendments will require both the police and crime commissioner and the community safety partnership, including the local authority and any other CSP members, to have regard to each other’s priorities. Practically, for the police and crime commissioner these priorities will be set out in the police and crime plan and for the community safety partnerships they will be set out in the strategic assessments and partnership plans that are required by regulations. The proposed amendments will require a police and crime commissioner to send a copy of his police and crime plan to the community safety partnership in the police area. We intend to impose the same requirement on community safety partnerships in respect of their strategic assessments and partnership plans by means of an amendment to the regulations that already provide for the preparation of these documents. I hope that reciprocal arrangement will help to strengthen the relationship which many noble Lords have expressed concern about and have been fearful would not work in practice. These proposed amendments will drive a more collaborative approach between the police and crime commissioner and community safety partnerships. Community safety partnerships, including local authorities, will be able to further engage and influence the police and crime commissioner’s priorities. Importantly, this will be achieved without significantly increasing proscription but instead ensuring that there remains flexibility in how this might be executed locally.
I will be interested to hear other noble Lords speak to their own amendments which form part of this group and will, of course, respond to those when I have heard them.
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, I have a number of amendments in this group but I will first comment on the Government’s amendments. The Minister described Amendments 35 and 41 as allowing flexibility. Indeed they do, but I asked myself when I saw them whether it was necessary to put the words down on paper. Amendments 35 and 41 merely provide for sending the responsible authorities copies of the plan. That is not a very onerous obligation and, more importantly, it is not one which amounts to a consultation. It is something which hardly needs saying. I am entirely with her on the points she has made which we will come to in later amendments about the supportive and collaborative arrangement which we want to see between the two arms of the new model, but I do not think this amounts to much. I hope that is not too unkind.
Amendments 43 and 50 talk about observing priorities and I could not find where the priorities were. I am grateful to the Bill team for explaining to me by email that the Government intend to amend regulations to impose a requirement on the statutory group to send their strategic assessment and partnership plan to the commissioner so that he or she will know what the priorities are. That is helpful. It is sometimes difficult to anticipate precisely what will go into regulations.
The noble Baroness, Lady Henig, has tabled Amendment 47 about membership of community safety partnerships and crime reduction partnerships. Like her, I still feel that relationships between the panel and local authorities have not yet been bottomed out, if I may put it that way.
My amendments largely repeat amendments to which I spoke in Committee. I have tabled them again because they came up in some of the enormous groups we had, which made it very difficult for Ministers at the Dispatch Box to ensure that they covered everything. There were one or two in the group on which my noble friend Lord Wallace, I think, said that he would write; I have not yet had the letter. I am sure that the Minister will understand that, as this is the last opportunity, essentially, the amendments are here again.
Amendments 40, 45 and 46, 54A, 55 and 56, 56A and 57 are about the contribution to be made by both victims and witnesses. I have tabled some of those amendments after contact with Victim Support. I am grateful for its contribution. It makes the point that in obtaining the views of the community on policing, witnesses—interestingly, Victim Support has been dealing with me on witnesses—should also be included. They, too, fundamentally depend on an effective and responsive police force. They are key participants in the justice system, whether or not they are also victims. It is often owing only to witnesses that the criminal justice becomes aware of an offence in the first place.
Victim Support states—I think, rightly—that our justice system requires witnesses to feel confident in the service they will receive from the police and that they will be the subject of sensitive handling throughout the progress of a case, not only, but including adequate protection if their status as a witness means that their safety or that of their family may be in danger. It made the point to me that particularly relevant is the apparent lack of adequate training given to officers about the reality of the court process. It commented to me about witnesses frequently being the victims of basic police misunderstanding about whether their identity will be protected, whether there will be a screen around the witness box, a video link, and that sort of thing. In fact, that is subject to the discretion of the court, and not something about which the police can give blanket assurances. In order that witnesses should not feel overused and underserved, some of my amendments suggest that they should have a role in the way that I have proposed.
A point I made at the previous stage is that victims have suffered a huge range of crimes, some very distressing, some very damaging, and some unimaginable. They or their representatives should have an opportunity to make an input to the police and crime plan and there should be arrangements to obtain their views on policing as part of the community.
Amendment 42 would alter Clause 8 regarding the means by which a,
“chief officer of police’s performance in providing policing will be measured”.
My amendment would change that to the,
“attainment of the police and crime objectives”.
That concentrates on the outcome rather than on the output and seeks to link this part of the Bill not to what the chief officer does but to whether the police and crime commissioners’ objectives, as set out in the police and crime plan, are attained.
Amendment 53 would enable the police and crime panel to request in advance that certain information should go into the commissioner's annual report. Although this is a small amendment, when I chaired the London Assembly I found that similar provision in the GLA legislation was very useful. It merely enables the panel, and the Assembly in London, to say in good time what subjects it thinks the commissioner should cover in the annual report. In this legislation, the annual report seems to have some status.
Amendment 59 would require the commissioner to have regard not only to the panel's report and its recommendations on the annual report but to any other reports and recommendations that it may make. This is not just an annual exercise. If there is to be this supportive and collaborative relationship then the panel will need to work year round. I am sure that it will have plenty of things it wants to say and that it will want to do so not just on an annual basis. This is a mild amendment as I use the words “have regard to”.
Amendment 58 relates to clauses on obtaining the views of the community on policing, and I suggest that local authorities should be included in the process. There should be consultation not just with people in the area but with those who have been elected in our system of representative democracy, who have views about the priorities for spending and whose own expenditure may cover allied or parallel ground.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
I am very interested in the noble Baroness’s comments on local authorities, but would they not apply to crime plans? I follow her arguments and am very supportive of the general thrust; but if that, why not for crime plans?
Baroness Hamwee
If the noble Lord is teasing me about a previous amendment, he can probably read my answer in the fact that I have stayed put. I am not averse to being teased.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, I was merely trying to liven up the debate.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
Far from it. I was just trying to follow in the noble Baroness’s footsteps with lively engagement.
Baroness Hamwee
Let us go on to the Local Government Association. That seems to follow, as Amendment 239A would add police and crime commissioners as statutory partners on community safety partnerships. Under the Bill, commissioners do not replace police authorities as members of CSPs; they simply have a duty to co-operate. The Local Government Association, making the point that this is an all-party view, says that it is concerned about fracturing current local community safety governance arrangements and that placing commissioners as statutory members on CSPs would help to ensure that all bodies involved in local community safety work together through a collaborative approach in the best interest of local communities and that the commissioner does not undertake contradictory efforts to those of the other CSP members.
I apologise to your Lordships for the length of time it has taken me to introduce all those amendments. It is a medium-sized group in the context of the Bill.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, pursuing my usual course of local government recidivism, I will comment briefly on Amendment 49A, which will include local authorities in the rather wide category of criminal justice bodies set out in Clause 11(4). On Second Reading, I rather questioned the extent of that list and wondered whether it is appropriate to regard the police commissioner in the same category as, for example, the Crown Prosecution Service or youth offending teams. However, be that as it may, if there are to be bodies such as those listed here—including, for example, youth offending teams, which are regarded as criminal justice bodies—surely it is logical that local government should be included as well, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, seems to acknowledge at least on this occasion. I hope that the Minister will accept that modest amendment. However, I will endorse the noble Baroness’s amendments that refer to the need for local government to be included, particularly, for example, in relation to the annual reports in Clause 13. It would be strange if the elected local policing body—effectively the commissioner—were not to give a local authority a response to a report or recommendations that such an authority might make to the commissioner. Again I hope—possibly vainly—that the Minister will see the logic of that and accept the amendment to that effect which the noble Baroness has moved.
Baroness Henig
My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 47 in this group. I apologise that I was premature in attempting to speak to this amendment an hour or so ago, having failed to notice that, in between the draft groupings and the final groupings, there had been some slight changes.
I particularly note the Minister’s Amendment 43 on behalf of the Government, which specifies that the local policing body must have regard to the priorities of the other statutory partners in developing policing plans. That is very welcome, and it begins to improve linkages with community safety partners. However, like the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, I still think that there are gaps in the landscape and that the Bill proposals could be further strengthened.
Amendment 47 suggests an active role for police and crime panel members in community safety partnerships, and it specifies that a panel member must sit on each such partnership within their area. The idea of this is to enable the panel to influence the strategic priorities of those partnerships before they are set, and to provide information to the panel and the commissioner to ensure that the policing family plays its part too.
It is all very well to say that the local policing body must have regard to the priorities of other partners; but what if these were at cross-purposes? Having a panel member in the partnership would enable an intelligent dialogue to take place and would enable that panel member to pick up on concerns before they became major problems.
The Minister is right in what he said earlier about this crucial set of relationships between CDRPs on the one hand and the commission, as we have it, on the other hand. However, I do not want this to be a discussion just about generalities, and it would be nice if this happened or that happened. Ultimately, all this is about better engagement. It is about trying to get an improved response on behalf of local communities. We are looking to try to get a system that works well for local people.
I recall that in Committee this House expressed real concern that one person, in the form of a commissioner, could not undertake the kind of in-depth engagement that 17 members formerly did, and that there was a real risk that they would be perceived as remote, not just by electors but by the many other bodies—public, private and voluntary—that work with the police. If the commissioner is going to find it very difficult to get round all the CDRPs, who can do it instead?
I think that the Government broadly agreed in their recently tabled amendments that the role of the panel must be as much about supporting the commissioner as about scrutiny. My amendment is a way of letting the panel develop a supportive role in practice. We keep hearing about the panel being supportive and about stricter checks and balances, but I am trying to get the panel to play a stronger role in practice. We know that membership of community safety partnerships would be one way for panel members to help to make this ambition effective and to get panels to be more supportive and play a more practical role.
We know that the police alone cannot solve all local problems that could arise. That is why community safety partnerships were set up in the first place. If we allow local policing bodies to become disconnected from the wider community safety partners, we will go back 15 years to the kind of silo thinking that saw record levels of crime at the end of the 1990s. I cannot believe that that is what the Government want.
It might be salutary if I remind the Minister that police authorities were not originally among the bodies required to be on CDRPs when they were established. Over time, it was found to be an error and was changed so that police authorities became statutory partners. Indeed, police authority members became among the most dedicated and active members of the partnerships. The reason was that it was a good source of two-way information. It was not just that police authorities, and now police panels, would get information back. Their presence was very much valued at district level both by local councils and divisional police officers. That system is working as we speak and I would be very reluctant to see it disappear.
I understand that the concept was not invented here. The charge has often been levelled at police forces up and down the country that they are very reluctant to introduce things that they have not pioneered or invented. I feel that the Government face the same danger here. They are trying to set up a new policing arrangement. I understand that, but there are lessons to be learnt about what has happened in the past 15 to 20 years, and we need to be prepared to learn them. My amendment attempts to restore a link that will otherwise be lost. I am trying to enable panel members to keep their pulse on the local landscape and ensure that both the panel and the commissioner are aware of developments, are equipped to understand problems and are able to co-ordinate effective joint action. Once again, I am trying to be constructive and to assist. I am absolutely certain that in the years to come, sooner or later the links will be restored. They have to be, because it is common sense. That is the way in which things will work at local level; it is just a question of making the change now rather than later.
Baroness Harris of Richmond
My Lords, I do not know why I did not put my name to the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Henig—I ought to have done—but I will say a few words in support of it. First, I welcome some of the government amendments in the group. I will single out Amendments 35 and 43. Amendment 35 deals with ensuring that every responsible authority in the context of community safety gets a copy of the police and crime plan. Amendment 43 ensures—going back the other way, as it were—that local policing bodies must have regard to the priorities of local partners. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Henig, that the Bill could go further. Therefore, I will say a few words in support of her amendment.
The Crime and Disorder Act 1998 is widely regarded as one of the best and most effective pieces of legislation passed by the previous Administration in their early years. It has made a huge difference to the way that local crime and anti-social behaviour is tackled. It is no accident that the general reduction in crime that we have witnessed in the past 15 years began at about the same time as the partnerships were put in place. Therefore, it seems strange that the Government appear less than enthusiastic about maintaining the link between the partnerships and the new police governance mechanisms.
It is particularly strange when one considers that the PCC’s role will include a vastly increased remit in relation to partnership bodies in other areas, such as criminal justice. Community safety partnerships seem to me to be the key fulcrum around which local engagement and local solutions are brought together. Why on earth we are disconnecting local policing bodies from these partnerships when they should be an asset to improving the effectiveness of local policing and partners, I really do not know. The noble Baroness, Lady Henig, is right to suggest that panels should be represented on community safety partnerships to preserve this relationship and I certainly support her amendment.
Lord Soley
I also support this amendment, very strongly so. It follows a number of things that I have argued on this Bill on the relatively few occasions that I have spoken. It is the issue on which I feel most strongly. Although it is not the Government’s intention, there is a real danger of breaking the link between the local authority, the local crime partnership and the police. What the noble Baroness, Lady Harris, has just said is absolutely right. Particularly before the 1998 Act, it was difficult to get really good relationships between police, local community groups and the local authorities. It was not because anybody was actively willing against it; it was because we did not have a structure for doing it.
It is a long time since I was involved in this sort of thing, but I remember those years and I fear very much us going back to that. I would have great trepidation because it will result in crime and social disorder being less well dealt with and it will therefore result in an increase in crime and social disorder. If the Government would cast their minds back to the period before 1998 they will recall that various groups, particularly those led by local authorities, and the police were trying to find new ways of working together. Some police forces, local authorities and groups managed to do it; others did not. It took that structure of the 1998 Act to give force to it. A situation emerged where, slowly, everybody accepted that the key to keeping down crime was not just more police officers on the beat—important as that is—but really good crime prevention programmes and a close link between the community and the police, headed up, but not always necessarily led by, the local authority. When you got that you suddenly found that everybody began to co-operate on a single target. They also began to identify crime hot spots or particular difficult crimes and you began to get co-operation.
I know that the Minister will say, “Don’t worry, it will be all right on the night, everything will be there to follow it up”. I have to say that I cannot see it in this Bill. You are talking about very large police areas and a remote detachment. When the Minister says, as she did on the last group of amendments, that a member of the panel will be able to attend or discuss with the council or the various groups which have been implied here, then my memory—again it is perhaps many years ago—of that sort of arrangement with local authorities often did not work well. The reason was that the commitment to that level of involvement was not satisfactory. What we need is a much more structured way and what my noble friend is putting forward offers that.
If the Minister cannot see her way to accepting this amendment, I would like to see the Government spell out much more clearly how they think crime prevention is going to work in the new structure and make sure that crime panels, local authorities and everybody else are working together on this. There is a danger with this Bill, structured as it is, that that will cease to function and if we lose that, we will go back 20 years, frankly, and the Government will live to regret it. So if the Minister can spell out to me why she is so convinced it will work I will be delighted not only to listen to her now but to reread her comments and try to understand it. For the life of me, I cannot at the moment see how this is going to improve the situation and it may well make it worse and take us back—as the noble Baronesses, Lady Henig and Lady Harris, said—to 1998 and possibly further than that.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, my noble friend Lord Soley has put his finger on it in supporting my noble friends Lady Henig and Lord Beecham. The argument for this Bill is about enhancing local accountability of the police force. Yet, remarkably, in a number of its provisions, it seeks to reduce the direct involvement of local authorities in these important issues. I accept the House has come to a view about police and crime plans, but surely we should be seeking to involve individual local authorities in a partnership with their local police forces and with the police and crime commissioner.
That is why it is right to seek to encourage the Government to ensure that there are references in the Bill to the relationship between police forces and local authorities. That is why this group of amendments is so important. The argument of the noble Baroness is that the police and crime panel, which will have representatives from local authorities, can do the job. I am sure we all hope that police and crime panels will be effective and I certainly think they would be more effective if the Minister could accept the amendment of my noble friend Lady Henig. The argument she put forward is that the panels, while concerned with scrutiny, could also play a valuable role in supporting the police force and the police and crime commissioner.
I certainly hope that, despite all my fears, there will be a mainly co-operative relationship between all three partners. Otherwise, we could end up with a situation in which the police and crime commissioner engages in political argument with the police and crime panel, with the chief constable squeezed in the middle. One thinks of all the energy that these partners in the local policing situation will spend arguing with each other and seeking to get public support when they should be working together to enhance police activity and effectiveness in a community.
I strongly support the amendments, which seek to place clearly in the Bill the role of local authorities and ensure that the police forces and PCCs of the future are required to engage with community safety partnerships. Surely one of the great advances that we have seen over the past few years has been the way that people have worked together to do everything they can to prevent crime and make sure that all the agencies involved co-operate and collaborate. It would be a great pity if as a result of this legislation those bodies were discouraged from so doing. That must be particularly so in the case of crime prevention and community safety partnerships. On those grounds, I hope that the Minister will be able to come back with at least some reassurance to noble Lords.
Baroness Browning
My Lords, before I deal with these amendments, I would like to clarify the Government’s position on this issue on which we have, as I mentioned earlier, tabled amendments. The Bill already contains provision for police and crime commissioners and the responsible authorities on community safety partnerships to co-operate in the exercise of their functions. The government amendments seek to strengthen that duty at a more strategic level by including provision for both parties to have regard to each other’s priorities. Perhaps I may clarify that. What that new duty adds is that PCCs and CSPs will be required to have regard to each other’s priorities, even in areas where they would not actually be working together—which could be the case—but where there would be benefits in them taking a consistent approach and having a knowledge of, and regard to, what the other’s priorities are. That would at least ensure that they did not take an inconsistent approach, a sort of left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing. We are anxious that they work together. It is a very important relationship, and that is why I have tabled amendments to strengthen it, as I have just outlined.
