Licensing Act 2003
Lord Condon Excerpts(10 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Taylor of Holbeach
Noble Lords will know that there have been a number of ideas on this issue. Chief Constable Adrian Lee from Northamptonshire suggested the idea of drunk tanks, which I had to read about to understand. This has generated some public debate; it is the sort of thing which clearly the Government will look at, because anything that can relieve the burden on hospitals must be a good thing.
Lord Condon (CB)
My Lords, I declare my usual interest. Is the Minister aware of the excellent project in Ipswich, Suffolk, that has been going on over the past year? On a voluntary basis, retailers, major supermarkets and off-licences, working with police and others, have withdrawn the sale of the strongest canned and bottled beers and lagers. On that voluntary basis, it seems to have had a beneficial effect on the quality of life for people, particularly in the centre of Ipswich, and has reduced anti-social behaviour. Does the Minister agree that this should be encouraged in other city centres?
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
Yes, I would certainly vouch for that. There has been a lot of co-operation from the retail trade. I met representatives of the Association of Convenience Stores at the Conservative party conference, where they had a meeting. They are very supportive of retail initiatives of this sort. This morning I met Richard Antcliff, the chief anti-social behaviour officer in Nottinghamshire, and I went to Nottingham to see the work being done in that city to reduce alcohol abuse. Communities can do an awful lot on this issue and the Home Office would encourage any such initiatives.
Crime and Courts Bill [HL]
Lord Condon Excerpts(11 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Condon
My Lords, I support Amendment 1A, moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, for the reasons that she has set out. I find myself agreeing with much of what the Minister said, apart from the mechanism that he advocates should be used in deciding this issue.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, has said, this issue is so important to the national interest that the only mechanism that should be used to transfer responsibility for the lead on terrorism from the Metropolitan Police to the NCA or related agencies is primary legislation. Like the noble Baroness, I cannot imagine any urgent situation where primary legislation would impede the notion of national security and a super-affirmative order would be the better mechanism to use.
Lest I should be out of date in my feelings about this issue, I consulted the current Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police last Friday to see if my views and his were on the same wavelength. He is content for me to relay to your Lordships’ House that he shares my concerns that if there should be change—I am not against the notion of change—primary legislation is the vehicle that will best take care of the public interest on this issue.
I have said before in your Lordships’ House that I am not implacably opposed to any transfer. In saying that, I remind the House of my recorded interests in policing and that for seven years as commissioner this was a role that I discharged in leading the force that had this co-ordinating and leading responsibility. I believe that a super-affirmative order is the wrong way to take care of all the arguments and to preserve the public interest.
Important issues that will have to be considered if there is to be a change include the fact that more than 80% of terrorist offences on the mainland are played out, sadly, in London, and that in fighting terrorism hearts and minds and prevention are as important as detection. Therefore, an integrated approach, which the Metropolitan Police has built up over decades with school visits, visits to mosques and neighbourhood policing, is as important in the fight against terrorism as the drama of executing warrants early in the morning and dramatic seizures of explosives. This is an integrated effort that has been built up over decades.
In the 12 months to September 2012, arrests for terrorism increased over the previous 12 months from 153 to 245, an increase of 60%. The current arrangements are working very well in preserving the national interest on this issue. I am not aware of any arguing or lobbying by the security services for this change to take place. Perhaps I am out of date on that issue, but to my knowledge the Metropolitan Police Service and the other agencies involved in the fight against terrorism are not advocating these changes.
My fear is that the creation of the NCA—this fledgling, embryonic new body, which is not even fully functioning, which is already struggling with border issues and which I fear will be underresourced—has led to the administrative tidiness of considering the transfer of terrorism from the Metropolitan Police to the NCA. That may be the right thing to do in time. It is unlikely to demand an emergency overnight or within-a-few-weeks change that would lead to the notion of a super-affirmative order. I believe the national interest demands that only primary legislation should be used in this case and I urge your Lordships’ House to support Amendment 1A.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, a few minutes ago the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick, raised the question of the quality of scrutiny of legislation by your Lordships’ House. This amendment raises exactly the same set of questions about the quality of scrutiny that is possible for executive decisions. The Minister said that no decisions have been taken and that whether this is something the Government will want to do is an open question. He said that we need to see how the National Crime Agency develops and that only then will it be necessary to review and perhaps bring forward proposals. If that is the case, why do we need to legislate in this Bill for this process to happen in this particular way? If the Minister was saying that for the next 10 years the Home Office will not be presenting any Bills to Parliament and therefore this is the only legislative opportunity that exists, then maybe there would be a case for it. However, I do not recall a year when the Home Office has managed with no Bills. Sometimes it has had as many as four Bills before the Houses of Parliament. Therefore, it is likely that there will not be a suitable legislative opportunity at whatever time in the future it is considered appropriate to carry out this review.
