Policing and Crime Bill

Baroness Henig Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard - part two): House of Lords
Wednesday 26th October 2016 Lords Chamber

Further, there are numerous policies and procedures embedded in the police service, and widely accepted and understood by partner agencies, that rely on the decision-making and authority being made at the rank of superintendent. This wider understanding and acceptance of the role of superintendents as departmental or functional leads relates directly to other organisational structures in the public and private sectors. This Bill is the ideal opportunity for us to do some of the modernising that is so desperately needed to help the police service restructure to face the very real challenges of a changing policing environment. I beg to move.

[Baroness Henig (Lab)]

I support the amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Harris, in the strongest possible terms. In doing so, I declare my interests as recorded in the Register of Lords’ Interests.

In my long police experience, both in Lancashire and nationally, superintendents and chief superintendents have been the indispensable filling in the police sandwich. Powers from the chief constable and his or her team are delegated down to them, and in turn they take command of and lead the ranks below them. They are the ones who head up important basic command units. They sit on council community safety panels and a range of other local bodies. They establish important relationships with borough council clerks and with council leaders. They were during my time as a police authority chair, and I am sure they still are, the most essential of all the ranks—the indefatigable heads of department, the middle managers just below senior rank, the leaders of the future and the officers with years of constructive practical experience. They are the ones who authorise a range of practical policing strategies in districts, who largely deal with the queries of local Members of Parliament and of councillors, and whose experience is essential to the force. Policing could not be delivered effectively without them.

So why should the rank not be prescribed in legislation, given the centrality of their role? A force would struggle without superintendents—they would have to be reinvented. Indeed, I seem to remember that in the early 1990s the Sheehy report recommendations included the abolition of the rank of chief superintendent. That abolition did not last very long—the rank was reinstated a decade or so later, and I was not in the least surprised. In the light of that experience, I support the amendment that the rank of superintendent should be listed alongside that of constable.

[Lord Blair of Boughton (CB)]

My Lords, I have not read the speeches of the two noble Baronesses. I am about to make a speech on an amendment that I am about to move. I can only say that it completely dovetails with what has just been said. I am not entirely certain that the superintendent is the most important rank in the police service, but I probably have a special interest in some of that. However, I absolutely subscribe to the point of view that superintendents are the workhorses of governance and practice and I support this amendment.

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Moved by

[Baroness Henig]

179: Clause 48, page 69, leave out line 32

[Baroness Henig]

My Lords, I am very conscious of the lateness of the hour and I will try to be brief. I am particularly grateful for being allowed to move the amendment now because next Wednesday I have some important responsibilities; I am captaining the House of Lords bridge team against the House of Commons, and that is why I cannot be here next week. Again, I am grateful that we are able to take the amendment tonight.

I should say at the outset that I have worked alongside and observed the activities of members of the Police Federation for more than 25 years at both the local and national level. I would say that this experience has given me some expertise in Police Federation matters, but of course expertise currently is not something to boast about or perhaps even to lay claim to.

I am sure that we all know that the chief objective of the federation is to represent the interests of its members, and in my experience the Police Federation does this extremely well at both the local and the national level. Indeed, that support network is very necessary. Police officers do a difficult and often dangerous job. They need and deserve the security of knowing that the Police Federation will always be there to defend them if or when things go wrong, particularly legally, but every now and again in relation to terms of service and powers, and politically as well.

It is of course true that the Police Federation should not operate exclusively on behalf of its members. We the public need to have confidence in police officers, so it is important that members and particularly officers of the federation, in carrying out their functions, maintain high standards of conduct and of transparency. Here I have to observe that their conduct has often left something to be desired. I have myself seen at first hand evidence of bullying and of loutish behaviour. I have seen intimidation and ways of operating that manifestly do not command confidence in the integrity of federation officers. I am not alone. There can be no doubt that in recent years their collective actions and attitudes have on occasion grated on successive Governments, and they have alarmed middle England and the devoted readers of the Daily Mail. In the wake of the fiasco surrounding the clash of who said what and did what in Plebgate, the federation itself resolved to carry through a raft of root-and-branch reforms, It asked Sir David Normington to carry out an examination of the structure of the Police Federation and of its objectives. In his resulting report, Sir David proposed among other changes that in fulfilling its statutory responsibilities for the welfare and efficiency of its members, the Police Federation should,

“act in the public interest”.

The Government are taking on board this recommendation but have modified it somewhat to stipulate that the Police Federation must act to “protect the public interest”. I believe this to be a massive overreaction and a serious mistake.