My noble friends Lady Hamwee and Lord Shipley have tabled Amendment 42. My noble friend reminded us that she is due a reply from my noble friend Lord Wallace, who promised in Committee to write to her. I will ensure that I chase up that letter tonight. Amendment 42 would remove the wording that stipulates that a plan should set out how a chief officer will be judged in his or her provision of policing and replaces it with a provision about how standards of policing will be measured. In my view, this goes to the heart of what these reforms are about, despite it being, on the face of it, a relatively minor amendment.
The Government’s model is that the panel and the public should hold the commissioner to account who, in turn, must hold the chief constable to account for the provision of operational policing. The original wording of the Bill achieves this, and it is right that the operationally independent commanding officer of a force, who exercises unfettered direction and control, is held personally accountable in law for the provision of policing. This amendment, perhaps interestingly, removes this subtle but very significant difference. That is not to say that standards of policing are not something that the PCC should be involved in. We are just clear that in maintaining operational independence and clarity of roles the PCC should hold the chief constable to account for meeting those standards. I am not in any way suggesting to my noble friends that the standards do not matter, but I believe that the line of accountability as set out in the Bill is the right way forward.
My concern with Amendments 44 and 45 is that they would significantly increase the burden on PCCs and members of the community safety partnerships. I understand the effect to be that they would have to co-operate with each other in relation to all the functions exercised by members of the community safety partnership and not just in their function of formulating and implementing community safety strategies. This would be a legal duty enforceable by the courts. However, I am concerned that it would give rise to considerable bureaucracy. Local authorities, fire services and health bodies would have to keep all their functions under review in order to show that they were co-operating with the PCC where possible, even though many of their functions have a limited connection to community safety or, in some circumstances, none at all.
The Government are proposing a more proportionate approach in that the duty to co-operate would extend only to community safety functions and there would be an additional duty on police and crime commissioners and community safety partnerships to have regard to each others' priorities, the latter being a much broader set of issues. At the beginning of my remarks, I outlined how I see that working in practice.
Similar concerns arise in relation to the proposal to extend the duty to co-operate to voluntary and statutory bodies concerned with crime reduction and victim support. There may be a significant number of these bodies, both local and national, to whom the duty would apply. We would not wish to create a bureaucratic requirement for PCCs and other bodies to show how they are carrying out this duty. More fundamentally, we do not think that the amendment is necessary as the appropriate links between police and crime commissioners and the relevant bodies will be created in any event, as we are providing the power for PCCs to issue grants, including to the voluntary sector and statutory bodies. In providing those grants, there would clearly be a great deal of discussion and recognition of the function and priorities of those groups.
With regard to Amendment 47, tabled by my noble friends Lady Hamwee and Lord Shipley, I see it as primarily reverting to current arrangements for police authorities by requiring members of police and crime panels to sit on community safety partnerships. It will be for the PCC to decide how best to manage relationships with CSPs. That is the strategic leadership they will provide. I have listened to the House's concerns on this issue and have introduced amendments that will enhance these provisions and essentially allow the PCC and local CSPs to manage the relationship locally. I have already spoken on these and will not repeat myself here. Suffice it to say that I have listened and, in seeking to amend the Bill in the light of the concerns voiced in this House at previous stages of the Bill, I have tabled those amendments accordingly.
Anyone who has dealings with CSPs will know that they operate very differently across the length and breadth of England and Wales. There is no one-size-fits-all system. These reforms are about reducing bureaucracy and about responsibility being taken locally for delivering quality services. I fear that the provisions tabled by my noble friends could increase the bureaucratic burden and add prescription to the Bill, which I do not believe is needed. The panel is there to scrutinise, not to share the executive functions of the PCC. I know this is a subject on which we disagree, and I see these amendments primarily as consequential to the removal of PCCs from the Bill under the original Clause 1, but I have to reiterate that that is the Government's position.
Baroness Henig
If a commissioner decided that he or she wanted members of the panel to sit on the panel, could that happen as an alternative way of achieving what we all want to see? Would that be within a commissioner’s remit?
Baroness Browning
I have not addressed that question before. I will come back to the noble Baroness. I am probably doing what my officials call “going off piste” here—I do it quite frequently—but I believe the PCC has the authority to build these relationships and if they felt it appropriate for someone, not necessarily a member of the panel, to represent them for a particular purpose, perhaps a particular project or for something that had been identified as a priority, I hope they would have the flexibility and the power to do that. I will write to the noble Baroness before I get into too deep water, but on the face of it I see no reason why the PCC should not nominate someone to do that if it were felt necessary for that to happen, not necessarily on a permanent basis but for a particular local situation where it was necessary to work quickly and rapidly.
I would add that police and crime panels are to be made up of representatives from every local authority in the police area, and each CSP in the police area will continue to benefit from a local authority representative. It seems to me that this negates the need for the PCP to be represented on the CSPs in its own right. The local authority is already represented on the CSP and the PCP so, to go back to my reply to the noble Baroness, if there were special circumstances because of a situation that had arisen, I would hope that the PCC would have the authority to ensure that there was representation to deal with specific issues.
Those representing the local authority are of course responsible for linking up that work. I heard what the noble Lord said about that not always working in practice but, quite frankly, one of the difficulties that we often face is that things do not work because individuals do not communicate as expected. If there were problems in that area, and a lack of joined-up communication, I would expect a rather grown-up approach in that someone, presumably the PCC, would step in and say, “We have a problem here, let us sort this out”; or, from the local government end, if it they felt that there was a problem at their end and they were not getting enough report-back from those who represented them, whom they will have chosen themselves, they would say, “We are not getting enough feedback on this, can we do something about it?”. Sometimes breakdowns in communication actually just need a bit of leadership—it is not rocket science. Of course, leadership is what we expect the PCC to give, and there is certainly plenty of leadership in local authorities to make sure that, if there is a problem, they identify it and do something about it—they do not need that to be in the Bill.
The Government are trying to devolve to local areas and to respect the people who serve on these committees, particularly the people at local government level who are elected to carry out those sorts of functions. I am therefore very resistant to going into minutiae of this kind in the Bill. Given that representatives will hold unique and privileged insights into policing and community safety on behalf of the local authority, it is inconceivable that a competent public servant would not ensure that the appropriate links were made and that the local authority would seek to rectify that situation. On that basis, I ask that the amendment not be pressed.
Amendment 49A, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, asks us to define local authorities as criminal justice bodies subject to the duty to co-operate. Again, I have some difficulties with this. First, local authorities are not criminal justice bodies. They are, however, concerned with the promotion of community safety. Secondly, Clause 11(1) already provides for PCCs and the responsible authorities that are members of CSPs to co-operate with each other. Local authorities are responsible authorities, so they are covered by the duty to co-operate in Clause 11(1). There is therefore no need to include them in a separate duty to co-operate in Clause 11(2). As I have already outlined, government Amendment 43 in this group strengthens the duty to co-operate in terms of the PCC and responsible bodies having regard to each other’s priorities in exercising their functions. This will apply to local authorities as responsible authorities. I am grateful to the noble Lord for tabling his amendment, but it does not really contradict what I have tabled.
Lord Beecham
I have just looked up the clause to which the noble Baroness refers—Clause 11 on co-operative working. She is quite correct to say that Clause 11(1) refers to the “responsible authority”. However, that subsection talks about the co-operation between the elected local policing body and the local authority as a responsible authority; it does not bring the local authority within the family of the other organisations in subsection (4) that are obliged to co-operate, which is why I suggested that they should be included there. In other words, this could be seen as a bilateral relationship instead of a multilateral relationship, which was the defect that my amendment sought to cure. Will the noble Baroness take it away and think about it further?
Baroness Browning
Yes, I am very happy to do that. I had rather thought that the noble Lord was seeking to strengthen my own amendment in this matter. I take his point about the difference between bilateral and multilateral relationships. I am very happy to take it away and look at it again, just to be absolutely sure that we have got this right. I had regarded the amendment that he tabled today as rather unnecessary, but I will double-check because I agree with what he is trying to achieve here.
Amendments 53 and 59 seek to increase the panel’s influence over the PCC. Amendment 53 provides that the panel may specify information that it requires the PCC to include in his or her annual report. Amendment 59 provides that the PCC, when carrying out his or her functions, must have regard not only to reports and recommendations made by the panel on the annual report for the previous financial year but to any other ad hoc reports or recommendations issued by the panel. I completely agree that a PCC should be listening to and actively considering the panel’s views and recommendations, and I would fully expect it to do so. This is bound to happen without it being put on a statutory footing. The panel will have the opportunity to scrutinise the PCC, and that will include the PCC’s consideration of any of its advice, reports or recommendations. If the panel believes that information is needed in the public domain, it has the powers to request and publish it itself. Ultimately the public will judge the PCC’s decisions. The Government are clear that we have struck the right balance here, so I ask that the amendments not be pressed to a vote.
Amendments 54A and 56A concern victims and witnesses of crime, and would add witnesses of crime to the list of groups whose views the PCC must seek and have regard to when drafting and issuing the police and crime plan. This is in addition to the present provision that allows for the views of the people in that police area and of victims of crime. This is already covered. I would certainly expect the PCC, in having regard to the views of people in that policing area—particularly, as it says, the views of victims of crime—to consider both the victims and the views of witnesses.
Amendments 40, 46, 55, 56 and 57 add bodies working to combat crime and disorder and assisting the victims of crime to the list of organisations that the PCC and MOPC must consult or have regard to when drafting the police and crime plan. Amendment 58 adds local authorities, including parish and town councils, to that list. There is already provision in the Bill for the PCC to consult victims of crime in the area; by extension, we would expect this to include bodies and services that help to support them. There is no need for this further provision. As for bodies reducing crime and disorder, a PCC will be driven to reduce crime and disorder simply by virtue of his or her position and electoral mandate. This is at the heart of what we expect PCCs to achieve: to reduce crime and antisocial behaviour.
The Government do not seek to tell PCCs how to go about their job in detail where that is unnecessary or disproportionate. Crime and policing strategies must be formulated according to the needs of the local area. It would be a short-sighted PCC indeed who did not consult such groups, including witnesses of crime, or pay attention to local councils within the force area. Amendment 239A seeks to list all PCCs as responsible authorities for the purpose of Section 5 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. In effect, it would make a PCC a member of a community safety partnership within each local authority area in his or her force area. To do so would place a requirement on the PCC to agree with each member of a CSP a strategy for the reduction of crime and disorder and a strategy for combating the misuse of drugs.
However, the current provisions in the Bill, as set out in Schedule 11, envisage a different role for PCCs in relation to the CSPs. We are taking a power to make regulations conferring functions on PCCs in relation to CSPs. We intend to make regulations allowing the PCC to bring together community safety partnerships within the force area to address the specifics of crime reduction and drug abuse, as listed in the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. The PCC will not sit on a CSP but will have a commissioning role over its activities, including grant-issuing powers. Therefore, the police service role in delivering those activities will be represented by the chief constable or his or her nominated representative, and ultimately the chief constable will be held to account by the PCC for the force’s role on the CSP. We see the existing provisions as adequate. Therefore, I ask that these particular amendments not be pressed to a vote.
Baroness Doocey
“( ) if the draft plan or variation is referred back by the panel under section 34(1)(c) and (1A), ensure the plan or variation follows the reasons given in the Assembly’s resolution referring the draft plan back.”
Baroness Doocey
My Lords, I shall speak also to my other amendments in this group. The purpose of Amendments 39, 168, 173, 175, 176, 177 and 178 is to make the provisions of the Bill consistent with those proposed in the Localism Bill. The Localism Bill gives the London Assembly a new power to reject the Mayor’s draft statutory strategies by a two-thirds majority vote. The Bill makes no equivalent provision. As it stands, it would not have the effect of applying the Assembly’s new power to the Mayor’s draft police and crime plan. Once these two Bills become law the London Assembly would have the power to reject any mayoral strategy with the sole exception of the draft police and crime plan. This discrepancy makes no sense. There is no substantive difference between the draft police and crime plan and other mayoral strategies, so there is no justification for the police and crime plan, which is probably the most important of the mayoral strategies, being excluded from the new arrangements. This is perhaps why the Mayor of London and every political party on the London Assembly are in favour and fully support this amendment.
Amendment 171 is designed to clarify whether the London Assembly could appoint independent members of the police and crime panel and whether the Assembly could enable independent members to vote. This has now been clarified by a government amendment, so I will not say any more about this at this stage.
My final amendment in this group, Amendment 180, is designed to give the London Assembly’s police and crime panel the power to require senior Met officers and civilian staff to attend meetings and to provide information. The Government have said that the Assembly’s police and crime panel can request senior police officers to attend. This is completely meaningless since there is no way of enforcing a request. The Government have argued that allowing the Assembly to summon senior police officers would blur the lines of responsibility. I simply cannot accept this. I believe that it is perfectly legitimate for the Assembly to be able to question the Commissioner of Police. The Government have not responded so far to the second half of my request—the part about allowing the Assembly to require senior staff to attend and produce documents. Surely their argument about blurring lines of accountability cannot possibly apply to senior police staff. Requiring either attendance or papers would allow the Assembly to have information on which to inform its assessment of the mayor’s policies, actions and decisions. I beg to move.
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, I have Amendments 166, 167 and 179 in this group. The first two would allow the London Assembly to determine whether to discharge its functions under the Bill either through a committee or through the full Assembly. At the moment the Bill prescribes. In responding to a similar amendment at the previous stage, the Minister said:
“The first question to address here is why there should be a bespoke committee of the London Assembly called the police and crime panel rather than, as proposed by noble Lords, the functions being conferred on the London Assembly as a whole. The reason is one of practicality. Having a dedicated committee, representative of the wider London Assembly, will ensure that sufficient attention and scrutiny can be paid to delivering its policing responsibilities and would also allow for independent members to be brought on to the panel … This smaller group will be able to focus its attentions on the important business of scrutinising, in detail, the actions and decisions of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime”.—[Official Report, 24/5/11; col. 1800.]
I am not sure whether I can say this of the noble Baroness, but I thought, reading that, it was really rather paternalistic. The London Assembly is a grown-up body, with its current and past members and, I am sure, its future members, and ought to be able to take its own decisions as to the best way of organising itself.
I remember when we were debating the GLA Bill, which became the GLA Act 1999, it originally provided for the Government to deal with, I think, the standing orders of the Assembly. I remember the noble Baroness, Lady Farrington of Ribbleton, saying from the Government Front Bench, “This is ridiculous. It can sort itself out”. She was quite right then and I make the same point now. There seems to have been some confusion, in any event, on the Government side, because earlier the same day the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, said:
“We argue that it is for the London Assembly as a democratically elected body to decide for itself how the membership of the panel should be chosen”.—[Official Report, 24/5/11; col. 1751.]
I accept that this was a slightly different context and a slightly different point, but I argue that the London Assembly as a democratically elected body should be able to decide for itself how it carries out its functions.
Amendment 179 would provide for the Assembly to approve or reject the draft police and crime plan, or a variation, with the veto of a two-thirds majority—unco-ordinated, but the same point as that made by my noble friend. I feel that it is appropriate for the Assembly to be able to treat the plan in the same way as it does mayoral strategies. On this point, the Minister said at the previous stage that it would not be appropriate for the panel to have a power of veto because of the plan being statutory in nature. My short point here is that the strategies to which my noble friend has referred—she managed to say statutory strategies without tripping over the words—are statutory in nature. I do not see that there is any qualitative difference between the two.
Finally, I have two questions about government Amendment 172. I welcome the clarification of the position regarding co-options, but if the Assembly is to be able to fix the number of members of the panel—reverting to my earlier point—can the Assembly create a committee which consists of all 25 members as a result of this amendment?
The third subsection of the amendment states that the,
“panel functions must be exercised with a view to supporting the effective exercise of the functions of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime”.
That picks up today’s theme of the constructive, collaborative and supportive nature of the relationship. I am not quite sure whether the Government might have gone too far on that because, in exercising the functions, the panel or the Assembly might support the best outcome but oppose the way in which the mayor’s office chooses to exercise them.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, this is an important group of amendments on which a number of issues are raised. The amendments highlight how serious the Government are, or are not, about these scrutiny bodies—in London it is the London Assembly structure—in terms of what they can and cannot do. The amendments would enable some opportunities for the London Assembly to propose amendments and changes to the policing plan.
At the moment, the London Assembly is charged with consideration of a whole series of statutory plans; for example, the Spatial Development Strategy and the transport strategy. I think that there are about seven or eight of these strategies, but that figure may have increased since I was a member of the London Assembly. In addition, there is the biodiversity action plan, which is specifically referred to in the Greater London Authority Act. The Government, or one arm of them, are busy changing the statute so as to give the London Assembly the power for which I have often argued in the past; namely, the ability to amend those plans by a suitable majority. Why is that not part of the Government’s vision for policing? It is absent and I do not understand why. I could suggest that the Home Office does not talk to the Department for Communities and Local Government, which is unthinkable, or that there is a reason why the policing strategy is seen in a different light from the other plans and strategies that the mayor is required to put before the London Assembly.
I suppose I am pleased to see that the Government have responded to the concerns expressed by many Members of your Lordships’ House about the need to ensure that, in the case of the PCPs, the chief officer of police should be able to appear before them or, in the case of the London Assembly, that the London Assembly should be able to see the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis. But it is a very weak and watery power that the Government have put forward in the amendment. It is simply the power to invite, which does not need to be written into statute because it already exists. The Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis appears several times a year before the full London Assembly on the basis of the current implicit right to invite. Therefore, the Government have made no concession at all.