Such a review having been carried out, the assumption that any transfer would be a simple matter which could be considered through even the elevated super-affirmative process is naïve. The integration, as the noble Lord, Lord Condon, stated, of counterterrorist work with mainstream policing is extremely important. I have probably said this in your Lordships’ House before but I live close to the Finsbury Park mosque. On the occasion that the Finsbury Park mosque was raided, as I arrived at the Underground station Metropolitan police officers were distributing leaflets explaining to the local community what had happened, why it had happened and what safeguards had been taken to protect the religious parts of that mosque. That was because counterterrorism is integrated into mainstream policing and there was a recognition that the Metropolitan Police would have to continue to police those streets after such a raid. That is why the integration of and arrangements with the counterterrorist units within the various forces around the country are so important. Shifting some or all of that to the National Crime Agency is complicated. These are not straightforward issues and they certainly ought to be debated properly in Parliament. That is what we are likely to miss.
I have another concern. We all now need the National Crime Agency to be a success and I believe it probably will be but it is going to take a while. Every reorganisation takes time. Every time you throw all the pieces up in the air and wait for them to settle, there is a period when the organisations have to come together. This is saying to an organisation which is not yet formally established, as this legislation is not yet through, that there may be some massive change to its remit just around the corner. I do not believe that is good for the current functions of the National Crime Agency; nor do I think it is necessarily good for counterterrorism if that change is to be made at some point in the future.
The Government have never answered the question of what is the problem that they are trying to fix. They say, “There might be a problem. We might have a review at some point in the future and if we do have a review, we want to be able to push this through by super-affirmative resolution”. That is simply not good enough. These are important questions. There must be proper parliamentary scrutiny in the future when these matters are considered.
Police: Performance Indicator Management
Lord Condon Excerpts(11 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Condon
My Lords, I am not sure how I follow that, but I will do my best.
I thank the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, for raising this important issue and I am sure that he will not be surprised if I do not buy entirely into his rather pejorative view of modern policing. Even though I am 13 years into retirement, I still believe passionately that the vast majority of police officers are honest, decent people doing a very good job. I declare my registered interest in policing and as a former police commissioner.
Performance management is vital in the public and private sectors, both of which I have worked in for the past 40 years. Performance management drives improvement, can provide transparency and comparability, and ultimately assists accountability. However, I agree with others that for too long reported crime figures have been overrelied upon as the most important police performance measure, despite their fragility as a true reflection of crime levels and their vulnerability to manipulation and massaging by rogue police officers. Others have spoken about that.
Many years ago, as a young and new Chief Constable of Kent Police, I tried to broaden the basket of police performance measures beyond the traditional crime figures. After wide consultation with the public in Kent, three additional measures were regularly published by my force: first, on the police response to emergency calls; secondly, on visible and reassuring police presence and availability on the streets; and, thirdly, on overall public satisfaction with Kent Police. That force became the first and only police service to be awarded a Citizen’s Charter for its overall service to the public, and I think that that was partly because we did not overrely on crime statistics.
Reported crime in recent years, however, has fallen throughout the developed world. Despite wide variations in police resources, methods and accountability, there has been a relentless fall in reported crime in all the major developed countries. Why has crime fallen? Policy, police and government issues have clearly helped, but I firmly believe that the main reason is the significant advances in technology and product development that have dramatically changed the volume and patterns of theft. For example, new cars are now very difficult, if not almost impossible, to steal. Pin numbers and other anti-theft characteristics have dramatically reduced the motivation to steal electronic goods. If you cannot use or sell an item you have stolen, what is the point of stealing it? The volume crime of theft has dropped dramatically throughout the developed world.
Similarly, and even slightly frivolously, there is scientific speculation that the removal of tetraethyl lead from petrol and the consequential reduction of harmful pollution to babies has led 20 years later to reductions in violent crime levels in developed countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France and West Germany. There are very strong correlations between improvements by not using lead in petrol and dramatic reductions in violent crime.
Moving on to police manipulation, the perhaps understandable but flawed overreliance on crime figures has also led to the manipulation and massaging of crime figures by some rogue police officers. During my first few weeks as Chief Constable of Kent, I had to deal with a major discipline case involving Kent detectives who had been visiting convicted burglars in prison. Through various inducements such as taking them out for the day, letting them meet their girlfriends and extra cigarettes, the detectives got them to admit to crimes they had not committed, thus fraudulently improving the Kent crime detection figures.