This is for two principal reasons. The first is that I do not know what “protecting the public interest” means. I have served as a local magistrate for 20 years and I know the importance of having laws that are clearly worded and fully understandable to the general public. Opaque words lead to bad law. I have therefore spent some time asking a number of my legal friends, some of them in this House, what they think is meant by “the public interest”. My learned friends cannot tell me. They do not agree and there is no accepted understanding of the phrase, and indeed there is some disagreement on what it might mean. So what precisely are we asking the Police Federation to do? They and we need clarity, so I would like the Minister to spell out to me, and more importantly to the legal profession, what she believes is meant by “protecting the public interest” as it applies to the Police Federation.

My second concern is that in representing its members, which the Police Federation has a prime duty to do, it could easily be drawn into doing the opposite of protecting the public interest. There may be officers whose cases, once the evidence is heard, could undermine trust and confidence in the police and could suggest that they have behaved in ways that have not protected the public interest, either deliberately or inadvertently. Should the federation not represent such officers? It is not difficult to foresee a conflict between the federation’s duty to look after the interests of its members and the obligation to protect the public interest, however it is defined. My strong view is that the federation is first and foremost a staff association, although I accept that it is a body that needs to act in a way which commands the trust and confidence of the public. So while it certainly should maintain high standards of conduct and high levels of transparency, fear of breaching this clause about protecting the public interest should not be able to inhibit the federation from representing the interests of its members. I believe that that might well be a consequence. It sounds grand to bestow on the federation a public purpose, which some of the more grandiose officers in the federation actually rather like, but to my mind it is a hollow aspiration. It is just words that sound good but have no agreed or clear meaning. I therefore believe that the words in proposed new subsection (1A)(a) in Clause 48 should be removed. I beg to move.

[Baroness Harris of Richmond]

My Lords, in drafting this amendment, the noble Baroness, Lady Henig, and I spent many happy hours trying to determine what exactly the “public interest” is, as she has said. It can mean a whole lot of different things to different people and its interpretation is interesting in the context in which it is presented in the Bill.

As we have heard, the Police Federation has followed the recommendation—I emphasise “recommendation” —of Sir David Normington’s review into how to improve itself. It decided that it would establish an independent reference group. At Second Reading I gave your Lordships a full account of how that independent reference group, which I chaired, had been treated. After we were set up as a fully functioning group in January this year, the Police Federation decided it did not want to use us to help it realise its stated purpose of reforming. This was in spite of the membership of that group having within it people with more than 100 years’ experience of working with the police, a very senior and highly respected retired civil servant and the first woman to run a fire authority—so not all of us were politicians, to whom the present chair of the Police Federation was vehemently opposed anyway. Yet all of us were committed to helping the Police Federation improve its image. We were, effectively, sacked in May this year, having been unable to do anything meaningful to help.

I am quizzical about just where the “public interest” fits into this scenario. It is bandied about, as the noble Baroness suggested, but nobody can actually pin down what it means. Is the Police Federation in denial of its obligations to the public interest by behaving in the way it has? If so, what is the meaning of the phrase now? Will the public be pleased at how the organisation has conducted itself—in their interest—or will they be as puzzled as we were about the behaviour of the management of the Police Federation arbitrarily to interpret that interest in this particular way? The phrase needs removing from the Bill unless the Minister can convince me that it is at all meaningful. I would be grateful if she could give me some examples.

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[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

The Nolan principles underpin every single aspect of involvement in public life. Obviously, this is specific to the police in a certain context, but I think the two should go hand in hand. Obviously, there are different aspects to the police compared with other public professions, but anyone who is in public office needs to sign up to the Nolan principles. This is an aspect that applies to the police.

[Baroness Henig]

I thank all noble Lords who have spoken at this late hour. Although it is late, this is an important debate. I listened very carefully to the Minister but she did not actually answer the question. She did not tell the Committee what the words actually mean. I have to say again that if it is not clear what a phrase means, it is not going to be good law and it is going to lead to an awful lot of disagreement in years to come. If four lawyers in a room cannot agree what “protect the public interest” means, that is a recipe for problems. The Minister did not explain what it meant. There was a lot of vagueness and phraseology but nothing clear or precise.

Obviously, at this point in the evening I will withdraw the amendment but I want to think about this a bit more. Some of us might want to return to this at a later stage because it really is not in the public interest to put something in a Bill the meaning of which people cannot agree on. That cannot be a good thing to do. But at this stage, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 179 withdrawn.