By the abolition of police authorities, the Government are removing the place where the public know there will be visible answerability by senior police officers. The right to invite is not a significant new right. Under most circumstances, any sensible chief officer of police and any Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis will accept such an invitation. When there are difficult circumstances, it is important to the public that senior police officers are seen to be required to appear before a public body in that way. I have spoken in this Chamber previously—I will not repeat all the points I have made—about the value of visible answerability and the important opportunities that that gives for the public to see that the police are being held accountable.
It is no substitute that under the new arrangements London will have the deputy MOPC who will not, unfortunately, have the benefit of being directly elected but will hold the commissioner of police to account, while outside London the PCC will hold the chief officer of police to account. That process inevitably will happen in private. A one-to-one meeting cannot be held in public. That will not be a system of visible answerability, so there has to be that visible answerability somewhere else—in the case of London, that should be the London Assembly. The right to invite is not sufficient. On limited occasions, there must be the right for the London Assembly to summons. It is very sad that that has not been the case. In passing, the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, asked whether the London Assembly could decide that all 25 members should sit and carry out this scrutiny function. At present, the full London Assembly on occasions meets as a whole to ask questions about policing. Will that now be precluded by the Bill and the way in which it has been structured? That is the implication. You end up with less visible answerability and less visible accountability, and the arrangements that already exist are diminishing. Surely, that is not the Government’s intention, which is why this group of amendments is so important.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, it seems to me that the noble Baronesses, Lady Doocey and Lady Hamwee, have raised some important points. Like my noble friend, I am puzzled by the inconsistency between government departments when dealing with similar matters in legislation going through your Lordships’ House. We raised this matter previously regarding corporates sole and the absence of effective corporate governance, in contrast to changes that other government departments are making regarding similar governance issues. I specifically referred last week to the Department of Health. As a result of the listening exercise it is changing the proposals on governance to ensure that what were going to be called GP consortia and are now to be clinical commissioning groups, will have effective corporate governance. Another example is the extension of the Assembly’s new power in relation to mayoral strategies not in this Bill to police and crime powers. I cannot see the logic of that. Surely if it is deemed appropriate for the Assembly in certain circumstances to be able to amend plans, why on earth is it not appropriate with the police and crime plan?
I, too, am puzzled about why the panel is not in the last resort able to require the attendance of senior police officers. The Government’s view is that that would blur the line of responsibility. They have also make that argument in relation to police and crime panels outside London. Far from blurring the line of responsibility, it seems to me that two things will happen. When the MOPC goes before the London panel or when—outside London, although I know that it is not part of these amendments—the PCC goes before a police and crime panel, the panel is bound to ask matters on operational issues. That is inevitable. The MOPC will either have to say, “It’s not me guv, that’s down to the commissioner”; or, as I suspect will happen, it will seek to answer on operational issues. Those of us who have been before Select Committees or scrutiny committees know that, in the end, it is difficult not to give an answer.
I suggest to the noble Baroness that the real reason why the Government will not give way on this is that they know we are on a journey towards elected politicians running the police force. That is the inevitable consequence of where we are going. By not allowing the panels to require the attendance of senior police officers, the Government are encouraging that process. Surely on a policing matter that should be the direct responsibility of the commissioner, the panel and not just MOPC should be able to summon the commissioner.
Baroness Browning
My Lords, I would like to deal with one or two points that have just been raised before I touch in more detail on the amendments that have been spoken to this evening. We want the Assembly to have a role in informing the development of the plan which is in keeping with the rest of the country and the elected mandate of the PCC. We do not believe that there should be a veto, because no other PCP will have the power of veto outside London. It would take away—this is critical—the mandate on which they were elected. I see the noble Lord looking heavenward but this is at the heart of PCCs. They will be elected on a mandate that will spell out to voters how they see themselves managing crime reduction.
Baroness Browning
I am halfway through the sentence; perhaps I may finish it. At the heart of the Bill is an ability to be elected on a manifesto and on a mandate which people will have heard. People will either support them on that or give their support to an alternative candidate with a different way of taking these matters forward. The right to veto would completely negate what had been put to the people who had voted in good faith on the contents of the strategy. I give way to the noble Lord.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, there are two issues here. One is London and what happens there and the other is the impact of a decision in London in relation to police forces in the rest of the country. As far as London is concerned, I do not see the difference between the mayor as the MOPC and the mayor as the Mayor of London. The manifesto will contain proposals that relate to both policing and non-policing issues, and since the Government have decided that it is entirely appropriate for the Assembly in certain circumstances to change those strategies, I cannot see the logic of the argument coming from the Home Office. Is it not supporting the overall government position on this? Secondly, if you agreed to this in London, would that differ from the position in other parts of the country? I see the force of that argument but again I refer the noble Baroness to what Mr Pickles said at the conference last week in Birmingham, when he made it clear that elected mayors outside London will not have any additional powers to those held by local authorities at the moment. Already within local government we have a situation where it is accepted, and the Government support, that there will be differences between London and elsewhere. I know that the Home Office is a very distinguished department of state but just occasionally it would be nice to think that it was actually a part of the Government.
Baroness Browning
My Lords, I assure the House that there is absolutely no question that the Home Office is not part of the Government. I am shocked to the quick that the noble Lord should suggest such a thing. There is a difference between the Mayor of London and the mayor’s election but, unlike mayoral strategies on which the mayor goes to the electorate, within the Bill there is a lot of detail which is already in statute that relates to policing, structure and the mayor’s function in London policing. This is therefore different from other matters which the mayor may go to the electorate on as part of a broader manifesto. I see the noble Lord, Lord Harris, about to rise.
Lord Harris of Haringey
I am grateful to the Minister. I hope that she is not relying on a brief from the Home Office which suggests that somehow the policing and crime plan is intrinsically different from the other mayoral strategies. There is the most extraordinary volume of legislation about what the Mayor of London can do on development issues in London. There is an extraordinary volume of legislation about what the Mayor of London can do with transport. The legislation specifies very complicated arrangements for consultation with the public of London before the mayor can frame the spatial development strategy and the transport strategy. To suggest that there is anything special here regarding policing compared with those other pieces of legislation is, I am afraid, nonsense.
To save me getting up again, if the Government are concerned that this sets a precedent for the rest of the country then why on earth are they having a different system of governance in London than in the rest of the country? Once you have accepted a different system of governance in London, then what you do in terms of how London operates does not set a precedent.
Baroness Browning
My Lords, we have been round this circuit quite a few times. The difference is that the mayor, unlike PCCs, covers a distinct police force area. The election of the mayor has already taken place; we are familiar with the structure. I know that the noble Lord is going to jump up and talk about the City of London police, and I accept the point. He has made the point and I think that I have fully understood it.
The structure in London is different from that in the rest of the country. In this uniformity across the country, however, we have tried to identify where there are differences in London—and there are differences—and draft the Bill accordingly. This may come as a surprise to the noble Lord because I have just said that we already have detail in statute on this matter, which we have, but at all levels, whether it is London or elsewhere, we have tried to introduce checks and balances throughout the Bill at the same time as keeping a light touch. We want to give PCCs and the MOPC the opportunity to be flexible and to make their plans according to their local priorities and demands. There is a structure within the Bill that will affect all of the country, including London—and there are differences that affect London because of the precedent of already having an elected mayor—but we want this to be something that is not top-heavy and not prescriptive from the centre, that allows local accountability for local decision-making that is a local priority and not something set down by Whitehall.
I would also like to put this on the record. Some noble Lords were not here on Friday when it was suggested that there is a difference between me and the Home Office. I have heard what has been said about the Home Office. This is not the first time in my career that I have been a Minister. It has never been my practice as a Minister to separate myself either from the department that I represent or from the Government whom I represent. There is hardly a cigarette paper’s width—if that is not being terribly politically incorrect—between us. I take full responsibility for the Home Office in your Lordships’ House. I hope it is meant kindly, but it does not always sound that way. I suggest to noble Lords that if there is criticism of the Home Office in your Lordships’ House, it rests on my desk. I take full responsibility for that. If people have complaints about the Home Office, I would ask that, as with all other complaints, they put it in writing, and I will respond accordingly.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton
My Lords, I could not resist the cigarette paper. I have been listening very carefully to the noble Baroness. I have a concern about public examination and questioning of the chief police officer’s ability to respond to what the community wants. I come back to two points in this Bill. The needs and expressed views and wishes of different parts of London can be very varied and the Assembly represents the whole of London. I accept that there is not a cigarette paper between the Government and the noble Baroness and the department, although some of us who have had experience with different departments find that occasionally one department can be slightly more flexible on a Bill than other departments can, but that is by the bye.
I have a growing concern about the role of the chief police officer. Underpinning the Bill is the assumption that everyone who voted will get the policies that they wanted, the whole policies and nothing but the policies. I am deeply concerned about one individual being able to do that. To me, public accountability is critical in this amendment, and in other parts of the country, in terms of protection. Some major areas of police work and the accountability of the chief constable will go to the area of police activity that is wider than the area covered by the authority or the chief constable. It may be that the CPC will be saying, “Look, I vowed that we would do A, B and C but we are not able to do as much of C as we would have liked because the Home Secretary is determined that some of the resources must go to something else”. Being able to be questioned and to air their views and policy initiatives in public is critically important to chief constables. I personally would prefer police authorities not to be according to the Government. However, to protect professionalism, the right to be questioned and heard in public is a basic professional right.
Baroness Browning
I take seriously what the noble Baroness says about chief officers. I appreciate the seriousness of the point that she is making. I hope that the Bill has taken account of that, not least in the protocol that has been discussed with colleagues in this House across all parties. I said on Report last week that we are still considering whether or not to put the protocol or the principle of a protocol in the Bill. That protocol has been developed with ACPO and others to try and get this balance right. It is very much in the interests of chief officers. I am not able to say today what the outcomes are of that decision-making, but I assure the House that we are seriously looking at whether or not to put the principle into the Bill. Did the noble Lord, Lord Harris, want me to give way?
Lord Harris of Haringey
The Minister may have misunderstood what I was saying on a point that I made earlier on. It is not that the ability of the Assembly to vary local plans runs across the thrust of government policy. I understand that the thrust of government policy is to release local energies to determine what the priorities are. If that is the case and you then say that the London Assembly cannot vary what is being determined locally, does that not cut across the sort of localism that the Government say they want? This is not about the problems of the Assembly interfering with national strategies or requirements; it is about the ability of the Assembly to say, “These are the local priorities”. Where there is a clear two-thirds margin—a pretty high target—that is something that the MOPC would have to take on board.
I cannot understand why the Government are saying that policing is different from spatial development strategy—say, the size of strategic tall buildings, the size of the congestion zone area or any of those other issues. These are not laid down nationally; they are determined locally. Of course the Mayor of London has been elected with a manifesto but the London Assembly, representing all parts of London, may well say, by a two-thirds majority, “We think that you should take this back and review it”. That is what the Government are saying could happen in those other areas—why are they not saying that it can happen with regard to policing?
Baroness Browning
We have a situation in London where, although I said earlier that there is a difference between London and the other areas, there will be an opportunity to scrutinise the plan. I do not want this to sound as if it is an isolated case. We have had these discussions now. We have tried to strengthen in the Bill the fact that there is a need not just to scrutinise and challenge but also to support. Where the plan is being drawn up, it is not just something that happens overnight. I would expect it to be subject to a series of consultations so there would be ample opportunity, if there were reservations, for the plan to be amended to take account of different points of view that had been put forward. It is not just an isolated thing.
Perhaps this is my fault but I have a feeling that in the earlier stages of the Bill, when we were talking about the plan, I did not spell out this aspect in more detail. It is not the case that one day somehow a plan is suddenly produced and presented for consultation and people sitting in committee then make their views known. We want them to have time to look at the plan in some detail; I raised this in an earlier amendment. There will need to be that period of time. The plan will not be put together overnight. There will be plenty of opportunities for views to be brought forward and for real consultation to take place.
Lord Harris of Haringey
I do not want to prolong this, but that is exactly the situation that already exists regarding the transport strategy. There is a requirement, which if I remember correctly seems almost unduly onerous, for any amendment to the transport strategy to require two separate consultation processes. I look across the Chamber at those current Members of the London Assembly. So the transport strategy is not something that happens suddenly; it happens after a great deal of discussion and process. Yet the Government are saying that the transport strategy can be amended by a two-thirds majority of the London Assembly. I put this question again to your Lordships: why is policing different from transport?
Baroness Browning
I realise that the mayor will have said things about transport, I appreciate that, but the mandate that the mayor will have been elected on will have outlined how he sees the reduction of crime in London. It is important that that is not fettered by a veto, which it could be.
Lord Harris of Haringey
You could say exactly the same about congestion in London. The mayor has stood on a manifesto that says he is going to reduce congestion in London by various methods, yet the Government are giving the power to the London Assembly to amend the strategy by a two-thirds majority after two separate consultation exercises before the strategy is finalised and those decisions are taken.
I am not trying to be difficult here. Well, I am trying to be difficult because I think that these are important issues, but I am afraid that the Government are being totally illogical when they say that policing is different from those other strategies.
Baroness Browning
My Lords, I have to remain illogical to the noble Lord. I can think of nothing else to say to him now that we have not already taken around this circuit, not just in today’s debate but in Committee.
I wonder whether I might start to address some of the amendments that have been raised in this debate, beginning with the veto in Amendment 179 tabled by my noble friends Lady Hamwee and Lord Shipley. I am sure it will come as no surprise to them when I say that I cannot accept it, probably for the most of the reasons that have been exchanged not with them but across the Floor of the House in the past 10 minutes. I can also not accept Amendment 178, tabled by my noble friend Lady Doocey. The amendment would give the London Assembly the power to reject the MOPC’s draft plan by a two-thirds majority and have the Assembly’s comments reflected in the plan. Amendments 39, 168, 173, 175, 176 and 177 are consequential to my noble friend’s amendment and can be considered with it.
The House will be aware that the Government have made a concession in relation to police and crime panel vetoes. We listened to the concerns of the House and have introduced amendments creating a new power of veto for the London Assembly police and crime panel in relation to the appointment of a non-Assembly member as the deputy mayor for policing and crime. We are also reducing the majority required for all the various panel vetoes from three-quarters to two-thirds. I understand that that is not as low as noble Lords would have liked. Points have been raised again on Report, as they were in Committee. But it is a concession. It was at three-quarters, so we have listened by reducing it to two-thirds. Noble Lords have said that it would be quite hard to get two-thirds of people there if such a vote were to take place. I have to say that such is my experience of democracy that wherever you set the threshold you are often disappointed that people do not feel that it is as important a matter as you do for them to turn out and vote. The right of veto is in the Bill. If such a matter occurred and people on the panel felt it was very important, they would almost certainly try to make the case to ensure that their points of view were known to those who were eligible to use the veto.
However, I am clear that setting the strategy for the force must be an unfettered decision for the PCC or the MOPC. This is precisely where its electoral mandate will come into play and where the public will most visibly see their views and opinions reflected. I realise that that is not the view of all your Lordships in the Chamber tonight, but it would be against the spirit of our reforms to allow that electoral mandate to be overridden by the panel. There is provision in the Bill for the panel to provide recommendations on the plan. It is a robust, transparent mechanism that ensures that views are heard and debated. However, the final decision on the plan must rest with the PCC or, in the case of London, the MOPC, and not the panel. For those reasons, I ask that the amendment be withdrawn.
Amendments 166 and 167, again from my noble friends Lady Hamwee and Lord Shipley, would allow the London Assembly to choose whether its functions in relation to the scrutiny of the MOPC should be discharged by the Assembly as a whole or by a committee—the police and crime panel. We have been clear that having a dedicated police and crime panel perform these functions will ensure that sufficient attention and scrutiny can be given to policing and crime matters. It would also allow for independent members to be brought into the panel to ensure diversity and the right mix of skills. The Government have tabled Amendment 172 to make that clear, having listened very carefully to representations that were made at discussions outside the Chamber and also in the Chamber in Committee. This smaller group will be able to focus its attentions on the important business of scrutinising in detail the actions and decisions of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, particularly in respect of the police and crime plan. In addition to the provisions in the Bill, I would highlight that the government amendment in this group provides for the London Assembly to have an important and extensive say on the membership of its police and crime panel committee. I note that it is common for the London Assembly to operate in committees, one example being the transport committee. I hope that the Home Office has got that right.
Baroness Hamwee
Before my noble friend sits down, I am aware that this is Report stage although it has not always been treated quite that way. My noble friend has been dealt an almost impossible hand but may I tempt her to respond to the question of the noble Lord, Lord Harris, on whether there is to be a change in how the Assembly operates? May it no longer in plenary session ask questions of the mayor in his capacity as MOPC? I cannot believe that either of the mayors, of whom London has so far had experience, would themselves be constrained, nor can I think that any chair of the Assembly would say, “I have to stop you there. This is outside the legislation”. I never succeeded in stopping the first Mayor of London when he strayed, as he did rather widely. This seems unbelievable but there is a serious question. In a plenary session when an individual who holds the two offices is answering questions, can he or she not answer them in a holistic fashion, moving between strict policing matters and non-policing matters?
Baroness Browning
My Lords, I understand that there is absolutely no change. There is no reason why they cannot ask those questions.
Baroness Browning
I assume that if a question is asked and somebody has the answer they would have the courtesy to give it. There is nothing in the Bill to prevent them answering a question they are asked.
