Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Debate between Baroness Hilton of Eggardon and Lord Shipley

Wednesday 11th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley]

My Lords, I also welcome the new Minister to her role. I hope that today she will listen carefully to the views expressed in the House on the detail of the Bill. I have previously talked about the problems of elected police commissioners twice in debates in this Chamber. I will not reiterate what I have said on previous occasions. Suffice it to say that we must not, through our debate on the Bill, end up polarising power in the hands of one individual. We should not politicise the police or produce conflict in electoral mandates between councils, their leaders and elected mayors and a police and crime commissioner. We should maintain impartial allocation of resources, preserve the neutrality of the police service and balance operational command with accountability.

Reference has been made to the coalition agreement. I shall quote precisely what it says:

“We will introduce measures to make the police more accountable through oversight by a directly elected individual, who will be subject to strict checks and balances by locally elected representatives”.

The issue is that the checks and balances are not strong enough and they are certainly not strict. They are very weak indeed. As we have heard, the commissioners will have the power of appointment and dismissal of a chief constable. They will have the power to set a precept, which must then be charged by the local authorities. They will have the power to set a budget and agree the heads of expenditure for a whole police area. They will also have the power to issue a detailed police and crime plan.

There are some checks in place. As the Bill makes clear, 75 per cent of the panel voting can veto the appointment of a chief constable, and 75 per cent of a panel can veto the level of the precept. However, as currently stated in the Bill, a panel has no power to veto the police and crime plan. It has no power to veto the budget and no power to veto the dismissal of the chief constable. The panel will be consulted on the plan and the proposal to dismiss a chief constable will have to go to it for consultation, but it does not have the powers to veto either of those areas.

Further, the commissioners will have the right to appoint their own staff directly. Crucially, the commissioners will have no legislature underneath them, unlike London, where there is one. Therefore, there is no structure underneath the commissioners which provides them with the advice, guidance and support that is absolutely required. As set out in the Bill, enhanced powers are needed for the panels in relation to the plan, the budget and the dismissal of the chief constable. The panels need to be bigger; 10 is too small. Geography, diversity, and urban and rural areas all need to be reflected in the panel. The veto should not sit at 75 per cent. Amendments have been tabled calling for two-thirds. The more I think about this, the more I believe that 50 per cent plus one is probably the right level. The panel must have power to scrutinise the police directly, as police authorities currently do. Under the Bill, they will be able to scrutinise only the commissioner, not the police. I do not regard that as acceptable.

The panel should be able to appoint one of its own members as a temporary replacement when the commissioner is incapacitated. As stated in the Bill, it will be required to appoint a member of the commissioner’s staff who has been appointed to that post by the commissioner and who will, by the very nature of the appointment, not be elected. I simply do not see how that is a strict check and balance on the power of the commissioner.

We shall need to debate many questions in relation to the Bill. I raise a further matter which has not been raised today but comes from the Constitution Select Committee and concerns the voting system. Your Lordships may have had quite enough of discussing voting systems, but a major constitutional issue is involved here. The committee states at paragraph 17 of its 14th report:

“The Government should explain clearly the rationale for adopting the supplementary vote system for the election of police and crime commissioners. In particular, the Government should explain why they have seen fit to recommend a different system to either of those put to the vote in the 5 May referendum on the voting system for the House of Commons”.

The point is extremely important because the supplementary vote does not require 50 per cent support. We simply do not know how many candidates there might be, but as people will have only two votes you could end up with a police and crime commissioner being appointed on a very low percentage of votes. I hope that in our debates in Committee we will look very carefully at how people get elected, because in my view the person who is elected a commissioner—should we have one—must have the support of 50 per cent plus one of those who are voting.

[Baroness Hilton of Eggardon]

My Lords, I too speak in support of the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Harris, and the important principle that the police service should remain politically neutral. The current system provides for a spread of political allegiances and representation of many sections of a force area. I cannot see that a single person can fulfil this role or that having the power to set the budget and sack the chief constable will not inevitably interfere with police operational actions.

On Second Reading I talked about my experiences as a chief superintendant and serving police officer at Chiswick, and of the distortions that can occur when policing is influenced by politics. In particular, I spoke about Chiswick and Brentford, where most of the problems of crime and disorder were located on the Brentford half of the ground, but all the public pressure came from the articulate, organised middle classes of Chiswick.

The role of the police service in this country for nearly 200 years has been to be politically neutral. The oath that we all took on joining the police service was that we would act “without fear or favour”. Indeed, in my view, the main role of the police service is to act as a buffer between the strong in society and the weak. This may be to protect specific citizens from attack by violent criminals, but it is also to protect minorities from the overbearing power of the majority, and allow them the space to demonstrate and to represent their points of view. Where this goes horribly wrong has been recently demonstrated in places such as Syria and Libya.

In contrast to the role of the police service, the role of politicians is to represent the interests of those who elected them and to favour policies that will ensure their re-election—not to have regard to the problems of disfranchised minorities. If the Bill becomes law, we will end up with police forces that are almost permanently influenced by one party or another. We will have Tory police forces, Labour police forces and, increasingly, different styles of policing.

My second problem with the provisions of the Bill is the title, “police and crime commissioner”. The introduction of “crime” into the title strikes me as cheap populism. The police service has many other responsibilities, in particular those relating to public order. One of the primary objects of Peel’s police was the preservation of peace and tranquillity. That holds true today. If we are to have these commissioners—which I very much hope we do not—then “crime” should be dropped from their titles.

My final problem with this proposed duopoly of power is that either the relationship will become too close, or there will be a clash of personalities. During my police service, there was a series of scandals in places such as Blackpool and Southend, where chief constables became too close to the local politicians and did them favours, or interfered with prosecutions—often on traffic offences. Alternatively, political differences may lead to, for example, the recent difficulties between the Mayor of London and the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. We have just heard cited the Bookbinder case. The most notorious example of this problem took place some time ago with the chief constable of Nottingham—the gloriously named Captain Athelstan Popkess—who saw his Labour councillors as Soviet sympathisers and had them investigated by his Special Branch. He was subsequently sacked by the Home Office.

The Bill, as it pertains to policing, is wrong in principle. We have a police service in this country that is admired very much throughout the world, despite some reservations elsewhere, for its impartiality and reluctance to act as a tool of politicians. To jeopardise that political neutrality is, I believe, extremely dangerous.