Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Debate between Lord Blair of Boughton and Lord Soley

Wednesday 11th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley]

My Lords, I shall try to be brief; a lot of arguments have been made and I shall try not to repeat them. However, I will repeat the congratulations that have been given to the Minister—although I will change it to commiserations because being dropped into a contentious Bill of this complexity and which has constitutional implications is a big challenge. However, I know she will listen and that is very important.

My reason for offering support to this group of amendments is because we are engaged in something very serious and a pause for thought is right. The trial period might be referred to in a more important group of amendments than this one but it involves the same principle that we need to pause and think about this.

One of the most important statements in the report of the House of Lords Constitution Committee, quite rightly, is:

“From a constitutional perspective, the chief risk with Part 1 is that of politicising operational decision-making”.

That, and what follows from it, is profoundly important. I ask the Minister, when she considers all of these arguments, to take that statement by the Constitution Committee into account more than anything else; it is particularly important.

I shall refer now to the optimism of people who believe that elected police commissioners will address a democratic deficit of some type. I am a strong believer in democracy and in voting generally, but there are times when you need to step back and think about whether it is the best system. The noble Lord, Lord Carlile—who is in a committee at the moment and will not hear my comments—is convinced that it is very important to have the senior officer of the police committee elected in the way described in the Bill. I say to him that one of the things that we all underestimate at times is that the British public as a whole put such great store on their constituency MP that they tend to go to their MP before they think of going to anyone else. Any ex-MP will know that despite the fact that you might say 100 times to an individual, “The local councillor can sort out your problem quicker and better than I can”, they will still go to the MP. That there are people who think that by setting up elected police committees covering large areas they will have people going to them, is a triumph of hope over experience.

The other fear I have was put clearly by my noble friend Lord Beecham and I do not need to repeat it in too much detail. There is a problem about people being elected on the basis of a fear of crime. I listened carefully to the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, but the problem with populism in an area such as crime is that it is based on fear. One of the difficulties in dealing with crime prevention is lowering the fear of crime. The greater the fear of crime, the more people retreat indoors, the more communities get cut off and the greater the risk of crime becomes. There is very strong evidence for that.

One of my objections to, particularly, the tabloid press in the 1970s and 1980s was that it played on the fear of crime to the extent that it drove the crime level up. I shall give a simple example; I shall not delay the House on it. I remember chairing a meeting in my then constituency of Shepherds Bush, with two police officers sitting alongside me, because there had been a murder at the base of a block of flats. The public meeting was very angry and the residents wanted large, 20-foot high gates erected to stop people coming in. They kept referring to three murders and I kept saying, “I know of only one murder”. I asked the police about this and they said, “No, there has been only one murder”. When I talked afterwards to the people, who were, importantly, mainly elderly, they kept referring to three murders. “There were three murders here, Mr Soley. You don’t know what you’re talking about and you’re not listening”, they said. So we went away and researched carefully the papers for the area. There had been three headlines in the paper: one when the murder was committed, one when the guy was caught and one when he was sentenced. The more I think about it, that was a classic example of the fear of crime because people had read it as, “Murder in this block of flats”, and it became three whereas in fact it was one. The fear of crime produces a higher crime level.

I will not go into this now because it is for a future debate on the Bill but I have reservations, too, about confusing crime prevention measures with policing. Police have a critical part in detecting and preventing crime but crime prevention is infinitely more than just policing. In fact, if you try to deal with crime just by dealing with the police you are unlikely to succeed. Those are my reservations about going down the election route without testing it pretty thoroughly first.

A couple of examples have been given, of Derek Hatton and the Bookbinder case. I knew about the latter, incidentally, but not its details. The noble Lord, Lord Dear, might well agree that if it was the first time we had to do it in 50 years—I think his term was “half a century”—that is a pretty impressive success ratio for a system. Any governmental system that lasts for 50 years without a major intervention of that type is one you have to look at carefully and think about copying, because you do not normally get that level of success. You do not need to look just at the Bookbinder case and Hatton examples: as the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, pointed out, Hatton was not a case but could have been. You need to look only at the recent case of Boris Johnson and the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Leaving aside whether the mayor or the commissioner was right, we should bear in mind that we appear to be creating a structure which will make such conflict much more common. Can the Minister keep that very much in mind? It is profoundly important. If we really want to see battles between an elected official and a chief constable, the danger in the Bill is that that will be a high risk.