There is an overreliance on crime figures with not enough being done to prevent fraudulent behaviour. What should be done to improve the situation? I think that the Government have already taken some important steps, including the transfer of responsibility for the independent reporting of national crime statistics to the Office for National Statistics. That is vitally important. Improvements have been announced to the British Crime Survey. Transparency through making changes to the collection of crime statistics is, as I say, very important. I also welcome the statement by the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice earlier this month about changes to police recording practices and how crime will be recorded. Some of those changes will come into effect from April of this year, with others to follow in April next year.
In conclusion, it is vitally important for all stakeholders in this arena to acknowledge the strengths, limitations and frailties of recorded crime statistics. Crime figures must not be the only significant proxy for police efficiency. Of course good policing and intelligence-led policing help to reduce crime, while equally, bad policing and confused priorities allow crime to flourish. However, reported crime is only a part, albeit a vital part, of measuring police performance. It does, has not, and will never provide the full picture. ACPO, the inspectorate, the Home Office and now the new police and crime commissioners must accept the limitations of crime figures, and they must give clear and unambiguous signals that only the highest ethical standards are acceptable in recording crime and detection figures. They must be ruthless in dealing with malpractice by rogue police officers, whatever the motivation for corrupting crime figures. It is wrong, however they try to justify it, such as by using the euphemism of “noble cause corruption”. These abuses must be exposed and dealt with.
I am confident that the Minister will be able to reaffirm the Government’s commitment to improving standards in this area and that, with the support of the police service, further improvements will be made. This is a vital area which impacts on public confidence in policing.
Police Integrity
Lord Condon Excerpts(11 years, 3 months ago)
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Lord Condon
My Lords, I declare an interest in policing and the security services. The Government are to be congratulated and supported by all sides of the House on bringing forward this courageous package of measures because it is clearly in the public interest and in the interests of the service to ensure the highest levels of integrity in policing. While there may be concerns about other aspects of police reform, this package is clearly moving in the right direction. When the Minister places a letter in the Library of the House, will he consider including in it a response to just how and when resources will be transferred from individual police services to the IPCC to enable it to carry out its enhanced role? It is not clear at the moment whether only budgets are to be transferred or whether this will involve real, live investigators moving sideways on attachments, moving permanently, and so on. The House would welcome some fairly clear guidance on how this is to operate, but in the round, these proposals are courageous and are to be welcomed.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, who speaks with considerable experience of these matters. I shall certainly do my best to respond promptly to his request for details of the transfer of resources and whether indeed that will involve more than cash and budgets, and will extend to resources. To some degree, the Statement is a starting point for a discussion with individual police forces and, indeed, with police and crime commissioners for they too are engaged in the governance of the police across the country; I hope that that dialogue will be productive. I am sure that noble Lords appreciate that this is considered to be an important development in the integrity of policing.
Police and Crime Commissioners
Lord Condon Excerpts(11 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Taylor of Holbeach
I think that the outcome refutes the noble Lord’s suggestion. I am from Lincolnshire where there were two independent candidates along with the party candidates. I am sure that the very fact that people have chosen to elect independent candidates will encourage other independent candidates to put their names forward next time.
Lord Condon
My Lords, does the Minister share any of my concern that nearly a third of the newly elected commissioners have appointed well-paid deputies or assistant commissioners without any transparency, selection criteria or adherence to Nolan-type principles?
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
I should make it clear that the facility for the role of the deputy police and crime commissioner is written into the arrangements, but it is not mandatory. It is indeed not politically restricted and it is designed to assist the PCC in his role. The actual administration of the PCC’s office will be in the control of a finance officer and a head of paid staff. The head of paid staff serves as the monitoring officer. I know the circumstances to which the noble Lord has alluded, but as I have said before, the decisions made by PCCs will be judged by the electorate at the next elections.
Crime and Courts Bill [HL]
Lord Condon Excerpts(11 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Condon
My Lords, I declare my registered interests in policing. I find myself supporting the spirit of Amendment 1 and Amendment 3, the first in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, and the latter in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, and the noble Lord, Lord Marks. If the Government resist all these amendments and the spirit behind them, they will miss an important opportunity to improve transparency, accountability, confidence and governance in the new NCA.
At Second Reading and in Committee, I raised the spectre of a disjointed patchwork of policing through the new arrangements. My fear was of a parochial, local network of policing run by the newly elected police and crime commissioners, and an all-powerful National Crime Agency with no supervisory or governance board, with very little in between and no lines connecting them. The Government will miss a vital opportunity here if they hide behind the notion that the NCA deals with important, national issues which only a relationship between the Home Secretary of the day and the director-general can embrace and satisfy. Whatever emerges through a supervisory or advisory board, or some consultative mechanism, we need to have confidence that it will embrace at least one or more of the new police and crime commissioners, representatives of chief constables and perhaps those elsewhere in policing, and the many other stakeholders who are legitimately concerned about how this new policing architecture will work.
