Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill
Debate between Lord Beecham and Lord Soley
Lord Beecham
My Lords, I shall speak to the amendments in my name in this group. In so doing, I point out that this clutch of amendments effectively relates to local government, as did the amendment moved by my noble friend Lord Harris. In that context, I declare an interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I am in excellent company. My noble friend Lord Harris is a vice-president, the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, is a vice-president and the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, is a vice-president. Even the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government is a vice-president—for the time being.
I shall just refer to the observations of the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, who spoke eloquently and aptly about what we might call the tactical level of policing. My amendments address the slightly more strategic level and the need for local government to be involved there. Both levels are of course very important. Amendment 68A seeks to require the police commissioner, or perhaps the police commission, to,
“consult local authorities in the police area and have regard for their views”,
in relation to police and crime plans before they are published, thus involving the local authorities in the policies of the commissioner or commission. Amendment 80A concerns the Secretary of State’s powers to consult before issuing guidance on a range of matters. This would again include,
“consultation with the relevant local authorities”.
Amendment 86A is concerned largely with information. It seeks to add “the relevant local authorities” to those bodies to which the annual report should be sent. Amendments 86B and 86C would enable the chief constable to attend public gatherings alongside the commissioner or commission and give a personal response to reports, in addition to any response given by the commissioner.
Amendment 91A contains a requirement to obtain the views of relevant local authorities on the police and crime plan and the precept. That is not an inconsiderable matter given that, as I have pointed out before, the precept in England will amount to 11 per cent of council tax and a higher proportion—15.5 per cent—in Wales. Therefore, it seems legitimate and, indeed, important that local authorities, among others, should be consulted about the precept. Moreover, who should be regarded as ratepayers’ representatives? It seems sensible to suggest that local authorities should at least be consulted about who should be regarded as ratepayers’ representatives. Incidentally, the Government are a ratepayer in various manifestations. It will be interesting to hear from the Minister how it is envisaged that the Government might play a role in this process, whether through the National Health Service or some other government agency.
Amendment 167A also seeks to involve local authorities in determining what neighbourhoods are in the relevant police area. It does not seem plausible that that should be determined by the Secretary of State without consulting the very body that is best able to determine what constitutes a neighbourhood, or that, given the size of force areas, it should be left to the police authority, however it is constituted. I am suggesting that local authorities should be consulted on that issue, not that they should just be the sole voice in making that determination.
Amendment 226A concerns representative bodies that the Secretary of State is required to consult on a range of issues. The amendment suggests that he should be required to consult also the Local Government Authority, the Welsh Local Government Authority—that should be “association”, not “authority”; it is a typographical mistake—and,
“any body representing police and crime panels; any other body the Secretary of State deems appropriate”.
Therefore, the amendment would not restrict the Secretary of State’s consultation but would encourage him to consult representatives of local government. It is impossible to consider an effective crime and community safety agenda without looking at the responsibilities of local authorities across a range of services which they provide. Whatever may emerge from this legislation, we will still have relatively small bodies of people, with or without executive responsibilities, covering very substantial areas in terms of geography and population. Those areas have local authority services ranging from housing to planning, transportation, environmental issues and education. Most of those services impinge in one way or another on the crime and safety issues with which the relevant authority, however constituted, will ultimately be involved.
This group of amendments is designed to ensure the closest collaboration between the different agencies involved, local government and the policing agencies, in conjunction with the powers of the Secretary of State, so that we have a holistic approach. Surely that is consistent with the policy of community budgeting, which used to be called Total Place, which envisaged looking across an area at all the relevant public services. In that context, it is surely important for local government to have a strong voice and, to a degree, to hold accountable the police service at the relevant strategic level of the local authority as well as at the lower neighbourhood and district levels, as the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, pointed out, which may be the concern of most people on a day-to-day basis.
Lord Soley
I give strong support to this group of amendments. I regard them as particularly important. The reason why they are important will become clear if we think about our recent history, by which I mean policing in the 1970s and 1980s, and not just in London. My noble friend Lord Harris referred to Broadwater Farm. I went to Broadwater Farm. I saw the late Bernie Grant there before he was an MP and afterwards. I went to Brixton when the town hall there was virtually surrounded and the fires were burning; the councillors were trapped and almost prisoners. But it was not just in London. I went to the Meadowell Estate in Newcastle, where Lord Scarman also went. It was not about racism there. Clearly, racism in the police force was a particularly serious problem at that time, but Meadowell had no black people. The Meadowell Estate system had broken down. There were different problems there.
When I went to speak to one of the groups there, they were all women; not a man was there. When I asked where the men were, they became defensive and said, “Remember, there are no jobs here; there is nothing for them”. The women had taken over running the locality in that sense. At the time, I had an involvement in policing generally and was at one stage the shadow policing spokesman for the Labour Party. The message I got from going to many such areas, leaving aside the issue of police racism, was that there was an almost total breakdown between local authorities and the police. That had happened not just in London or other areas of high ethnic diversity but other areas.
If we go back to newspapers of that era, we read stories about concern among the police and the Conservative Party that if police and local authorities were forced to get together, there would be the very danger that we have been talking about under the Bill: that local authorities would somehow exert political control. That was the worry and the debate. As I said when the noble Lord, Lord Howard, was in the Chamber, that was when the Labour Party took the view that there ought to be elected police commissioners. I was very doubtful about that theory, and I still am, but it came about because of the breakdown between the local political structures and the police. We found in various areas, including mine at the time, that the police were very reluctant to talk to local authorities and, when the local authorities talked to them, it was often done in a conflictual way. The local authority would say, “Why don’t you do this?”, and the police would say, “This is our business, not yours”.
We will come later in the Bill to the other area that troubles me greatly, which is the lack of clarity about crime prevention. The key here is that we must never again go back to the situation that we had in the 1970s and 1980s—indeed, even in the 1960s, if we consider Notting Hill—where the relationship between the police and local authorities was, at best, non-existent and, at worst, hostile. If we go back to that system or that situation, we will get big problems again. It may be, as it was in Meadowell, a rundown out-of-town estate which has no jobs or it may be on the basis of ethnicity, but something will be the trigger for a breakdown. The lack of co-ordination between the police and local authorities will aggravate that, or indeed almost create it at times. It did create it in certain areas.