Protection of Freedoms Bill (Programme) (No. 3)

Lord Beith Excerpts

Monday 10th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[James Brokenshire]

My hon. Friend takes the issues of the House extremely seriously, and I respect him for that. The Government have made important changes to how legislation is scrutinised. We are having two days on Report for the Bill, and that is markedly different from what we would have seen from the previous Government; we would have had a day for consideration of a Bill of this kind.

The terms of the programme motion will come as a disappointment to my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr Leigh) and the other right hon. and hon. Members who have put their name to new clause 1. Despite the two days that we have set aside for Report, twice the normal allocation that we were accustomed to seeing in the last Parliament, regrettably it is unlikely that the House will be able to consider all the new clauses tabled for debate.

As I said, the programme motion has been constructed to ensure that there is adequate time to consider the key provisions already in the Bill. I believe that that is the right approach. Although this is not the occasion to consider the substance of new clause 1, which seeks to amend section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986, I fully recognise that the matter is of considerable interest to a number of Members on both sides of the House. That much is clear from the number of right hon. and hon. Members who have added their names to the new clause.

We agree that the issue should be examined further. That is why, in the next few days, we will publish a consultation seeking views on whether section 5 should be amended along the lines proposed by my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough. I will be happy to meet him to hear his views on this important issue. Once the consultation has concluded—it will run to early in the new year—the Government will set out their conclusions as quickly as possible, so that they can inform the debate on the issue while the Bill is in another place. I have no doubt that there will be other opportunities for the House to consider section 5, either when we next examine the Bill on its return from the other place or on some other suitable occasion. I can assure my hon. Friend that through the consultation we want to promote debate on this issue, not seek to curtail it, by widening and broadening it outside this House.

[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)]

I am grateful for what my hon. Friend says, which helps to set in a more attractive context the otherwise uncharacteristic step that was taken by moving new clause 1 to the very end of the Bill’s consideration. Is he saying that the Government will facilitate a parliamentary opportunity to legislate if a clear conclusion emerges from these discussions?

[James Brokenshire]

The timing of the consultation is intended to be such that it can inform proceedings in the other place. There may therefore be time, in the context of the consideration of the Bill as a whole, to be able to address issues that may come through from the consultation. I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough will accept the consultation as a mark of our determination to undertake a proper review of section 5 and that on that basis he will agree not to press his new clause.

We believe that the programme motion strikes the right balance. I commend it to the House and ask Members to support it so that we can get on with debating the important issues that lie within the Bill.

Policing in the 21st Century

Lord Beith Excerpts

Monday 26th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Alan Johnson]

Thanks to us, the hon. Lady says from a sedentary position. I remind her that we were making the police a priority and guaranteeing the funding for record numbers of police officers.

Last week’s report by Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary and the Audit Commission made it plain that any cuts above 12% were bound adversely to affect front-line policing. Soon we will learn how the Government plan to restrict the use of the DNA database and CCTV, and thus make it harder for the police to catch criminals. Today we have the final part of the triple whammy—structural upheaval through the imposition of elected commissioners and the abolition of the Serious Organised Crime Agency. Perhaps the Home Secretary can tell me which chief constables, which police authority chairs or even which local authority leaders support the replacement of police authorities by a single elected commissioner. Sir Simon Milton, when he was the Conservative head of the Local Government Association, said that:

“there are already people elected at local level to represent the community and be advocates over a range of services—they’re called councillors”.

Is not the Home Secretary setting up, in Sir Simon Milton’s words,

“a parallel and potentially conflicting system with a competing mandate”?

Sir Hugh Orde has said:

“Every professional bone in my body tells me”

that having elected commissioners

“is a bad idea that could drive a coach and horses through the current model of accountability and add nothing but confusion.”

