Police: Independent Police Commission Report

Baroness Berridge Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for obtaining today’s debate, and many of my comments on the roles and responsibilities of the police are informed by my experience at the moment on the Parliamentary Police Service scheme. I am thoroughly enjoying this insight into the amazing work that our police do, and I have serious respect for teams like Team A at Peckham, who take a risk every time they answer a 999 call.

I was warned that I would hear a lot about the Winsor Review from the police, but I did not. I have heard much about kit. A Met police kit is like Marmite. They either love it—“Great kit!”—or hate it—“Rubbish kit”. I commend the recommendations concerning procurement, to which I will return, along with Policing Generation Y: Governance and Diversity in the Police.

First, I will speak about the report itself. I was curious about this commission, which said it was independent but had no statutory or parliamentary basis; nor was it conducted under the auspices of the All-Party Policing Group, which the noble Lord so ably chairs. I tried to read the results with an open mind. As I read, I thought my main concern would be the lack of female involvement in the report. Perhaps 11 women out of 39 commissioners is considered enough, but I thought it was disappointing. As only four out of the 26 witnesses who gave evidence to this inquiry were women, I wondered if it was truly representative. Liberty, I note, was helpful, as it brought 50% of the women who gave evidence to the commission.

What holes this report below the plumb line, in my view, is that it fails to live up to the basic tenet that the police are the public, and the public are the police. I looked carefully at the appendices to see who had inputted, and most of the written submissions were from the police themselves. There is much academic input, as the noble Lords have noted. Surveys of police personnel totalled more than 20,000 responses. Along with all these inquiries, the best evidence is always live witnesses. None were members of the public, victims or representatives of victims’ groups. Again, they were police, politicians or NGOs. The main vehicle used by the commission to obtain evidence from the public was a telephone survey by YouGov of only 2,000 people—less than 10% of the number of the police in their survey.

This mistake is easily made. On the Joint Committee on Human Rights, on which I serve, at the eleventh hour we realised that, to prepare a report on unaccompanied migrant children, we needed to hear from unaccompanied migrant children. I recognise fully the academic expertise in this report, but, with so much evidence from the police and a few NGOs and so little from the public, this imbalance causes me to treat any conclusions with a considerable degree of caution.

The report states:

“For most people it is likely that their own ward, town or village is the more meaningful unit when considering local policing than whole force areas”.

This comment brings into focus an issue not covered by the commission: what is this “meaningful unit” of policing for Generation Y, who live socially networked lives and are not primarily geographically connected, and where crimes committed via their phone or through Facebook are perhaps more likely than crimes in their neighbourhood? The report contains no serious engagement with technology as a means to report crime, which is what younger generations are going to require. Reporting a crime via an app to British Transport Police is much safer than calling if an incident is taking place in the train carriage in which you are sitting.

More helpfully, the report considers the lack of ethnic diversity in the police service. As this is such a key issue, I would have welcomed much more comment and analysis on it, and more input from black and minority ethnic officers, who responded in very low numbers to the survey. If the recommendation for further involvement of the Equality and Human Rights Commission would help matters, it should of course be taken up. Reflecting the people whom you police should be specifically included in any new Peelian principles, as it is essential nowadays to policing by consent. There is urgency to this issue, as I wonder for how much longer all-white surveillance teams, which I have seen, will not stick out like a sore thumb. The commission does not deal with the lack of ethnic diversity on the board of the College of Policing, which contains no black person, or the lack of independent members. This is a serious concern if, as the commission suggests, the college is to take on some form of registration or regulatory role.

The commission seeks to resurrect the issue of the governance of the police. On page 87 of the report, it indicates its preferred option of,

“an indirectly elected Policing Board”.

It would comprise the leaders of local authorities. The police and crime commissioners have not yet served a full term; it is just not sufficient time to judge whether the new model works. The proposed police board, with only the leaders of local authorities on it, is going back in time to the days when only local politicians and magistrates were involved in governance. That did not work and independent members were added to authorities. Leaders of local authorities are no less susceptible to the “recipe for conflict” cited by the commission as a reason to reject one of the models; namely, an elected chair and the indirectly elected board.

There will probably be deep political divisions between those local authority leaders, especially if there is any future merging of the 43 police areas. The policing board in the report would set the overall budget, which risks the same kind of shutdown that the USA sees when the parties fall out. The main argument raised against the PCCs is that the size of constituency is a problem. That argument is not substantiated in the report. As the introduction by the previous Government of the London mayoral office has shown, such an office can cut through the local government boroughs that can hamper a vision for an area. I see no reason why the PCCs cannot do just that.

Finally, I return to kit. It is obvious that money can be saved by national procurement of equipment, but it must be practical and it must be tested. Is the Met Police uniform really suitable for modern-day policing? Carrying kit on belts causes back problems for officers in foot chases, and if you are buying two pieces of technology to bolt together, you should check that they work when they are bolted together—which is a complaint of the traffic police. One of the basic tools is the CAD system—Computer Aided Dispatch—which feeds the information to screens in the car from the 999 call at the centre. I am informed that this is an old British Airways baggage handling system. I think that that says it all.

I have commended what I can of this report, but may it serve as a lesson to all in your Lordships’ House that inquiries and commissions should seek directly the views of the public if they are to have any long-term validity.