Baroness Doocey
My Lords, I welcome government Amendment 172. I am very happy with that and will withdraw my Amendment 171. Like the noble Lord, Lord Harris, I am at a complete loss to understand the points made by my noble friend the Minister. I have listened very carefully to everything she said. Every single mayor has been elected on a manifesto basically of two things: police and transport. All of the issues to do with transport are exactly the same as those to do with policing. Nothing that has been said by my noble friend has made me understand the thinking behind the Government saying that it is okay for the Assembly to be given a new right to reject the mayor’s strategy by two-thirds in transport but it would be completely wrong for the Assembly to be given the right to reject the police and crime panel report. I simply do not understand where the Government are coming from. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Browning
“( ) In its application by virtue of subsection (11)(e), section 43(2) of the 1999 Act (duty to send copies of current version of police and crime plan) has effect with the insertion after “to each London borough council” of the words “and to each of the other persons and bodies that are, for the purposes of section 5 of the Crime Disorder Act 1998, responsible authorities in relation to local government areas that are wholly or partly within the metropolitan police district.”
Baroness Browning
“( ) The elected local policing body for a police area must, in exercising its functions, have regard to the relevant priorities of each responsible authority.”
Baroness Browning
Baroness Browning
““relevant priority”, in relation to a responsible authority, means a priority applicable to the exercise of that authority’s functions which is identified by that authority in compliance with a requirement imposed by regulations made under section 6(2) of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998;”
Baroness Hamwee
Baroness Hamwee
In moving Amendment 51, I will also speak to my Amendments 52, 54, 142 and 143, with which it is grouped. I again apologise to the House that my amendments repeat, or are similar to, amendments to which I spoke in Committee. The large groups in Committee meant that we had what I might describe as composite responses from the Dispatch Box.
Amendments 51 and 53 continue the theme of checks and balances in the shape of tools to enable the panel to do its job. Clause 12 is headed “Information for public etc”. Under Clause 12(3), the commissioner must publish information which he or she “considers to be necessary” to enable local people to assess the matters that are set out: that is, information that he—some may be “she”, but I guess they will mostly be “he”—considers necessary. No doubt that consideration has to be done in good faith, but it strikes me that it would be almost impossible to enforce. I do not know who would enforce it. My amendment would insert, as additional matters to be included, those,
“which are required by the relevant police and crime panel”.
As I say, these tools would enable the job to be done and would interpose the strict checks and balances required to check and balance the commissioner.
I have already alluded to the provision that I seek to add to Clause 13. It is not an onerous or difficult obligation but would allow the panel before the beginning of the relevant year to tell the commissioner what it thinks ought to be included in the annual report. This was applied in London under the GLA Act when I chaired the Assembly. After the Assembly had had a preliminary discussion about the items that it thought should be included in the mayor’s annual report, there was a negotiation with the mayor. It was a perfectly civilised but productive process.
Amendment 52 is designed to draw attention to the position of victims of crime and to ensure that “performance” includes,
“the treatment of victims of crime”.
I have brought this up again because I do not think it was answered in the group in which it was contained previously.
Amendments 142 and 143 are a repetition of amendments concerned with the attendance of senior officers and the production of documents and information. I heard what the Minister had to say in our debate on the previous group about allowing the attendance of the most senior officer. You do not need to put into legislation that someone may attend a meeting; the legislation should not set out a narrative of what might happen but provide rules if people are not minded to do the sensible thing. Surely the point of a law of the land is to require attendance—in this case of someone who is not particularly willing to attend. If we think that attendance is a good and productive thing, the role of the legislation is to ensure that it is required.
My noble friend Lord Wallace did not state specifically which amendments he was speaking to—he said that the Government were right about some of them—but he said that the balance was wrong and that he was concerned to protect the commissioner from,
“being inundated with requests for information”.—[Official Report, 24/5/11; col. 1750.]
However, the panel’s role is to advise and scrutinise the police and crime commissioner, especially in respect of the annual police and crime plan. To advise and to scrutinise in the broadest sense, the panel needs information, and not only the information that the commissioner determines that it should have. This applies to every piece of information because everything is relevant to the plan. I fully appreciate where accountability lies—with the chief constable to the police and crime commissioner and with the commissioner to the electorate—but there are dotted lines in there to enable the panel to be brought in. Sometimes it is appropriate and practical for someone a bit less senior than the chief constable to attend, but at other times it is necessary to insist on his attendance and to insist that documents and information are provided.
The Government have tabled amendments in this group. Some of them are about the request to which I have referred; others change the relevant term from “reports” to “information”. They are a minor improvement but still do not seem to my mind adequately to recognise the role of the panel. I beg to move.
Baroness Henig
My Lords, I have tabled Amendment 141 in this group, which would provide that outside London the panel should be able to call senior police officers to answer questions as well as the commissioner and members of the commissioner’s staff. As I shall spell out, this amendment complements the amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee. I very much agree with the sentiments that she expressed with regard to her amendments.
It is very important for panels to be able to call in senior police officers. The panels must be able to triangulate evidence if they are to carry out their role of effectively scrutinising the commissioner. It is true that they will be able to gather information from the commissioner under the provisions in the Bill, but they will also need to analyse and test that information. The most effective way of challenging and testing information is to ask questions about it. Certainly, the panel can ask questions of the commissioner under the provisions already in the Bill, but this may tell it only what the commissioner wants it to hear, particularly if the commissioner has been responsible for providing that information in the first place. All my experience in local government and policing tells me that it is extremely important for the panel to be able to reality check what it hears from the commissioner against the views of senior members of the police force.
Lord De Mauley
My Lords, as you will see in the government amendments in the group, which I shall come to in a moment, we agree that it is important that information is available to the public and the panel in assessing the actions of the police and crime commissioner and the force. Amendments 51, 52 and 54, in the name of my noble friends Lady Hamwee and Lord Shipley, concern the provision of published information. We are grateful to my noble friends for these amendments. Amendment 51 would compel the PCC to publish information that the panel deems appropriate, while Amendment 52 stipulates that performance information should include data pertaining to the treatment of victims of crime. Amendment 54 states that the PCC must provide documentation as well as information.
On Amendments 51 and 52, the panel already has the right to request information, and provided that it would not jeopardise national security or personal safety it must be supplied, and nothing prevents the panel from publishing it. There is further access to information through regular, light-touch inspections by HMIC and crime mapping. Therefore the panel already has a means of obtaining information, and, as I say, should it wish to see it published, that is perfectly acceptable.
On Amendment 54, the panel can again request any information that it deems necessary from the PCC, and I am happy that it is on the record that we interpret “information” to include documents. This should be provided except where it might adversely impact the safety of the public. I hope my noble friends agree that the provisions in the Bill allow for the outcomes they seek to be met, and I ask that these amendments are not pressed.
Amendment 141, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Henig, and Amendment 142, in the names of my noble friends Lady Hamwee and Lord Shipley, would allow the panel to require the attendance of senior officers from the police force. As I will discuss in bringing forward Amendments 145 and 181, we agree that there are times when it is right that operational matters must be considered alongside the police and crime commissioner’s role. However, these amendments go much further. We do not accept that the panel should be able to scrutinise other members of the force directly. It is the police and crime commissioner’s role to hold the chief constable to account and the role of the panel to hold the PCC to account. Duplicating the accountability of the chief constable is confusing and would only undermine the effective and clear leadership that policing needs.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, if the panel cannot require the chief constable to come before it, inevitably the police and crime commissioner will be called upon to answer operational issues. If that happens, the line between the role of the PCC and the chief constable will become very blurred. I know the Government say that they resist the amendment because they do not want to blur the role of the PCC overall as being accountable to the electorate, but their approach will bring its own perverse incentives.
Lord De Mauley
I see the noble Lord’s point. He is right to point out that there is a compromise in that concession. However, the chief constable has to be responsible for his force. He or she is the person invited to attend with the PCC. On the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Henig, if they do not know an answer they should go away and find it, like a Minister does at the Dispatch Box. We are trying to avoid a situation where the force is split by allowing the same question to be addressed to different people. That would risk undercutting the authority of the chief constable.
Baroness Henig
I understand that perfectly but it is not what I am trying to do. I want to enable the panel, in exercising strict checks and balances—which, after all, is what we are trying to do—to scrutinise the commissioner effectively. To enable that to happen, the panel should be able to ask questions of a chief constable that relate to a commissioner’s performance. This is all about the scrutiny of the commissioner; it is not about holding the chief constable to account. I agree with the noble Lord that that would not be acceptable; it is not what we want to see happen. We are trying to increase the ability of the panel to scrutinise effectively. That is what we are all trying to secure.
Lord De Mauley
My Lords, perhaps I may come back to that point and, for the moment, move on.
Amendment 143 would make the panel’s ability to request information more explicit. As discussed, it is important that panels can carry out their functions. However, panels already have powers appropriate for the scrutiny role they will perform. They can require the attendance of the police and crime commissioner or members of the PCC's staff to answer questions that they deem necessary. They can also require information from the commissioner and their staff, except where this would compromise security, so I hope that I can persuade noble Lords in due course to withdraw these amendments.
We are proposing in this group a number of government amendments which will address many of the issues raised by your Lordships during Committee. Amendments 145 and 181 would allow the police and crime panel to request the attendance of the chief constable in the exercise of their duties. We have noted your Lordships’ comments and we thank my noble friends Lady Hamwee and Lord Shipley in particular for their contribution. It is still one of the fundamental principles of this reform that it is the police and crime commissioner who holds the chief constable to account. As has been said, we believe that such dual accountability would lead to a confusing landscape, with the chief constable being pulled in two different directions and the public unclear as to who they were holding to account for their policing service.
However, it is recognised that in order for the police and crime panel to fulfil its role in holding the police and crime commissioner to account, there might be times when the chief constable’s attendance is desirable, so it is proposed to give the panel the ability to request their attendance. That stops short of it being able to compel him or her to attend and it will be for the chief constable, in consultation with the police and crime commissioner, to decide. As I said, the principle is that the PCP’s function is to scrutinise the PCC rather than the chief constable but we acknowledge that there may be occasions when it is desirable for the PCP to meet the chief constable.
I turn to information provided to PCCs and to government Amendments 182 and 186. Noble Lords will be aware that, as originally drafted, the Bill provided that a chief constable could be required to provide a police and crime commissioner with any report that he or she saw fit. That matched the existing provisions for police authorities and one may well ask what these government amendments add to that. It is arguable that a report is a document containing or consisting of information—we certainly take this view—so that a power to require reports necessarily encompasses a power to require information. While this was not discussed in your Lordships’ House, a number of parties have raised with us concerns about the existing provisions.
Those concerns were, essentially, that by requiring a report rather than information, the PCC might only be able to obtain the chief constable's interpretation of data rather than being able to analyse that data themselves. I am confident that chief constables would not in any way seek to misrepresent data or use them selectively. However, in order for the PCC to be able properly to hold the chief constable to account, they will need to be able to see raw data for themselves so that they can give their own thought and analysis of them. This amendment will ensure that happens and that there can be adequate and appropriate flows of information between the chief constable and the PCC. It will also achieve consistency throughout the Bill, since similar provisions such as Clauses 14 and 94 are couched in terms of information rather than reports. Comment, opinion or analysis are kinds of information, so a PCC will still be able to use this clause to require the chief constable to give an account or explanation of any matter of concern. As such, I hope that noble Lords will support these government amendments.
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, I have learnt one new thing today: the use of the term triangulation. I feel that any response would simply risk going round the circuit again, although I note that the noble Lord has just given some assurances on interpretation of terms, which will be useful, and I must acknowledge them. I beg leave to withdraw Amendment 51.
Lord De Mauley
“(A1) The police and crime commissioner for a police area may—
(a) appoint a person as the deputy police and crime commissioner for that police area, and(b) arrange for the deputy police and crime commissioner to exercise any function of the police and crime commissioner.”
Lord De Mauley
(a) appoint a person listed in subsection (3) as the deputy police and crime commissioner;(b) arrange for the deputy police and crime commissioner to exercise a function listed in subsection (4)(a), (e) or (f);(c) arrange, under subsection (1), for a person listed in subsection (3) to exercise any function; or(d) arrange, under subsection (1), for any person to exercise a function listed in subsection (4).(2A) A deputy police and crime commissioner may arrange for any other person to exercise any function of the police and crime commissioner which is, in accordance with subsection (A1)(b), exercisable by the deputy police and crime commissioner.
(2B) But the deputy police and crime commissioner may not arrange for a person to exercise a function if—
(a) the person is listed in subsection (3), or(b) the function is listed in subsection (4).”
Baroness Browning
“(ca) the Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime appointed by the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime;”
“(g) a member of the staff of a person falling within any of paragraphs (a) to (f).”
Baroness Henig
“(e) except as provided in sections (Powers of dismissal: role of police and crime panel) and (Powers of suspension: role of police and crime panel), appointing, suspending or calling upon a senior officer to retire or resign;”
Baroness Henig
My Lords, I shall also speak to Amendments 187, 188, 194 and 195 to 197 in this group. They all relate to the appointment, discipline, suspension and dismissal of ACPO-rank officers—not just chief constables. The House will recall that I addressed this issue in Committee and I return to it now. I listened very carefully to what the Minister said then and mentioned that I might well return to this matter after considering the points that she made. I have fully considered them and, thinking about it, I still fundamentally disagree that the only person who should be responsible for appointing senior officers in a force, other than the chief constable, is the chief constable himself or herself.
Certainly, a chief constable should have a significant say in who is appointed to senior posts. My amendment allows for this. However, the overarching responsibility for the efficiency and effectiveness of the force remains that of the governing body. The Bill specifically confirms that this function will remain with commissioners. They cannot exercise this effectively if they do not have an influence on the shape or make-up of the top team and I therefore return to this topic.
Outlining what these amendments will do, Amendment 69 relates to Clause 19 on delegation and provides that the commissioner can delegate responsibility for appointing and disciplining senior officers in certain limited situations, which I set out later. Amendment 187 effectively deletes Schedule 8, as my amendments in this section return the situation to the status quo, making the new provisions in this schedule redundant. Amendments 188 and 194 give commissioners the overarching role for appointing and disciplining deputy chief constables and assistant chief constables respectively, while enabling a role for panels in these processes. That is set out through the amendments which follow. Amendments 195, 196 and 197 specify a role for the panel in appointing senior officers, in requiring senior officers to resign and in suspending them respectively.
I am still at a loss to understand how the Government think they will achieve the more muscular and high-profile role they envisage for commissioners at the same time as giving them fewer powers than police authorities currently have. Dealing first with the amendments about appointing and disciplining senior officers other than the chief constable, in Committee I heard the Minister point out that Sir Paul Stephenson thought it was a really good idea for the chief officer to do this and, by inference, suggested that the Government should follow this lead. Yet I am afraid I did not hear a great deal about why she thought it was such a good idea.
As I think I also mentioned in Committee, Sir Paul Stephenson and I have known each other for many years. In fact, I was the person who first appointed him as chief constable when I was chair of Lancashire police authority. He is an extremely able man and, as the current Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service, he counts as the most senior serving police officer in the country. Yet I do not agree and never have agreed with him on this issue. I actually find it quite ironic that, in Lancashire, I in fact appointed him to the position of deputy chief constable. It is by no means certain that had the then chief constable held the power to appoint, he would have been appointed. We do not know that but it was certainly the police authority that appointed him to the role of deputy chief constable. I have to say, with no disrespect to Sir Paul Stephenson, that he would say he wants more say over his top team. That goes without saying and I understand the sentiment. But he is the one chief officer in the country, ironically, who will not get this to the same extent as others because the role of deputy commissioner is a Crown appointment and not in his gift.
I noted in Committee that there were a number of equally senior but no longer serving police officers in this House who did not agree with Sir Paul’s position. They have, perhaps, had the benefit of considering this question away from the hothouse and everyday pressures of policing. Their view, if I can paraphrase, was that the chief constable’s position was better protected and less exposed if he or she had a role in the appointment but did not take the ultimate decision. They would have more freedom to manage their own team if they alone were responsible for the appointment of their immediate juniors. If I understand it correctly, that is the Government’s key argument. But it would have a great many downsides for that chief officer, potentially exposing them to unwelcome industrial-tribunal action without any supporting cover, as well as disciplinary action if the commissioner thought they had appointed the wrong person. All of this would detract from other perhaps more pressing matters about managing the police force on a day-to-day basis. I suspect the Government think that if the governing body appoints a senior officer there might be confusion about who manages that officer. This is emphatically not the case under current arrangements. I see no reason to think that restoring the status quo would cause any confusion. There are existing provisions which make it quite clear that this is the role of the chief officer.
I know the Government are keen to achieve a clear separation of functions between the chief officer and the governing body. This is where the principle of the chief officer having the freedom to manage his or her top team comes from. This is not in dispute and would not be compromised by my proposals. The stronger role for commissioners proposed by the Government reinforces the fact that it is ultimately the governing body which should be responsible to the public for the overall shape, style and effectiveness of policing in their area. A commissioner cannot carry out this function properly if he or she does not have the final say on who is appointed to the top team. It is crucial to aligning any strategic vision for policing to the style and skills of the top team. It is not the same thing to say that the commissioner must be consulted about senior appointments, as the Bill currently does. The commissioner’s role must be decisive if he or she is to exercise a proper level of traction over the policing requirements for the area.
I also mentioned in Committee a number of other good reasons why the governing body must appoint the chief officer. The most important reason was the tendency of people in senior positions to appoint people in their own image if they have a free hand. This would give rise to real concerns about improving the diversity of the police at senior levels. The Minister did not really address this matter in her response. I am aware that the whole area of senior promotion and assessment is to be revised, but the problem is that this will be in another Bill and we do not yet know what this will look like. We have had no White Paper or similar on this yet, but it is beginning to look alarmingly as if ACPO will be given full responsibility for overseeing this change and for setting the criteria once the NPIA is abolished. This is the problem with having a rushed and, frankly, rather badly thought-out Bill which covers only half of the policing landscape. We are being asked to take on trust that serious matters of this nature which affect the current Bill will be looked at, without any clear indication of what is going to be proposed. The only amendments the Government seem to have made to this section are ones which effectively specify that the chief constable must be a constable at the time of appointment.