The Conservative chair of the Association of Police Authorities has said that the idea appears to be driven by dogma, and Richard Kemp, the leader of the Liberal Democrat group on the Local Government Association, has said that the vast majority of the 3,700 Lib Dem councillors—a figure soon to be drastically reduced at the next election—oppose an elected commissioner. Does the Home Secretary not think that the narrower the remit of the position, the weaker the case for having the occupier of that position decided by ballot?

How will the Home Secretary safeguard the operational independence of the chief constable? As the APA has pointed out, police authorities have done a great deal over the past few years to ensure that the public understand their role and that police authority members are properly equipped and trained to operate effectively. There is a clear argument for enhancing and increasing the role and responsibility of local government, so that local councillors have a clear mandate for holding the police to account. That is the route that we should be taking, rather than this unnecessary, unwanted and expensive diversion. Can the Home Secretary tell me whether the LGA is right when it states that the elected commissioners will cost £50 million? What is her estimate?

The coalition agreement talked about refocusing the Serious Organised Crime Agency, not eliminating it. That organisation was formed only four years ago, and the structural upheaval then took years to settle down.

[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)]

It was yours.

[Alan Johnson]

It was our structural upheaval, I agree completely, but that is what occurs with any reorganisation. To put people through another structural upheaval four years later is simply madness.

In 2006, SOCA was wrongly described as replicating the FBI, and reports over the weekend gave the same description. Does the Home Secretary think it is accurate? She will be aware of Sir Paul Stephenson’s John Harris memorial lecture recently, which rejected the FBI option. Sir Paul set out a model built upon SOCA, not upon replacing it, and his national federated model has much to commend it. Why is the Home Secretary not pursuing that alternative?

The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre does fantastic work. To build upon that work, we were moving it away from SOCA to be a non-departmental public body. Will the Home Secretary continue that process, and if not, why not?

Will the dedicated border force replace the UK Border Agency, and how many jobs will be lost as a result of these initiatives in SOCA, the UKBA, the National Policing Improvement Agency and elsewhere?

We have yet to hear a word from this Government about how they plan to cut crime. All we have heard is how they will cut officer numbers, prison places and police powers. Today, the Home Secretary has managed to reannounce at least three decisions that we had already taken in government. She says that she will mandate beat meetings to challenge the performance of neighbourhood policing teams, having scrapped the policing pledge drawn up by chief constables themselves to provide exactly that mandate.

The Home Secretary inherited the Department when crime had fallen substantially, public confidence in the police had never been higher and public concern about antisocial behaviour had never been lower. She says she is pursuing bold policies; in fact she is pursuing bad policies. I was pleased to see the Government’s U-turn on anonymity for rape defendants; elected commissioners need to go the same way.

Counter-terrorism and Security Powers

Lord Beith Excerpts

Tuesday 13th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I of course want to ensure that those involved in counter-terrorism, whether in the police or other agencies, are able to undertake the job we ask them to do and which they do diligently for us day in, day out. On spending cuts, however, no specific figure has been set. As the right hon. Gentleman will be aware, a spending review is under way in which Departments are looking at their expenditure and it is right that the Home Office does as other Departments do. I must tell the right hon. Gentleman and others on the Opposition Benches that I did not want to be in the position of looking at spending cuts in the Home Office and other Departments. The reason why we have to do so is that, in the words of the last Labour Chief Secretary to the Treasury, there is no money left. And whose fault is that? It is the Labour party’s.

[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)]

I commend the Home Secretary for recognising that the very real threat to the safety of the people of this country is hindered, not helped, when people perceive that their civil liberties as well as their safety are threatened. Using terrorism powers to bundle people out of the Labour party conference, to stop people reading out names in Whitehall, or indeed to deal with the Icelandic banking crisis demonstrated how authoritarianism had taken over from rational assessment of what we need to defeat terrorism.

[Mrs May]

The right hon. Gentleman makes an extremely valid point. It is extremely useful, in the context of this statement and the questions and answers on it, to remind people of what happened at the Labour party conference, and what an abuse of terrorism legislation that was.