My other point is one that the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, made carefully with her great experience of Northern Ireland. I remember from my own time dealing with Northern Ireland, both on the Front Bench in the House of Commons and as chair of the Select Committee, that the problem of policing there was extreme. That was because the divisions in the community were based on both national and religious identities, while we had a police force which primarily, and almost entirely, represented one section of the community. The method of control had been by one section of the community. I think my noble friend Lady Henig made the point that if you have large areas in mainland Britain, as opposed to the United Kingdom including Northern Ireland, there will be patches in them where the people are not similar to the whole area. You do not need to take your example from Northern Ireland; you can simply look back to London in the 1970s and 1980s.

When the riots broke out in 1981 and the Scarman report came out, Lord Scarman powerfully made the important point that racism within the police had to be tackled. Racism in the London police force at that time was very serious; we all knew that. Despite noble efforts by police at all levels to deal with it, the problem was severe. I say again to the Minister, who I am sure is in her listening mode, that if she is looking at large areas of this country she will find that some of them contain large minority populations who already feel, in some cases, that the policing does not represent them. If we are to go down the road that we are heading down with this Bill without checking it out pretty carefully first, one thing I ask of the Government is to look very carefully at how on earth they make sure that ethnic minorities in those large areas feel represented within that system. London was a classic case of the explosion of anger about policing, when a large and growing section of the community was left out.

I am the first to congratulate the police in the metropolis on all that they have done in recent years; they have worked wonders, and things are infinitely better than they were. As any senior police officer will tell you, though, there is still a problem—in other words, it is not easy to deal with. As the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, pointed out, although we have made enormous strides in this area in Northern Ireland, the idea that somehow we cracked this problem is a triumph of hope over experience.

I said that I would keep my words brief. My single message, picking up on the point made by the Select Committee on the constitution of the House of Lords as well as the points that have been made by myself and others, is that the Government are embarking down a road that has an awful lot of elephant traps in it. When policing is such an important part of our constitution, as the Constitution Committee makes out, the case for making sure that we get the detail right is profoundly important. We will come to this in a later group of amendments, but there is a case for piloting or a pause of some type.

[Lord Blair of Boughton]

My Lords, I declare an interest as the commissioner to whom the noble Lord, Lord Soley, just referred. I am afraid that I will spoil the party of the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, by saying that yes, there is someone here who was a Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and opposes the Bill in root and principle. The reason why I do so is the nature of the beast, in terms of who these police commissioners will be and how they will behave.

I support the amendment because I do not support pilots. We do not need pilots because we can see how the system works. The gentleman who has been mentioned a great deal, Bill Bratton, a good friend of mine, the greatest commissioner and probably the greatest police officer that I have ever met, was fired after 28 months, after reducing crime across the board in New York, including homicide, to limits that had never been seen before. He did that but he crossed Mayor Giuliani by appearing on the front of Time magazine, and was fired instantly. Giuliani of course appointed a man who ended up in prison later on in his undistinguished career. That, I am afraid, is how the beasts behave.

Another example of my worries about the Bill goes back to what the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, said about the protocol. Much was made about the protocol at Second Reading. I have read the protocol and it is not worth the paper that it is written on. It has no statutory basis, and when it comes to the point of hiring and firing the chief constable, there is nothing in that protocol that will stop an individual police and crime commissioner simply announcing that he has got rid of or wishes to get rid of the chief constable, or that he has no confidence in the chief constable. Once that has been announced, the chief constable is almost finished—without any help, because there is no panel there that would be able to support him.

If noble Lords do not think that British politicians would behave like that, I shall give the example—I will not name him, but your Lordships will all know him—of the Home Secretary who tried to have the chief constable of Sussex and the chief constable of Humberside fired, without the power so to do, and he did that effectively on the front pages of the national newspapers. This is for your Lordships’ House to consider: unless someone does something that puts limits around the power of these commissioners, who may well go into office with wonderful ideas and deep integrity but may also see their chances of re-election fall through the floor, and unless their power is constrained in some way, the only answer is for this House to support the amendment put forward by the noble Baroness, Lady Harris.