I understand why senior officers are concerned to ensure that a chief constable is an experienced police officer. This relates to issues around operational independence. While I am pleased that the Government are making some concessions, I am not convinced that this is the most important concession to make. There has been one instance already when a non-police officer was appointed to the post of chief officer in a police force, although the police force concerned was a Civil Nuclear Police Authority force and not a Home Office force. None the less, that did take place. This in itself is a comment on the perception of the skills of senior officers among appointing bodies. Although this was a few years ago, there was concern then, which still remains to some extent, that there is not enough focus in senior assessments on business and management skills among senior officers. That is why it is so important to be able to see the whole package of everything that sits behind senior promotion and assessment in this context. This goes back to my point about senior people appointing and promoting others in their own image. It is worrying that chief officers will not only be responsible for appointing individuals; they may also be made responsible for designing the whole package of leadership skills that will be fostered and assessed through the possible new role for APCO that I have mentioned.
It is human nature to undervalue skills which senior managers think they themselves have never needed in deciding who to promote and appoint, and even to over-emphasise some skills which they believe to be important. In my experience in the police service, women officers suffer from this. I have seen over and over again senior officers putting huge emphasis on operational qualities and the ability to oversee certain operations but undervaluing issues of communication, the importance of relationships and the importance of emotional intelligence, which in policing is very important. I am worried that, if we are not careful, we will revert back to some of the things that we used to see happening 20 years ago.
Even if the commissioner is consulted and makes some clear points, there is little the commissioner can do, short of hitting the nuclear button and firing the chief officer. If the Government do not provide some decisive traction for governing bodies over functions in which they have an overriding interest, they are merely encouraging an unstable situation where commissioners take extreme and disproportionate action over disagreements. That is not good enough and if my amendment is not accepted, the Government must at the very least get rid of these clauses until they can be clear about the shape of the whole senior appointments landscape and extend the status quo on a transitional basis until this has been done.
I also made the point in Committee that the governing body should have a role in disciplinary matters, especially suspension and dismissal at senior level. These amendments also provide for this. There was widespread concern in the House at the time that giving responsibility to chief officers alone for senior officer disciplinary issues was a grave mistake and a recipe for corruption. I am disappointed that the Government have not come back with additional proposals about this. I made the point in Committee that there would be few circumstances where, if a senior officer was behaving unethically, the chief officer would not be under some suspicion, even if only of inadequate supervision of the individual concerned. The Bill’s proposals make the chief officer both judge and jury in terms of complaints against senior members of their team, while at the same time providing to chief officers a potential loophole to evade investigation where they could be implicated. This is because it is left to the discretion of chief constables whether to refer the matter to the IPCC, except in some very severe situations where referral is automatic. Clearly, a chief officer might fail to refer matters which reflect badly on him or her to the IPCC. This is entirely inconsistent with the whistle-blowing principles that are the cornerstone of any regime of good governance. While I heard what the Minister said on the first day of Report about ensuring that principles of good governance would be included within the requirements for commissioners and police forces, this is an obvious case where it seems it will not in fact apply. It is clear by any acceptable standards that the governing body must have the decisive role in dealing with complaints against senior officers. This is fundamental to the commissioner’s accountability and to being clear with the public about where they can go if they have a problem. No member of the public is going to have any confidence in a regime where the chief officer deals with complaints against his own senior team. This in no way meets expectations of independence or lack of bias. This is so obvious that I am very surprised that the Minister has not put forward any alternative proposals. I ask her to explain why she thinks the public would have any confidence at all in the arrangements currently set out in the Bill.
Moving on, because I know that time is pressing and I apologise to noble Lords for that, my proposals also give a much stronger role to the panel in relation to appointments, complaints and conduct matters relating to senior officers. This is designed to address some of the concerns expressed in Committee. Again, the concerns were focused on bringing a more collaborative approach to the work between a commissioner and the panel and providing meaningful levers to the panel to address problems about putting too much power into the hands of individuals.
Baroness Harris of Richmond
My Lords, I speak in support of the amendments, to some of which my name is added, which deal with delegation.
The amendments are all about ensuring that all senior police force appointments at and above the rank of assistant chief constable will remain with the governing body, as is currently the case. I envisage that as being the PCC but with a strong role for the police and crime panel from the interview stage onwards. In the case of senior officer appointments other than the chief officer, they specify that the chief officer of the force must be included on the interview panel, and therefore have a role in appointing his or her senior team. I certainly agree that the chief officer alone should not be able to appoint senior members of the team.
Moving on, the amendments state that the responsibility for senior officer conduct and complaints should rest with the governing body, the PCC, with the PCP taking a strong role. It is absolutely unacceptable that police officers decide whether to investigate their close colleagues. That is neither transparent nor proper.
During my time as chair of my police authority, I had to deal with some serious matters touching on the conduct of a chief constable. I could not possibly have dealt with the matter on my own. Even with legal help and support, we needed to work together as a body to come to a reasoned conclusion. As it happened, the legal advice that we were given was wrong, so imagine how I would have felt if I had had to take sole responsibility for making such a decision. Having the panel being supportive—indeed, helping to come to difficult decisions—will be by far the best way to deal with often tricky circumstances. I support the noble Baroness’s amendments.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, I am conscious of the hour and the fact that our Benches are filled to hear this debate, but this is a very important group of amendments. My noble friend Lady Henig and the noble Baroness, Lady Harris, have raised some important points about that come back, really, to the consequences of having a corporation sole, in which one person has enormous power and responsibility.
My amendments relate to the powers exercised by the police and crime commissioner. Under Clause 39, “Appointment, suspension and removal of chief constables”, huge authority is given to the police and crime commissioner to appoint a chief constable and to require their suspension, resignation or retirement. When it comes to the appointment, there are some safeguards, because the police and crime panel has a veto power on the appointment. We may disagree about the number of the panel voting in favour, but it has a veto power. When it comes to suspension, retirement or requirement to retire, the safeguard is much less. Although the police and crime panel can undertake a scrutiny process, as set out in Schedule 8, in the end, the police and crime commissioner can ignore the panel's recommendation.
My worry is that the police and crime commissioner who is seeking re-election when year two or year three is coming up and who is in some trouble may well consider sacking the chief constable as a visible sign to the public that he or she is doing something. There are circumstances—my noble friends have hinted at them—where that would be a jolly good thing to do, but at other times it will not; it will be a political action by a police and crime commissioner. Where are the safeguards? In the end, there are none because, whatever the panel says, the police and crime commissioner can ignore it.
I have a series of amendments which relate not only to the chief constable but to the circumstances where the same may be required of other chief officers and also to the situation in London. Essentially, this provision should apply only where it can be shown: that there is good reason—in other words, that it is in the interests of the force, for reasons of efficiency or effectiveness; that there has been appropriate consultation with the chair of the police and crime panel; that there has been proper investigation of the circumstances leading up to such an action; and that the approval of the Secretary of State is given. If Ministers consider that that gives the Secretary of State overweening powers, I must say that I have not been persuaded that the essential nature of the tripartite arrangement—the role of the Home Secretary, the police authority and the chief constable—should be so torn up that there are no safeguards to be undertaken by the Home Secretary if the police and crime commissioner decides to take such an action where, as I said, there is virtually no effective scrutiny other than the PCP recommendations.
This is a very important group of amendments. There is unease about the power to be exercised both by the police and crime commissioner in relation to the chief constable and other senior officers and then by the chief constable in relation to those employed by him as a corporation sole. We would look to the Government to recognise those concerns and to give some reassurance.
Lord Dear
My Lords, two amendments in this group, Amendments 189A and 192CA, stand in my name. One refers to the appointment of a chief constable and the other to the dismissal of a chief constable.
In Amendment 189A, I suggest that new words are inserted into Schedule 8:
“A police and crime commissioner should take advice from HMCIC before making any decision as to the appointment of a chief constable”.
I shall come back to the word “should” in a moment. This relates to the suggestion that the advice from an outside agency is taken prior to any decision being made by the PCC and prior to the subsequent discussion of that by the panel. We are looking at this in the context—we have talked a lot about context through the various stages of the Bill—of the fear of the untrammelled exercise of power by the PCC. There are a good many examples over the years of police authorities looking only around their own feet rather than at the broader horizon. The risk is somewhat greater when one has a fully elected individual who has very few of the constraints that police authorities have.
Although I am absolutely sure that, in the majority of cases, if PCCs come into being, they will exercise their power sensibly, in your Lordships' House we are often preoccupied with the thought that some of them might not. In this case, the lack of exercise of the sort of expertise that one would look for would lead to the risk of a blinkered mentality or, as has already been mentioned this afternoon, a silo mentality and a failure to take account of the talent that is available in the wider sphere nationally. Quite obviously, that would lead to a very insular approach from that PCC, the appointment of safe bets, perhaps the appointment of candidates who are personally known and favoured by the PCC, and the appointment of people who are locally or regionally accented. In other words, the whole thing would be driven inwards rather than outwards.
At the moment, there is no national pool of talent within the police service, which is managed in much the same way as some multinational corporations, national organisations or the Armed Forces manage their emerging top positions. The report by Mr Neyroud, which was published earlier this year, and the report that we expect to have from Mr Winsor, which is expected at the end of this calendar year, will have an emphasis on leadership within the police service and I dare bet will propose a whole raft of new developments, formalisation, and improvement of the present structure. I hope they do. On various occasions in your Lordships’ House, I have spoken at length about the crying need for better leadership and structured leadership within the police service.
The system at the moment involves a mixture of advice given to police authorities by ACPO, by the Home Office and by the inspectorate. The inspectorate, which I have included in the amendment, offers advice at varying stages prior to the shortlist being constructed by the Home Office and then offered to the police authority. It offers advice on the shortlisting carried out by the police authority itself and then at the interview stage. My experience of seven years as an inspector of constabulary was that I was asked by police authorities to sit on a large number of appointment interviews when chief constables were being considered. Usually, the advice that I gave was followed and sometimes it was not. I did not take it personally when my advice was rejected, but I saw it as an exercise of democratic accountability in the best possible sense.
Lord Shipley
My Lords, I shall be very brief. This is an extremely important group of amendments. As noble Lords have said, the amendments address the importance of having appropriate checks and balances in place. In this grouping, while welcoming government amendments, I suggest that it should be possible for the Government to go further in line with some of the amendments that have been tabled and spoken to already in this group. The appointment, suspension and dismissal of a senior officer is a very serious matter where checks and balances are essential if proper procedures and natural justice are to be followed.
On the first day of Report, I commented on the lack of checks and balances on both the commissioner and the commissioner’s deputy in making senior appointments to the commissioner’s staff. This group of amendments relates to senior officers, and it is important to ensure that proper procedures are followed and that individuals making appointments are subject to appropriate checks and balances. What I am seeking to do in supporting some of the amendments in this group and in what I said on day one of Report about the commissioner’s own office is to ensure that the public have confidence in the process that is being followed. It is helpful, therefore, to have amendments that clarify the role of commissioners in senior police appointments and it is important that they be consulted as part of any changes to those appointments. I hope that my noble friend the Minister will look at Amendments 186A to 186F, 189A and 193A very carefully because they clarify a lot of detail, not least the circumstances in which suspensions should be considered and who should be involved in those.
At the heart of all this is public confidence in the system—the appointment, the suspension and the dismissal of senior officers. The public know that, at different stages, the chief constable, the chair of the panel, the panel, the Chief Inspector of Constabulary and indeed the Secretary of State all might have roles in considering the position of a senior officer. With these amendments, there would be a significant improvement in public understanding and confidence in the system that is being followed. That is why I hope that my noble friend the Minister will consider very carefully what is said in debating this group of amendments.
Baroness Browning
My Lords, we have quite a long list of amendments in this grouping, including some government amendments, to which I will come at the end.
I begin with Amendments 69, 188 and 194, tabled by my noble friend Lady Harris of Richmond and the noble Baroness, Lady Henig, and to which the noble Baroness, Lady Henig, spoke, concerning the appointment of senior police officers. These amendments would change the basis on which senior police officers, other than chief constables, would be appointed. They seek to give responsibility for the appointment of these officers to the PCC. The Government believe that responsibility for these appointments should rest with the chief constable. We believe that the chief constable is best placed to identify the mix of skills required for their chief officer team. They have the best understanding of the areas where their force has good skills and the areas where it would benefit from a fresh injection of skills. As a result, the chief constable should be able to determine who should be appointed to their top team.
The Government believe that the PCC has a role to play in this process. That is why the Bill makes provision for the chief constable to consult the PCC prior to appointment. However, if the PCC is to hold the chief constable to account for the decisions that he makes on how to run the police force, the PCC must have some distance from the appointment of individuals in these ranks. It cannot be the case that the PCC is responsible for appointing these officers or involved in the process and then holds the chief constable to account for the way in which the force is run in the light of decisions taken by those officers. This would, I believe, compromise the PCC’s ability to discharge this function.
I move on to HMCIC advice on chief constable appointments and the creation of appointments panels in Amendment 189A, proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Dear, and in Amendment 195, proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Henig, and my noble friend Lady Harris. I believe there would be some blurring of the lines of responsibility in the appointment of chief officers. The Government’s intention is that a police and crime commissioner will be democratically accountable for their decision regarding the appointment, suspension and removal of a chief constable and that the chief constable should be able to determine the appointment of their top team.
I turn first to the appointment of the chief constable. We have put in place a number of checks and balances on the process of the appointment of chief constables, including the possibility of a veto by the PCP. However, while the PCP provides an important scrutiny function during this process, it is not the primary decision-making body. While there is no barrier to the PCC taking into account the views of HMCIC or others as he sees fit, to put this into primary legislation is difficult. I do not mean difficult in terms of the technicality of it; I just feel that it goes a little too far. Therefore I believe that these proposals are unnecessary.
In respect of the appointment of the rest of the chief officer team, it is a fundamental part of the reforms that chief constables have the right to appoint their top team. They will, of course, do this following consultation with the PCC, and I remind the House that they will be required to act reasonably and lawfully. It is not as though they are going to be able to do this outwith the laws that would apply to this and their accountability for it. We believe that chief constables are best placed to make decisions about the make-up of their workforce, in particular, their top team. The involvement of the PCP would, we believe, undermine operational independence of the chief constable.
Both the noble Baroness, Lady Henig, and my noble friend Lady Harris of Richmond have proposed that the role of the PCP be strengthened in the dismissal and suspension of senior police officers. While the PCP provides an important scrutiny function in relation to chief constable dismissals, again, it is not the primary decision-making body. PCCs are accountable to the local communities for their decision-making and they should therefore have the responsibility for determining whether chief constables should be suspended or removed. The decision to suspend or dismiss another senior officer must lie with the chief constable. In both cases, the decisions are subject to the requirement to act reasonably and lawfully under the safeguards set out in Schedule 8. Therefore, the amendments are not necessary or appropriate and I ask noble Lords not to press them.
Baroness Henig
I thank the Minister sincerely for that lengthy response. I tried to follow it fully, but inevitably some points may well have escaped my attention. I will be extremely brief in responding in light of the hour. Again, I do not want to strike a negative note, but not for the first time I despair about what the Government are proposing and what I see as a refusal to listen to sensible advice. I have to say that, because I do not believe that the issues raised by noble Lords were in any way revolutionary or in any way pushing out the boundaries. A lot of the proposals were extremely sensible and based on long experience, and the Government are somehow rejecting them out of hand for reasons that I do not fully understand.
Let me give some examples. The Minister has not addressed the deep concerns about the disciplinary issues and the position the chief constable is going to be in. That has not been addressed, although I may have missed it in the lengthy—
Baroness Browning
I apologise for interrupting. The noble Baroness is quite right. If I may interpose a few words here, I must say that I appreciate that what the Government have set out is not what the noble Baroness is seeking in her amendments and in the debate around the Chamber tonight. I would point out that all matters other than minor complaints—we defined what we thought these were in Committee—are subject ultimately to appeal to the IPCC. Any serious complaint will have IPCC input and ultimately will go to it as part of the appeal procedure.
Baroness Henig
I thank the Minister. My emphasis is on public perception. As I said when I moved this amendment, it is important for the public to have absolute confidence in the system. My concern remains that that confidence may not be there because of the perception that the chief constable is judge and jury. That was what was concerning me.
There are perception issues again, particularly in relation to the amendment about the involvement of HMIC. I accept that it may not be absolutely essential to write this into the Bill, but again it gives confidence. It certainly, I think, gave confidence to all members of police authorities that at certain stages you had to call in HMIC. That was extremely important and it is still important. The Bill should say that HMIC should be involved at certain points in appointments and in certain other situations such as dismissals. That gives the public confidence, and you must underwrite this system. A new system is being proposed, and the more confidence that can be given about how it is going to operate, the better. That is why I am concerned.
In addition, briefly, the commissioner is going to make appointments and the panel’s role in appointments is extraordinarily limited. I feel that it is inadequate. I am worried, as I have already said, that chief constable appointments might lack diversity. There was a point not long ago when the system briefly changed and chief constables actually appointed deputies. It was not all that successful, as I recall, and the system was changed, so again we have experience in this area.
That is all I want to say, but I end positively. I very much welcome the Minister’s invitation or offer to discuss with Members the senior officer pool and other issues. I am sure that the offer will be readily taken up. I would certainly be interested in taking part in those discussions, and I am sure other noble Lords would too. I very much welcome that.
Justice and Security (Northern Ireland) Act 2007 (Extension of duration of non-jury trial provisions) Order 2011
(13 years, 4 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Shutt of Greetland
That the draft order laid before the House on 5 April be approved.