I understand that perhaps Amendment 1 is a step too far because there are matters of national importance that maybe only the Secretary of State in the Home Office can have the chairmanship responsibility for. Yet I hope that the Minister will be able to move some way towards reassuring us that the new arrangements, however they emerge, will improve confidence, transparency and accountability in this important new agency, which I wish the very best. I hope it will succeed.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Home Office (Lord Taylor of Holbeach)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Condon, for his speech and in particular for the goodwill that he demonstrated towards the success of the NCA.
I hope that I do not disappoint noble Lords when I say that I will resist these amendments, but I will address the issue in some detail and fullness. Some of the elements will come up in later debates, but I recognise the importance to noble Lords of this particular group of amendments none the less. They go to the heart of the Government’s arrangements for the NCA. The noble Baroness, Lady Smith, reiterated the position that she outlined in Committee, that the NCA should be led by a statutory board headed by a non-executive chair.
I will come to my noble friend Lady Hamwee’s amendment later, because she talked about a slightly different form of governance. I start by addressing the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, and whether it is somehow necessary for the National Crime Agency to have a statutory board. We can establish quite quickly that it is not. The NCA is being established as a Crown body without incorporation. A Crown body without incorporation does not have a separate legal identity from the Crown, so incorporation and a statutory board are not, strictly speaking, required. The functions of the agency are conferred directly on the agency itself, not on a board. This is a tried and tested model for a non-ministerial department and works well for other similar agencies with which noble Lords will be very familiar, such as the Crown Prosecution Service and the Serious Fraud Office.
Not only is no statutory board required, but to create one would be detrimental to the effective governance of the NCA. The noble Lord, Lord Harris, spoke vigorously about the fact that he felt a governance board would be very effective for the NCA. However, we have designed the agency so that the Home Secretary —the elected Government’s representative who is accountable, not to nobody as the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, implied, but to Parliament—has clear strategic oversight, while the director-general, who would be an experienced crime fighter, provides the day-to-day operational leadership. Furthermore, we have designed the agency’s governance arrangements so that the director-general will be directly accountable to the Home Secretary, not beholden to a committee. In this way we will ensure that the accountability structures are clear, practical and non-bureaucratic.
The amendments of the noble Baroness seek to mirror the arrangements for the Serious Organised Crime Agency, which was blessed with the traditional quango-type structure, led by a non-executive chair and a board. However, as my noble friend Lord Henley pointed out in Committee, SOCA’s arrangements have risked more bureaucracy rather than more accountability. The current SOCA chair and board are excellent individuals who have done a good job, but to be led by a committee was never the right structure for a law enforcement agency. Police forces are led by chief constables directly accountable to a single individual—the elected police and crime commissioner. The National Crime Agency should similarly have an operational director-general at its head who is directly accountable to the Home Secretary.
The noble Baroness argues that the statutory board will help preserve the director-general’s operational independence. She is perhaps concerned that his operational independence might be dented by too frequent contact with the Home Secretary without the protection of a committee. My noble friend used the word “cosy”. I cannot reconcile that idea with reality. The director-general will be an experienced crime fighter and a strong leader in his or her own right, not a shrinking violet, and that is certainly not how anybody who knows Keith Bristow, nor any noble Lord with direct experience of governance in policing, would describe him.
To put it another way, the relationship between the director-general and the Home Secretary, just like that between chief constables and the police and crime commissioners, will be a robust, professional partnership where both parties have their own roles to play which are set out clearly in the legislation. In particular, Clause 4 establishes the operational decisions test which rests with the director-general. If the legislation is not enough protection, I do not see what a non-executive chair or committee is going to add, other than a further layer of bureaucracy through which the director-general’s discussions with the Home Secretary will have to filter.
Of course, we can all absolutely agree on the importance of good governance for the NCA. While the director-general is rightly ultimately charged with leading the organisation, in doing so he will obviously need and want the advice and challenge of other experienced voices from inside and outside the NCA. Here I can perhaps help noble Lords because the NCA, like other non-ministerial departments without statutory boards, will still need to have a management board to advise the director-general on the strategic direction of the organisation, ensure that there are proper audit and risk arrangements in place and so forth.