Relevant document: 20th Report from the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments
Lord Shutt of Greetland
My Lords, I beg to move that the House does approve the draft Justice and Security (Northern Ireland) Act 2007 (Extension of duration of non-jury trial provisions) Order 2011. This order further extends for two years the period during which trials without jury can take place in certain circumstances in Northern Ireland. Without this order, the system allowing for non-jury trials would lapse on 31 July this year. I propose that it be extended for a further two years.
Non-jury trials take place in very limited circumstances, where the Director of Public Prosecutions issues a certificate. The DPP can issue a certificate only if one or more of four statutory conditions, which are laid out in Section 1 of the Act, are met. Furthermore the DPP must be satisfied there is a risk that the administration of justice might be impaired if a jury trial were to be held.
The four conditions relate to the circumstances of the offence and the defendant. Condition one is that the defendant is, or is an associate of, a member of a proscribed organisation. Condition two is that the offence was committed on behalf of a proscribed organisation or a proscribed organisation was involved. Condition three is that an attempt has been made by or on behalf of a proscribed organisation to prejudice the investigation or prosecution. Condition four is that the offence was committed as a result of, or in connection with, religious or political hostility.
This system, which focuses on risk, is very different from the Diplock court system, which preceded the current non-jury trial provisions. The default position under the Diplock system was that all scheduled offences would be tried by a judge alone. Now, under the Justice and Security (Northern Ireland) Act 2007, there is a clear presumption that jury trial will take place in all cases. Certificates are issued only when absolutely necessary in the interests of the administration of justice and where the particular statutory tests are met.
Of course, we all want to get to the point where trials for all indictable offences in Northern Ireland are heard by a jury and there is no need for these provisions. As noble Lords will no doubt be aware, there has been significant progress in Northern Ireland towards normalisation. This culminated in the devolution of policing and justice powers to the local Administration in April of last year. The local elections in May were the first in a generation to be fought on bread and butter issues. Northern Ireland has come a long way.
Sadly, despite this progress, there remains a serious threat from a small but dangerous minority who have no mandate but who are determined to drag Northern Ireland back into the past. The House will recall the horrific murder of the young PSNI Constable Ronan Kerr on 2 April this year. People and political leaders from across Ireland, both north and south, were joined in their condemnation of PC Kerr’s appalling murder. However, the terrorists have shown disregard for the community’s resolve and continue to engage in acts of terrorism. On 8 April, terrorists abandoned a vehicle containing a 500-pound bomb close to Newry, putting at risk the lives of police officers and members of the public. There have also been a number of other security alerts over recent weeks. On Saturday 25 June, the Gardai discovered improvised mortar components and a substantial quantity of fertiliser in County Louth. The total number of attacks in 2011 on national security targets currently stands at 14. There were 40 such attacks in 2010. The PSNI continues to disrupt those intent on causing harm to the community and so far this year has made 101 arrests in connection with terrorist activity. The disturbances that took place in East Belfast last month show that, unfortunately, paramilitary influence remains an issue in both communities in Northern Ireland.
It is against the backdrop of this severe threat that the Government seek to renew the non-jury trial provisions. The threat brings a serious risk that jurors appointed in criminal trials could be subject to pressure and intimidation by terrorist or paramilitary organisations. There is also the associated risk of perverse acquittals, where jurors may be coerced into returning a not guilty verdict.
In reaching a decision on whether to seek the renewal of the provisions, the Secretary of State consulted a number of individuals and organisations on the need for non-jury trials. They included the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew, the independent reviewer of national security arrangements in Northern Ireland, who concluded that the threat from terrorism and the risk of disruption of trials remain live and recommended that for the time being non-jury trials should continue to be available. The chief constable of the PSNI and the Attorney-General, in his capacity as Advocate-General for Northern Ireland, also agreed that in view of the current circumstances a further two-year extension should be sought.
The number of non-jury trials in Northern Ireland—
Lord Trimble
The Minister has just given us the views of various people. Were representations and expressions of view given by persons, organisations or political parties in Northern Ireland? What was the balance in those representations in favour of continuing with non-jury trials or otherwise?
Lord Shutt of Greetland
This was a limited consultation in terms of the numbers invited, but all political parties based in Northern Ireland were invited, as well as the Committee on the Administration of Justice and the noble Lord, Lord Carlile. There was not a 100 per cent return in terms of invitations to respond. I am told that not many political parties did in fact respond. Of the 11 responses, nine were that we should continue with these provisions and two took the view that we should not.
The number of non-jury trials in Northern Ireland remains relatively low. So far in 2011, the DPP has issued 12 certificates for non-jury trials. In 2010, 14 certificates were issued. These figures are low but significant and show the ongoing need for non-jury trial. The Government want to see a return to full jury trial in all cases in Northern Ireland as soon as possible. However, given the current severe threat from residual terrorist groups in Northern Ireland and its bearing on criminal trials, the renewal of these provisions for a further two years is the right thing to do. I commend the order to the House.
Lord Cormack
My Lords, I strongly support the speech of my noble friend. Noble Lords will know that I was chairman of the Northern Ireland Affairs Select Committee for five years before the last general election, and in that capacity conducted inquiries into organised crime, among other things. When we conducted our inquiry into organised crime, it was quite plain that many people were not prepared to give evidence to the Select Committee in public, for fear of intimidation. Things have moved on and it is a very good thing that the majority of trials in Northern Ireland are now trials by jury. However, my noble friend is right to point to the real threat from dissidents, about which both Sir Hugh Orde and his successor have consistently and repeatedly warned us. It is notable that so few responded to the consultation exercise with a negative view.
I will just refer to two particular crimes that my noble friend did not cite: not only the ghastly murder of the police constable this year but also the murder of PC Carroll; there was also the most barbaric murder of Paul Quinn, for which no one has yet been brought to trial. The last inquiry that my committee conducted was into the Omagh bombing and we must remember that nobody has been brought to trial in a criminal court and convicted of that most terrible of all atrocities in Northern Ireland. Against that background, where the most despicable criminals have not yet been brought to trial, largely because of the fear of people giving evidence, it is absolutely essential that the provision in the measure before your Lordships’ House is retained for two years.
There are many noble Lords in this House who know far, far more about Northern Ireland than I do because they come from that glorious part of the United Kingdom. They must feel, as I do, that real progress has been made—all those present tonight contributed to it, and one of the particular contributors was my noble friend Lord Trimble. We are well on the way to normality but we are not there yet. Until we are there—until there is no fear of intimidation—we have to retain this provision. It is right that my noble friend brought the measure before us tonight. It is right that your Lordships’ House should support it. In conclusion, I very much hope that in two years’ time he does not have to come here again and ask for a further extension, but if the circumstances are still as they are today he will have to do so.
Lord Maginnis of Drumglass
My Lords, I support the Motion before the House, albeit with some disappointment, as one who 13 years ago sat beside the noble Lord, Lord Trimble, during negotiations and hoped that we would no longer, and certainly not at this stage, have non-jury trials. However, a number of people in Ireland want to keep alive the distrust that exists between two traditions. Those people do not have—and I say this with some confidence—the sort of grass-roots support that previous terrorist organisations had. None the less they have the ability to kill policemen and civilians. Just recently they have issued a threat against prison officers, saying that they intend to kill prison officers because the “hotel” at Maghaberry is not quite to their liking. The reality is that this, though it may be a last stand, still presents a difficulty and presents huge challenges to the security services and to the community as a whole.
There are certain things that are going for us. I am optimistic—I am never quite sure that I can be as optimistic as some of my noble friends from this side of the water. There is always a threat, always a hiding place, but I think that it is appropriate at this time—and it is not every day that I say this—that I praise the Garda Siochana, whose attitude, under the leadership of the very recently retired Commissioner Fachtna Murphy, has been exemplary. There is no equivocation, there is none of this, “Well, we’ll find the arms dump, but we’ll let the culprits escape”. They have found the culprits, they have taken them to court and convicted them. That has sent a huge and very important message to Northern Ireland that there is no all-Ireland desire to have violence continuing.
For somebody who has been involved in security and Northern Ireland affairs for as long as I have, there is always the temptation to say that we did it better when it was more difficult. I simply hope that our police service, the Police Service of Northern Ireland, does not slip into a comfort zone which assists people who are dissident IRA and a number of other people who would embark on loyalist violence again—I have never, I hope, been someone who looked purely at one side of the community, or the threat to one side of the community. There is a necessity now for a common-sense approach, a need to ensure that fewer people are put under pressure. I am talking now about juries and I think that the Minister is very wise in what he has suggested this evening; that we have to protect not only those who would be targets of the potential terrorists but those who would become targets as members of a jury. Indeed, as recently as this week we have seen prison officers being highlighted for targeting.
I should not sit down without saying something that I hope will be heard by all the authorities in Northern Ireland, particularly the Northern Ireland Office. I have said one or two kind things, I am going to say one or two unkind things—perhaps one unkind thing—and that is that the degree of communication at the moment is not satisfactory. I hope that the Minister will take that message away. There are those of us sitting in this House who have many years of experience and whose advice is never sought. More than that, I feel that sometimes our advice is avoided.
With that, I simply say that I support—like the previous speaker, I hope that in two years’ time, I will not have to support it again—the continuation of the non-jury trials at this stage.
Lord Glentoran
My Lords, I did not intend to come into this debate, but the noble Lord, Lord Maginnis, said two things that worry me. He suggested that the PSNI is getting complacent. I do not believe that to be true. It is under threat continuously. He and I have met widows in recent times. That is not right. For four or five years now, I have worked with the Secretary of State and no one is more diligent or more energetic than my right honourable friend Owen Paterson. The communication is very free and ongoing, and Owen does not hide anything from anyone. He tells it as it is. If the noble Lord does not like the way in which it is coming out, that is different. But it is the way it is.
Lord Alderdice
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for outlining the background to the order. I should like to pick up one or two of the comments. Like other noble Lords, of course I regret the fact that it is necessary for this order to come forward again. Perhaps, particularly today, noble Lords might expect me to say that such a thing should not be necessary. In the final IMC report published today, we have said again that it is time for peace process institutions to pass into history and for the proper administration of politics and the rule of law to take place under Northern Ireland authority by Northern Ireland elected representatives.
I and my colleagues very much stand by that but it does not necessarily mean that the particular process to which we are referring today should be set to the side immediately. I want to take that a little further. It is clear that there are those in Northern Ireland on the republican side—we sometimes call them dissident republicans—who simply are not persuaded that political arguments should not be made through threat or actual use of violence. They continue to believe that. For a very long time there have been people who have taken that view in Ireland, north and south as well as elsewhere.
As the noble Lord, Lord Maginnis of Drumglass, said, it is also clear that there are those in the loyalist community who continue to use violence. With regard to them, I see little evidence that there is any political agenda at all. It is very much about self-aggrandisement and crime. In some cases it is a kind of incipient attack on the police and the historic inquiries team, because some of them simply do not want their past crimes to catch up with them. They want to foment violence, trouble and sectarianism within their own loyalist community.
My difficulty, and I think my noble friend will agree, is that despite the fact that the previous Government indicated that a more substantial process would take place, the consultation was very limited. It seems to me that, the next time round, there needs to be a much more substantial consultation at a much earlier stage. Over the past number of years the majority of people—and I say this from my experience in the IMC—have been increasingly prepared to come forward to give evidence and material, to participate in juries and so on. However, I am not wholly sure that we will get to a place in the next two years, or perhaps even a little longer than that, when there will be no fear and no reason for fear in the community.
It seems to me that there is something fundamentally unsatisfactory about telling ourselves that in two years it will be fine; in two more years it will be fine; and in another two years it will be fine. We know how long the provisional can stay and that it can become rather permanent. I do not think that that is satisfactory. I wonder whether the notion of non-jury trials is such that they will have to be with us for quite some time. They are not for widespread use—we are talking about only a dozen or perhaps two dozen individuals over a period of 12 months. However, it is still a significant number.
I come back to a matter that I and colleagues in the Alliance Party have spoken about in the past—that in such non-jury trials a number of judges might sit together, not on the basis of a two-year order but perhaps on a longer-term basis in circumstances where it proved necessary. We have seen such circumstances in the Megrahi trial, for example, which was a three-judge court, with appeal to a five-judge court.
In the past, the argument made by the judicial authorities in Northern Ireland when there were a very large number of cases was that it was completely impossible as the number of judges required would make it completely impractical. There was some force in that argument. However, where we are talking about a very small number of cases it does not seem unreasonable to believe that the judiciary in Northern Ireland might be able to sustain the numbers required. In theory the Diplock courts were unsatisfactory; in practice complaints about justice during the Troubles were more about perverse outcomes such as the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four, which were jury trials, rather than the actions of judges in Northern Ireland. It says a great deal about the calibre of the judges in Northern Ireland over many years that there were not an enormous number of complaints. In principle it was not satisfactory but in practice there was relatively little complaint.
Lord Empey
I want to make sure that I understand what the noble Lord is saying. Is he saying that instead of coming back in two years’ time for another renewal, which in theory could go on indefinitely, we move to a transition proposal? As Dr Johnson said, there is nothing as permanent as the temporary. In other words, would this become a transition period rather than simply coming back in two years for renewal? Was the noble Lord saying that his proposal for multi-judge courts would be a transition to where we would all want to be with jury trials?
Lord Alderdice
As ever the noble Lord is alert and well ahead of the argument. There is a case that, rather than waiting for two years, when we would have little opportunity but possibly a modest consultation and a repeat of the order, perhaps after only one year there could be a much more serious consultation process that would look at the question of whether a more substantial change might be made. For example, a more permanent arrangement which had three judges sitting in such non-jury cases might be considered. I say “after only one year” because quite clearly it would require substantial primary legislation that would require serious consultation and thought. However, I feel that it would not be good for us to get into a position where every two years we repeated this because we could not think it through properly. It is much better to come back for a proper consultation, not with just 11 returns but with a more substantial debate which gave time for proper primary legislation. I fear—from my own experience and I rather suspect that of other noble Lords with experience in Northern Ireland—that those on the loyalist side and the republican side who may be prepared to threaten juries and otherwise use threats and intimidation may not disappear in two years or four years or six years. Some of the cases of violence in the last little while will take quite a while through the process.
Lord Glentoran
To some extent I considerably disagree with the noble Lord’s proposition. I understand where he is coming from but I feel that psychologically to impose a permanent trial system without judges, a Diplock court system, is admitting defeat. I am still an optimist, even now. I still think that we will be able to get back to proper democracy and judicial processes. I cannot go along with the idea that we set up this non-jury system of trials for as long as we want. The other thing I like about the present system is that it reflects the state of play in Northern Ireland because the heart of the state of play on one side is financial and on the alternative side it is terrorism and criminality and the way the judicial processes are working. It is very important that this should come back to your Lordships’ House and to the other place once every two years.
Lord Alderdice
I am grateful to my noble friend for intervening, but in a sense he is already engaging in the process that I was suggesting. I was not suggesting that we immediately jump to that suggestion or any other, but rather that we should engage in a proper process of debate and consultation rather than the more than modest consultation that there was. The noble Lord, Lord Maginnis, has a point when he talks about consultation and communication. If there is a proper consultation over a reasonable period, the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Glentoran, can be engaged with, rather than living in hope that everything will be fine, when all our experience, sadly, is that it has taken a lot longer to get where we want to go than we could ever have imagined.
Lord Bew
My Lords, I offer reluctant but strong support to the noble Lord, Lord Shutt. It may or may not be a comfort to him to know that he stands in a long line of Liberal Ministers, going back to Mr Gladstone in the 19th century, who have been perplexed by the problems created by the Irish tradition of political violence for the legal system, particularly for the process of jury trials. There was a serious argument in the 19th century that such cases should be taken out of Ireland and tried in Liverpool; serious writers argued that that was a way of preserving jury trial. More generally, it was perceived that the inability to have proper legal procedures in cases involving political violence was pointing up a fundamental crisis in Ireland—the failure of the attempt to combine colonialism and democracy—and that this created a context in which terrorism existed.
What is striking about the situation in Northern Ireland now, though, is that by any standards we have a legitimate democratic system. In the most recent Assembly elections, 107 out of 108 Members of that Assembly were fully elected by the people of Northern Ireland and are full supporters of the political arrangements that are in place. In a referendum, the people of Ireland as a whole showed that they support those political arrangements. We now know that it is too sweeping a judgment to say that terrorism arises simply from a denial of democracy, because we have now established a legitimate and democratic system and we still have these problems with democracy and a situation where it would yet be unwise to return to jury trials in terrorism-related cases. I take very seriously the advice from the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, in particular, which the Minister mentioned in his introductory remarks.
Like other noble Lords, I have one caveat, one doubt. It concerns the process of consultation, which seems to have been meagre in this case. A few months ago the noble Lord, Lord Shutt, came to the House with a piece of legislation that reflected electoral law. There, in fact, the consultation was actually wider. In some ways this is a more important matter, going to the heart of where we have reached now in Northern Ireland.
I fully recognise what the Minister describes when he says that the Northern Ireland Office was not overwhelmed with advice on this matter; for a number of reasons, people want to turn their eyes away from this. It is actually difficult to have a lively consultation on it, and the Minister’s remarks in this respect are entirely reasonable and fair. I wonder, though, whether we should be thinking along the lines suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, of having a genuine debate. I am not convinced that he is right about the desirability of three judges as a solution in this context, even in the short term, but that does not matter; there is no question that if you said, “We are consulting about this”, you would provoke a substantive debate and much more lively contributions.
I ask the Minister to consider ways in which we could ensure that the next time that he has to come to this House asking for an extension in this respect, if there is a next time, we will be able to say that we have had a proper public consultation and a genuine element of vigour in the debate that occurred beforehand. For reasons that are not his fault or the fault of the Government, he has not been able to say that, but if we took a different approach there might be a way of having a better debate.
Baroness Smith of Basildon
My Lords, I have listened with great care to the debate and it is clear that none of us welcomes the order before us. The Government have informed us, and it has been endorsed by noble Lords, that it has been brought forward because of necessity. The Minister’s comments on that were a wise reflection. We are not in a normal situation and we should never regard it as such. We have to continue to move towards normalisation of the courts and the justice system. The noble Lords, Lord Shutt, Lord Bew and Lord Maginnis, all recognised the enormous progress that has been made in moving towards normalisation in Northern Ireland but we recognise that some parts of the justice apparatus are not yet able to be fully normalised. That has to be the right direction to move towards and one that has our total support.
The key issue of importance in this order is the maintenance of public confidence in this position. Obviously, we will not oppose the order tonight, but I am sure that the Minister is aware that accountability and transparency of decision-making if a case is not to be heard by a jury are extremely important. Each decision must be taken on a case-by-case basis. We certainly agree with the Minister and support the reduction in the time before it will expire from four years to two. I welcome the comments he made at the beginning that there should be a return to jury trial as soon as possible. It is clear from the discussion this evening that no one wants to move towards a rolling extension of such an order every two years. Should a further order be necessary in the future, I hope that the noble Lord will take back to his ministerial colleagues the comments that have been made about consultation and the issues that have arisen. That could play into the comments and concerns that I have about accountability and transparency and ensuring that we maintain public confidence in the system.
I have four points to raise with the Minister that I think will be helpful to noble Lords. He set out some of the reasons why he felt it necessary to extend the order. It would be helpful to have a little more detail on that. That is my issue about public confidence in the judicial system. It is always important and prudent to be as transparent and open with us as he can possibly be but I recognise the difficulty. I understand the Government’s concern, which has been raised by other noble Lords, about jury interference. Is he able to tell us about any other action that the Government are seeking to take to deal with the issue of jury interference because that will help towards looking into the future of reinstating jury trials? Furthermore, as the decision will continue to be made by the DPP, can the Minister say more about the criteria that are used by the DPP when deciding whether or not the case should be heard by a jury? He gave the four criteria at the beginning, but I am interested in the weighting of those criteria and the fact that only one has to be met for the DPP to decide on a non-jury trial.
I wonder whether the Minister has further information about the limited circumstances in which a certificate for a non-jury trial would be provided. If he has not, I am happy for him to write to me about this. Fourteen certificates for non-jury trials were issued in 2010 but 12 have already been issued in 2011, which indicates that there will be a much higher number issued in 2011 than in 2010. We are all aware of high profile cases that have yet to come to trial. If we were to see that increase year on year, the Minister will recognise the significance of that. I am interested in the number of cases considered for jury and non-jury trials. What is the balance between those for which the DPP grants a certificate for a non-jury trial and those that he would not grant a certificate for a non-jury trial? We have to be concerned about the numbers increasing when we are seeking to move towards normalisation of the justice system.
I thank the Minister for his helpful explanation that has led to a thorough debate on this issue. I hope that he will take away the comments to his colleagues in the department who can reflect on them to see whether improvements can be made, particularly with regard to consultation in future.
Lord Shutt of Greetland
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, for speaking about his experience in the House of Commons of dealing with Northern Ireland matters and I note that he spoke about people’s fears. I am delighted to hear that the noble Lord, Lord Maginnis, is an optimist. That is a good place to be in regard to Northern Ireland. We need more such optimists. I hope that he continues to be an optimist. I am also delighted that he praised the exemplary work done by Garda Siochana. I noted with concern what he had to say about threats to prison officers. I will ensure that that is taken back to the department so that people are aware of it. I am also concerned that he feels that there is a communications problem. The Secretary of State has spoken to Peers about Northern Ireland matters for a number of years, but such a meeting has not taken place for a while. I will draw to the Secretary of State’s attention that it is time we had another. We have said that we would endeavour to hold three such meetings a year. I think that we are not up to scratch on that. I will certainly take that back to the department.
I am delighted that the noble Lord, Lord Glentoran, is also an optimist—what an optimistic day—and that he believes that the police service is not complacent. I am delighted to hear my noble friend Lord Alderdice speaking on the day on which his report—the 26th and final report of the Independent Monitoring Commission—has been produced. I am sure that all noble Lords are very grateful for the work that the noble Lord and his colleagues have carried out over many years in monitoring the willing. Sadly, much of the dissident republican and dissident loyalist violence that we are still talking about is the work of the unwilling. I noted with interest my noble friend’s comments on a possible way forward. I have heard the voices but we will have to make a judgment closer to the time on whether there is a need for a public consultation. Happy would be the day when we could say that we did not need the two-year period. That could happen. It does not have to be a case of two plus two plus two, but we want to take into account the impact and effect of other changes to the criminal justice system which the local Administration is taking forward. At the moment we can extend this provision only for two years. My noble friend suggested that we look at a three-judge system. I will take that option back to colleagues. Obviously, that would constitute a big change but I understand why he has suggested it. We routinely have one judge presiding over a criminal case and if a defendant is not satisfied with a verdict, there are the usual routes of appeal.
In the early days of the Diplock courts, there were more than 300 cases. That figure diminished over time but in the past five years of the present regime there have been 12, 25, 11, 14 and 12 so far this year. However, as the noble Baroness indicated, the figure could now be going higher than the year before and the year before that.
The noble Lord, Lord Bew, indicated his reluctance but said that he strongly supported the extension. We are all reluctant, I am afraid, and wish that we did not have it to do. He gave a comforting reminder of the splendour of the democratic system. Nevertheless, there are those who do not want to participate in what it brings forward. He was concerned about consultation and I shall take his concerns back.
The noble Baroness, Lady Smith, agreed that the order is a necessity. She is concerned about public confidence. However, as I understand it, this is an exceptional system; it is used only in limited circumstances on a case-by-case basis and there is a presumption for jury trial, the opposite of Diplock. The noble Baroness asked about other action. I am not aware of any that I should draw to the attention of noble Lords but, if there is, I shall write to her. After looking at all the papers and all that I have read, I am not certain that there is another initiative of which I am able to speak. However, if there is, I shall drop her a line on that. The noble Baroness referred to other steps. This is now a matter for the devolved Administration and the PSNI. All we can do is support them in their efforts to reduce intimidation.
I like to have figures available but I cannot say, for example, that there were 12 cases in a non-jury setting and 3,000 otherwise; I do not have those kinds of numbers. We shall endeavour to provide the figures—I am sure they must be available—but it is clear that the figure for non-jury trials is very low.
I hope I have dealt with the comments made by noble Lords and that your Lordships will agree to the renewal of the order.
Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill
(13 years, 4 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
My Lords, this is the first opportunity I have had to congratulate my noble friend on her appointment as a Minister in the Home Office. She had a distinguished career in the House of Commons and we were appointed as two of the first four ever political commissioners to the Electoral Commission. That was a decision by the previous Administration, with all-party support. I was immediately impressed by her grasp of the issues and the immense style she brought to the commission. All her fellow commissioners were delighted at her appointment but disappointed that we had lost someone who clearly had so much to offer. I enjoyed working with her on the commission and hope that we can work together in her new role.
My amendments in this group seek to ensure that the deputy mayor for policing and crime is an elected member of the Greater London Authority. I do not understand how anyone could object to that. I thought that the Government wanted people to be elected to undertake these important roles. Having a London Assembly Member as the deputy mayor for policing and crime must be preferable to having some place-person of an incumbent mayor at any particular time if the Government insist that these proposals go ahead.
I see that the Government have moved some way, in their Amendments 89 and 90, in giving the London Assembly the power of veto over the mayor's nominee if they are not a Member of that Assembly. However, that requires a two-thirds majority, so we could have a situation whereby the majority of the London Assembly does not want the person the mayor proposes but that still goes ahead because they have not hit the two-thirds threshold. Could my noble friend not reconsider this and go just a bit further? I beg to move.
Lord Rosser
My Lords, this group of amendments includes provision for ensuring that the mayor appoints a Member of the London Assembly as the deputy mayor for policing and crime and not just, as the Bill provides, for “a person”. The amendments also provide for the deputy mayor of policing to arrange for,
“another member of the London Assembly”,
rather than any other person,
“to exercise any function of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime”,
that is exercisable by the deputy mayor.
The Government have also tabled amendments on the London Assembly’s veto power over,
“the appointment of the candidate as deputy mayor for policing and crime if the candidate is not a member of the London Assembly”.
That may act as a small incentive to appoint a London Assembly Member. However, those veto powers requiring a two-thirds majority of votes cast would not be necessary if some of the other amendments in the group that provide that the deputy mayor has to be,
“another member of the London Assembly”,
were accepted. The Government have rejected the idea of an elected deputy mayor for policing and crime in London, but if that is a step too far for them surely they can accept the amendments that provide for that deputy mayor to be a Member of the London Assembly and thus ensure that the occupant of the post has at least successfully stood for election.
In reality, the deputy mayor for policing and crime is the one who has responsibility for policing in London rather than the mayor, who has many other duties and does not have the time to give the post his undivided attention. It is only right that the occupant of the post should be a Member of the London Assembly, not simply “a person” known to the mayor and whose appointment—with a two-thirds majority required in the London Assembly to veto it—the mayor can almost certainly secure. I hope that the Minister will recognise the strength of the argument for these amendments and indicate that when she responds.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Browning)
My Lords, I will first address government Amendments 89 and 90 in this group. The Government have given this matter a great deal of consideration and I discussed it in some detail in meetings across the House with noble Lords following Committee. There are already some safeguards in the Bill as to the appointment of the deputy mayor in the form of strong disqualification criteria and the requirement for non-binding confirmation hearings. However, it was clear in Committee that noble Lords did not consider this sufficient, so we have given this further consideration, including considering the option of limiting the mayor to appointing Assembly Members. On this specific point, the Government accepted that there were arguments in favour, but we were concerned at the relatively small pool from which the mayor would be able to select the holder of this important post. Instead, the Government have brought forward amendments that would still allow the mayor to appoint a non-Assembly Member but would make the confirmation hearing binding in such a case, giving the Assembly the power to veto the appointment by a two-thirds majority.
Any Assembly Member the Mayor wished to appoint would be subject to a non-binding confirmation, as already set out in the Bill. I hope this will go to the core of the concerns that my noble friend Lady Doocey expressed in Committee. I also hope that the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy of Southwark, will feel reassured that the mayor cannot simply appoint one of his or her friends to that position. In saying that, I thank the noble Lord for his kind remarks. I, too, enjoyed working with him on the Electoral Commission and I look forward to working with him in this Chamber as well. I had better not say more than that because it will not do his reputation on the opposition Benches any good if I say that we are going to work closely in the future. I do not think his Whips would like that too much, but he knows what I mean.
We suggest adding new powers to this part of the legislation because we understand the unique role the deputy mayor will have, if appointed. Of course, it is still for the mayor to decide whether to make such an appointment. We have tried to listen to the concerns expressed in Committee, and I hope that noble Lords who have tabled amendments in this group will be reassured that the deputy will either need to be an Assembly Member or to have the confidence of the London Assembly.
Amendments 75, 78 and 88, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy of Southwark, and my noble friend Baroness Doocey, would prevent the mayor from appointing anyone but an Assembly Member to be the deputy mayor for policing and crime. Several other Peers, not least my noble friends Lord Shipley and Lady Hamwee, were also concerned that the mayor could appoint a non-Assembly Member to be deputy mayor and that this would cut across the democratic principles that this Bill seeks to establish.
The Bill allows the Mayor of London, operating through the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, to delegate the day-to-day handling of policing governance to a deputy. However, in accordance with general legal principles, the mayor will not be able to pass on the responsibility for any delegated work. The mayor will still be answerable and responsible. It is essential to this new governance model that the mayor is always held responsible for the way his or her functions are carried out, whether delegated or not. Clause 20 establishes that the selection must be in line with existing provisions for mayoral appointments. Further essential details, such as the eligibility criteria and terms and conditions for the post, are set out in Schedule 3. The Government agree that more is needed, but we do not think that the solution suggested by these amendments is the right approach. As such, I hope noble Lords will not press their amendments and will support the government amendments.
On Amendments 76, 77 and 81, Amendment 76, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy of Southwark, would prevent the delegation of functions to individuals other than the deputy mayor. That is a little concerning, first because it would prevent the mayor from being able to split responsibilities as he or she see fit, as everything from typing a letter to paying funds would have to be done by the mayor or delegated to the deputy mayor. Secondly, it would in effect require the mayor to have a deputy. At the moment it is for the mayor to choose whether to delegate to anyone else.
It is important that the mayor, as the elected person with a mandate to make decisions, has the discretion to decide how their office will function. As such, I ask that the amendments not be pressed.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for her response, and I of course thank my noble friend Lord Rosser. I accept that the Government have moved some way on this, although I am disappointed that they have not moved as far as I would like. However, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Browning
(5) But the Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime may not arrange for a person to exercise a function if—
(a) the person is listed in subsection (6), or(b) the function is listed in subsection (7).”
Baroness Browning
“(f) a member of the staff of a person falling within any of paragraphs (a) to (e).”
Baroness Browning
(a) ”
“(6) Paragraph 10 applies in relation to such an appointment if the candidate is not a member of the London Assembly.
(7) Paragraphs 2, 4 and 5 are subject to paragraph 10.”;
(b) after paragraph 9 insert—“10 (1) The London Assembly may veto the appointment of the candidate as Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime if the candidate is not a member of the London Assembly.
(2) The exercise of that power of veto in relation to an appointment is not valid unless the London Assembly—
(a) has held a confirmation meeting in relation to the appointment before the exercise of the power; and(b) notifies the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime of the veto within the period of 3 weeks described in paragraph 4(3).(3) If the London Assembly vetoes the appointment of the candidate, the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime must not appoint the candidate.
(4) References in this Schedule to the London Assembly vetoing the appointment of a candidate are references to the Assembly making a decision, by the required majority, that the candidate should not be appointed as Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime.
(5) For that purpose, the London Assembly makes that decision by the required majority if at least two-thirds of the votes given in making that decision are votes in favour of making that decision.”
Lord Beecham
“( ) A precept must be issued separately from a local authority’s—
(a) council tax demand, and(b) non-domestic rates demand.”
Lord Beecham
I am given to understand by my noble friend Lord Hunt that I am not required to speak for more than half an hour or so to these amendments. Ever willing to oblige, I shall endeavour to be reasonably concise and thereby break the habit of a lifetime.
This grouping is slightly odd because Amendments 92 to 100 relate to the financial aspect of the work of the commissioner and the arrangements for the precepts. The other amendments relate to other aspects that are not quite connected. Perhaps they should have been degrouped, but as they are not I will confine myself to the first group of amendments. They cover a number of issues.
Amendment 92 would require the precepts to be levied by the police commissioner or authority, however constituted, separately from the council tax demand and the non-domestic rates demand. That is in the interests of transparency. As the whole case that the Government advanced for the Bill is one of accountability and transparency, it seems sensible that the people who are paying local taxation towards the cost of the police service should be aware of that separately from the ordinary demands that they will get for the rest of the local authority’s services. Separate precepts should be the order of the day.
In addition, however, there is the question of how the precept is derived in the first place. Amendment 93 raises again the question of local authority involvement in the process. Under Amendment 93, the local authority should have the opportunity to review the proposed precept. Other amendments require the police commissioner to have regard to any representations made by local authorities in respect of the precept, and the panel to have the opportunity to amend, rather than simply veto, the precept.
Baroness Hamwee
That was only four minutes—it really is not good enough. As the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, said, the first part of the test is about the budget and I have amendments on that as well. Amendments 112, 113 and 114 are my amendments in this group. I tabled them, and I think that my noble friend Lord Shipley’s name would have been added to them had he known I was doing this, as he agreed the wording. I associate him with them.
After a discussion instigated by the Minister at the all-party meeting which she held to discuss the protocol—where she talked about the role of the panel as being supportive as well as destructive, or, at any rate, as carrying on the scrutiny function—we had a discussion about what scrutiny meant. I decided to write my amendments to that effect and these three are the result. “Constructive”, “collegiate”, “collaborative” and so on are words that we have been tossing around in debate over the past few days. We have been talking about checks and balances and, to my mind, this is the balance. The words that I have added in as part of the balance are:
“keep under review the exercise by the … commissioner of the statutory functions”;
“undertake investigations”; and,
“support the … commissioner with regard to”,
not just the functions, but specifically:
“the development of his or her police and crime plan and its implementation and the development of his or her budget”.
That is quite deliberate because we need to recognise the budget as the facilitator, the implementer of the police and crime plan. They are so connected as to be inseparable.
I am afraid that I will repeat what I have said before, but the panel cannot be supportive without a major role in both the plan and the budget. You have to start with the panel’s role in the plan and the panel cannot do its supportive job without the tools to undertake it. The Minister has her version in Amendment 107. Although I welcome the warm words here, I think that the panel needs the specific powers. I realise that we are unlikely at this stage to persuade the Government of this, but my mind is unchanged. We are each a product of our own background, and the baggage that I carry is of spending some years in a scrutiny role. Knowing that I have, as it were, the tools in my back pocket, rarely having to be used but always there, is a very important part of the tool-kit, as the jargon goes.
My earlier amendments in this group, Amendments 94, 96, 97, 98 and 100, again are to make the point—which, I suspect, has not been understood—that you cannot just look at the precept, a point that the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, made as well. The precept is the last stage in the development of a budget. There may be a fundamental political difference—I do not want to say fault line—between different politicians as to whether one starts by looking at the precept as taxation, and therefore bad, or as the result of a budget and how you spend the money, and therefore good.
My amendments are not just about the precept but about the heads of expenditure that go to make up the budget and the important tool that the commissioner will have, which is virement between the different heads.
Amendment 146 deals with the need for approval of the budget and spells this out in some detail. It includes the veto of the budget, as distinct from the veto of the precept. In response to a debate on these issues, the Minister said:
“Our intention would be for a series of discussions to be held, not just one blanket meeting at which, for example, the precept or the budget was discussed and a decision taken without the panel having a lot of background information”—[Official Report, 6/6/11; col. 34]—
and so on. Of course that must be right, but stating the intention is a very long way short of giving the mechanisms to the panel to do the job that I have described.
Baroness Henig
My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 108 and 111 in this group. As my noble friend Lord Beecham said, this is a very diverse group of amendments. The two amendments in my name relate to the functions of the police and crime panel. Amendment 108 revises and rationalises the functions of the panel and Amendment 111 simply removes an existing clause relating to panel functions to reincorporate it in a more rationalised fashion within Amendment 108.
In briefly outlining the effect of these amendments—not too briefly, since we seem to be racing through them, so perhaps I will try to slow down a little—I would say that they are designed to set out a more collaborative approach to the panel working with the commissioner. This includes an essential role in engagement with the public at local level and with police performance at divisional level. My aim is to exploit the strength of local councillors in a way that enables them to contribute constructively to police governance. I emphasise that there is no great gulf between what I, my noble friend Lord Beecham and the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, are trying to do in these amendments, and what the Minister is trying to do. She talks about the panel having a supportive role. Others of us see that role as being collaborative and constructive. There is not much difference between “supportive” and “collaborative and constructive”. If I could nudge the Minister just a little further, that would be helpful. It is not a big change, but being constructive and being able to collaborate would help the panel to operate in a more tangible way that I will come on to describe.
I want to give specific functions to the panel in relation to working with the commissioner to develop a detailed police and crime plan, budget and precepting proposals. Again, this is designed to encourage a corporate approach rather than, as might otherwise happen in some areas, a confrontational approach to police governance. My amendments also provide that a panel must hold public meetings, which is ultimately a cornerstone of securing true public accountability. The driving concern behind this group of amendments is the attempt to describe a more co-operative approach to overcome the dangers of polarised political differences or overfamiliar political relationships between the commissioner and the panel that would render governance ineffective.
I appreciate that there is a government amendment in this group that attempts to specify a more co-operative and supportive approach for the panel and the commissioner. It is very welcome, but rather unspecific. This is true of a lot of government amendments; they go in the right direction and their spirit is right, but they are very general. My amendments attempt to put more flesh on the bones, to nudge the Government a little further and to describe in more detail how the panel and the commissioner should work together. I draw noble Lords’ attention specifically to the part of the amendment that covers the policing plan, the budget and the precept. These are key areas in which the panel should be involved not just in scrutinising the commissioner but in contributing to developing the shape of these things. That is what it should be doing and that is what I hope my amendment would achieve.
It echoes some amendments put forward by others which specify a more detailed role for the panel in, for example, scrutinising the detail of the budget. Again, my amendment goes a little further and suggests that the panel should contribute constructively to shaping the budget. As I said earlier, it also provides a key role for the panel in providing a link between local areas and the wider police area. We discussed in earlier debates the need for this more local link, which is consistent with what councillors do and puts members of the police and crime panel in a good position to play a more active role at local level. In this context, two elements are particularly important. First, it will enable panel members to complement the role of the commissioner in engaging and consulting with communities. Panel members can bring views from areas and communities that might otherwise not be heard into the wider policing family. Secondly, it will enable panel members to keep an eye on police performance at a more local level, so that they will be in a position to bring emerging problems to the attention of the panel and the commissioner before they become major.
In practice, a lot of this will happen anyway in areas where the commissioner is good at forming relationships. Where there are good commissioners, good relationships will be formed and the commissioner will want to work with the panel in this way. This will all happen as a matter of course. My concern is about areas where the commissioner will not be good at forming relationships and working with others. Of course, it will be in precisely those areas that prescription will be most necessary. In a sense, we are all looking to the areas where things will not necessarily work well, where problems will arise and where the Government will be forced to say, two or three years down the line: “What a shame we did not put this or that in place”. I am trying to envisage how this will work in practice, how it might best be played out and what we can put in the Bill to make it happen.
I will also mention voting. My amendment specifies that all decisions of the police and crime panel should be taken by majority vote. I am sorry about that: I heard what was said about two-thirds, but I am a great majority-vote person. It is what I am used to and it is consistent with other amendments that I will put forward in relation to veto powers, which suggest that these, too, should operate by a simple majority of the members present.
For me, that has the virtue of bringing consistency to the majority required for all panel votes and will avoid confusion that might otherwise arise by having different voting limits for different things. In later amendments I will discuss why I think veto powers should be exercised through a simple majority. Suffice to say for now that I believe it is entirely consistent with strengthening the role of the panel.
As I mentioned, these amendments put some flesh on the bones and set out how greater co-operation between the panel and commission might be achieved in relation to key functions. While they set out some practical ways in which the role of the panel can be strengthened, to perhaps guard against some of the worst problems that could arise, they cannot entirely cure what I still think is a fundamentally flawed model. None the less, I hope they will be regarded as—and they really are meant to be—constructive suggestions about giving a stronger and more balanced role to the panel.
Baroness Harris of Richmond
I speak briefly in support of Amendments 108 and 111 tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Henig. I must say that it is without much hope of any movement, as we have seen most of the evening from the Government. Much of the debate and many of the negotiations between the Government and Peers who have expressed concern in Committee have been focused on checks and balances and getting the role of the panels right. I am grateful that the Government have accepted that a more co-operative approach is needed through the amendment that the Minister is about to put forward, which I welcome.
However, I agree that some greater description needs to be included in the Bill about what a co-operative relationship looks like in practice. I therefore support the more detailed amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Henig. The proposal that the panel should be involved in some of the really key functions brings some important clarity to what this might involve, particularly around shaping the police and crime plan, the budget that will help to deliver it and the precept that will need to be raised locally to support it.
I also welcome the role envisaged for panel members at a more local level in helping to engage with communities and monitor force performance. This, of course, goes back to concerns that the PCC is too big a job to be able to engage in detail at very local level on a consistent basis; and I think it is helpful to suggest that the panel should do so. This would enable it to bring concerns and issues to the attention of the governing body, as well as adding to the sources of information available to the panel to assist in its scrutiny of the PCC. I believe that these are helpful suggestions to assist in drawing out how the role of the panel can be strengthened, and I support them.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, this has been an interesting debate with slightly curious groupings. I think I should take out my Amendment 109A, which relates to a review by the panel of the police and crime commissioner’s human resources policy. I do not think it belongs here. It might be better taken when we reach Schedule 15.
There is a theme in relation to most of the other amendments in this grouping around the role of the panel in relation both to the public and to the precept. My noble friend Lord Beecham is absolutely right. The precept is a significant proportion—between about 11 and 13 per cent—of the total council tax. We debated this in Committee and I know that when we get our council tax information, we have different leaflets in relation to different bodies. However, my noble friend is right: because of the significance and the fact that this is made by one person, it should be completely separate and completely separately identified. That would discharge more effective public accountability.
In previous amendments, we have debated the role of the PCC, and noble Lords on the government Front Bench have rejected many amendments because, for instance, when it comes to requiring chief constables to appear before the police and crime panel or the equivalent in London, it is argued that that blurs the line of accountability. I think that unless you have completely separate precepts, that also blurs the line of accountability when it comes to raising resources from council tax payers.
My Amendment 96A reinforces the requirement for openness in relation to the precept. I think it quite extraordinary that local authorities are not going to be consulted formally on the precept that the police and crime commissioner proposes to make. The Minister will no doubt say that that can be done through the panel. Of course the panel exists to provide scrutiny, but given the importance of the precept, I think there is a strong argument that each individual authority ought to be consulted as well. I hope the Minister will be sympathetic to that.
My noble friend Lady Henig made some very important points in relation to the panels and the question of public meetings. Her amendments link the panel to local areas. West Midlands Police force, which covers the area from Coventry to Wolverhampton, will have one person to be elected the PCC. There is a risk that some of the great work that has recently been undertaken by the police force to develop links at the local level will be dissipated, and the role of the panel to reinforce those links would be very valuable indeed.
The government amendment essentially states that the responsibilities of the panels must be exercised with a view to supporting the effective exercise of the functions of PCCs. It is a tribute to the draftsmanship of parliamentary counsel that such an anodyne amendment could be put forward. It is, of course, completely meaningless because who is to say whether what a PCP does is exercised with a view to supporting the effective exercise of the functions of PCCs? Unless we find ourselves in judicial review territory, I presume that this will never be tested. If I were a panel chair, I would, of course, always argue that everything I did was about ensuring the effective exercise of the functions of the PCC. I think we should congratulate the Government on their ingenuity, but I hope the Minister will confirm that it is meaningless.
Baroness Browning
My Lords, if I may deal with that last point first, it is certainly not meaningless. I will come later in my remarks to why I think it is an important addition to the Bill.
In resisting these amendments before the House tonight, I note that many are addressed through proposed government amendments to which I will speak later. I shall begin with Amendments 92, 93 and 95, which were tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, in relation to precepts. Amendment 92 would compel the PCC to bill the public separately from the precept of the local council. I thank the noble Lord for tabling this amendment because I think the effect would be positive. In essence, it would provide clarity to the public about exactly where their money is going and how much they are paying for policing services. However, this is also a matter of proportionality. The debate about hypothecating the local authority’s bill is quite an old debate. I recall having discussions about it on many occasions in the other place. Everybody thought it would be a good thing because there would be more clarity, but nobody has taken it forward, including the former Government, I have to say. To issue separate bills would increase costs, not just in the production of the bill itself but because, if it were separately sent, there would be questions about collection and payment on time which would add cost to collecting the money for the precept.
PCCs will be high-profile figures, and part of the point of these reforms is that nobody should be in any doubt as to who is responsible for the policing precept, strategy and budget. The council tax bill will, as now, clearly set out where the money is going. With that in mind, and looking at the balance of the proportionality of what the noble Lord has put before the House tonight, I feel that the current arrangements will be sufficient. For that reason, I ask him to consider withdrawing his amendment.
Amendments 93 and 95 would require the police and crime commissioner to notify the local authorities in the police area of the proposed precept, and the commissioner would be required to consult with the police and crime panel and the local authorities. The panel already has the power to review the precept, and will be able to reflect the views of the local authorities in doing this. We have already had this discussion with regard to an earlier amendment. Although not exclusively made up of local authority members, the panel will represent every local authority in the police authority area and therefore will be able to reflect the view of the local authorities. For that reason, I see no need for further prescription on this issue.
In addressing the precept, I also refer to Amendment 96A, tabled by the noble Lords, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, Lord Beecham and Lord Stevenson of Balmacara. I understand your Lordships’ view that the views of local authorities should be heard on this issue. However, the police and crime panel membership, with its strong link to local authorities, will be able to make sure that those views are represented in considering the precept. Indeed, this access to local knowledge is one of their strengths. We have not touched on this very much but the representation of local authorities will bring that specific local knowledge to the table. Therefore, I do not feel that this provision is necessary.
The next series of amendments seeks to give the panel a greater role in relation to the budget and the police and crime plan. I reiterate that the Government are fully committed to the model of directly elected police and crime commissioners and it is they who will have the public mandate to develop the police and crime plan and the associated budget. It is imperative that the lines of accountability that run through this reform are clear and that the public know whom they can hold to account for the performance of their police force.
I turn now to Amendments 94, 96 to 100, 146 and 147. First, I will address those amendments tabled by my noble friends Lady Hamwee and Lord Shipley, which seek to give the panel a direct role in the setting of the budget and heads of expenditure. We have already set out provision for the panel to review and to produce a report and recommendations on the precept level set by the commissioner, and in extreme cases, to veto it. This already gives the panel considerable power in relation to the budget that the Government consider proportionate to its role.
Amendment 109, tabled by my noble friends Lady Hamwee and Lord Shipley, concerns the power of a police and crime panel to veto the police and crime plan of a police and crime commissioner outside London. I am clear that setting the strategy for the force must be an unfettered decision of the PCC. This is precisely where its electoral mandate will come into play, and where the public will most visibly see their views and opinions reflected. There is provision in the Bill for the panel to provide recommendations on the plan, which is in line with its scrutiny role. However, the final decision on the plan must rest with the commissioner.
My noble friend Lady Hamwee has tabled Amendments 112, 113 and 114. In relation to Amendments 112 and 113, I note that the police and crime panels already have powers appropriate to the scrutiny role that they will perform. Therefore, I do not see what further value these amendments would bring. In addressing Amendment 114, I am pleased to note that my noble friend’s amendment is in the same vein as the government amendment to which I shall speak now.
Baroness Henig
I am most grateful to the noble Baroness for those remarks. At the end of the day we are doing all this for the public; it is for local communities. The reason I put forward my suggestions is not simply to make for better working with the commissioner, but to benefit the public. It seems to me that that is what all this is about. If I have differences with the noble Baroness, it is because I feel that the public will be better served by local councillors who have a constructive role in representing the local community to the commissioner and vice versa and who can play an active and collaborative role. It is in that spirit that I have been putting forward my amendments, not for any other reason than to benefit the public. I am sure that the noble Baroness will appreciate that sentiment.
Baroness Browning
I do indeed and although we have not been able to agree on everything, I have appreciated the constructive way in which the noble Baroness has brought forward her suggestions, both in Committee and on Report. I know that I have disappointed her in many of my responses, but I hope she will accept that in this change to the Bill I have listened carefully across the House, but particularly to her words. She has chosen her words very carefully, she has had a good point to make and I have tried to encapsulate that in this amendment. Therefore, I propose an amendment to the general provisions in relation to police and crime panels at Clause 29 to reflect the need for the PCP to exercise its powers with a view to supporting the PCC in its duties. The police and crime commissioner will be solely responsible for holding the chief constable to account. However, I accept the noble Lord’s premise that the relationship between the commission and the panel would be one of support as well as challenge.
The noble Baroness, Lady Henig, used the word collaborative to describe the proposed relationship between the commissioner and the panel. My concern with this is that it would ultimately create confusion over who holds the police to account. Therefore, the Government propose to place a duty on the panel to exercise its functions in support of the commissioner. This will mitigate the risk of conflict between the commissioner and the panel without diluting the accountability of the commissioner.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, as regards the final point, I can only agree with my noble friend Lord Hunt. Amendment 107 is the absolute embodiment of a platitude. It is wholly unnecessary and almost insulting to prospective members of police and crime panels as it appears to assume that there may be a case where their purpose will not be to support the effective exercise of the functions of the commissioner. In the real world, that cannot be the case.
I am very disappointed with the Minister’s response in relation to how the precept is arrived at, although less so in connection with the question of the separate precept. Perhaps I may say that she has a monocular and wholly unrealistic view of how these processes are likely to work. As she did in the earlier debate, she is viewing it from the perspective that all we are concerned about is the budget of the police authority, however constituted, and its precept, as if that were something discrete, separate and completely detached from what is going on in local government in the area in terms of the service aspect where collaboration is clearly essential, the totality of the expenditure and the cost to the local taxpayer. That simply is not the case. If it were to be the case, it would be very much for the worse in terms of effective policing and local government. That collaboration clearly has to be facilitated and the arrangements in the Bill do not effectively facilitate it.
The noble Baroness says that it will be important to have access to local knowledge through the members of the crime panels. But that local knowledge in the case particularly of district council members in two-tier areas will be confined to relatively small parts of the force area. In those areas, there will be perhaps one or two county members and many more from district councils. That will not give the police commissioner a realistic view of what is necessary to be done for the whole force area. It is also asking too much in the case of metropolitan areas for a single individual or perhaps two to speak for the whole authority, which in Birmingham’s case runs into hundreds of thousands and sometimes to very many more than that. The West Midlands has 2 million to 3 million people. Even the slightly expanded number to be proposed later in a government amendment as regards the constitution of the police power will leave people representing very large areas. They will not have the authority of leaders of councils. Given the pressures on them, leaders of councils or elected mayors—I see that the Government will move an amendment for elected mayors to serve on police authorities—will not have the time to devote to what is effectively a scrutiny exercise for most of the year.
In my experience as leader of Newcastle City Council years ago, the leaders met the police authority to discuss the budget in some detail. We had a proper discussion, and the authority and the back-up to do that, which is what is required under the new dispensation. You will not get that, with the best will in the world, from panel members. They will not have the authority to speak for the whole council. They will probably not get the back-up that will be required particularly in the case, if I may say so, of district councils whose resources can be very stretched. We will simply not have an effective relationship between the local authority in an area and its police force. For the life of me, I cannot see what the Government have to lose by accepting the amendments, at least in respect of this obligation to consult with the authorities, as opposed to a handful of members from those authorities who will not have themselves any authority effectively to speak for the authorities which send them there.
This will be a missed opportunity. It will weaken the effectiveness of the panel and it will therefore weaken the effectiveness of the whole police authority. It is ironic therefore that Amendment 107, that the Minister moved, which talks about supporting the effective exercise of the functions of the police and crime commissioner, in fact, by the attitude that the Government are taking to the amendments, will achieve precisely the opposite. An opportunity is being missed to cement a productive relationship in the interests of the whole area and I urge the Minister to take this back, to talk to her colleagues in the other place and see whether she cannot induce them to see some sense. I beg leave to withdraw.