The outline framework document has been referred to and we will be discussing it later. I hope noble Lords have been able to see it, and I will try to make sure that copies are available in the Printed Paper Office, if they are not there already. It provides for the board to be established under the chairmanship of the director-general, which my noble friend Lady Hamwee referred to, and it will include non-executive members. The role of those non-executive members, just like non-executive board members anywhere else in government—or outside government, for that matter—will be to advise and challenge the executive on the basis of their outside experience and skills in order to help the organisation do better.
I contrast that picture of non-executive membership with the non-executive posts provided for in Amendment 2. Under the noble Baroness’s proposed model, the NCA board would comprise persons representing the views of police and crime commissioners and chief officers in the different parts of the United Kingdom. The noble Baroness argued that this is needed to ensure that the NCA is sufficiently alive to the interests of those groups. Clearly PCCs and the chiefs of the United Kingdom’s various police forces will be key partners for the NCA. That is why the Bill provides that they will be part of the group of strategic partners and will have the opportunity to influence the strategic direction of the agency through consultation on the NCA’s strategic priorities and the agency’s annual plan. The director-general will also, of course, want to engage personally with chief officers and PCCs across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland to ensure that the NCA is doing everything it can to help protect their communities from serious and organised crime. He will do that, and is already doing that, through building solid relationships with individual chiefs and PCCs, and through the Association of Chief Police Officers and the new Association of Police and Crime Commissioners. These practical working relationships will ensure that the NCA is alive to the complex needs of communities and of its partners that serve those communities.
Four individuals attending the NCA board could hardly do the same. In seating these individual representatives at the table of the NCA board, the noble Baroness has turned it from a board—in other words, a body which one might expect to focus on using its diverse experience to get the best possible performance from the NCA—into something more like a stakeholder forum for the NCA’s partners to air their views. I believe that the Government’s model is a better one and gives better direct access to the director-general.
My noble friend’s amendment would also create a statutory board for the National Crime Agency, in this case chaired by the Home Secretary with a further ministerial member and a number of non-executive members in addition to the NCA’s executive leadership. This is a similar structure to that adopted by ministerial departments, albeit that has never been set out in statute and nor, as far as I am aware, has anyone called for it to be so set out. I am not persuaded of the case for such a board. I appreciate that my noble friend’s amendment tries to leave the director-general in control of the agency and directly accountable to the Home Secretary by underlining that the board will function subject to the provisions set out in Part 1, but let us be pragmatic here. It will hardly help establish the director-general’s clear operational leadership of the agency if its key leadership body is chaired by the Secretary of State. Furthermore, many corporate management decisions that properly fall to a board—for example, on the people strategy—would not be for the Home Secretary, and she would not see it as her role to chair those sorts of deliberations, since to do so would cut across the director-general’s leadership and direction of the agency. So the director-general would still need to establish and chair an NCA management board to deal with those issues.
Lord Blair of Boughton
My Lords, I declare my registered interest in policing. Last week, during the debates on the Justice and Security Bill, a number of noble Lords expressed the sentiment that national security is the first duty of government. I agree with that point of view. I put my name to this amendment because I believe that Clause 2 directly affects national security and so, in my view, is more important than any other clause in this section of the Bill.
The Metropolitan Police currently has—and has had for many years—primacy for counterterrorist law enforcement in all parts of the United Kingdom, including Scotland and Wales, although not Northern Ireland. The roles of the commissioner, the Assistant Commissioner for Specialist Operations—who, by agreement, is the ex-officio chair of the ACPO Terrorism and Allied Matters Committee—and of the National Coordinator of Terrorist Investigations, who are all Metropolitan Police officers, are understood and accepted by chief officers of police throughout the land, and by our colleagues in the security services and the Special Forces.
A whole regime of counterterrorist units outside London and national procedures has been developed, including the ceding to the Metropolitan Police of ultimate responsibility for CT executive operations. This is an effective and tried and trusted regime that allows for the transmission of intelligence and decisions about surveillance, interception and arrests to flow from the very local to the global, and vice versa, without crossing organisational boundaries—the curse of arrangements in so many countries, including the United States.
However, along with the noble Baroness, that is not the case that I make today. The decision as to arrangements for counterterrorist policing, including whether they should be passed from the Met to the NCA, is not a matter for the police or even for ex-commissioners of the police, but for Parliament. However, I suggest it should not be done this way. I understand the super-affirmative procedure laid out in Schedule 18, and it has many checks and balances, but it is essentially passive. It does not require debate in depth. The kernel of my argument for deleting this clause is that nothing is more important than national security, and in my lifetime no change more significant than this in the policing arrangements to protect our nation has ever been contemplated. A change in the NCA’s responsibility may be right, but it may not be. Lives—lots of lives—may depend on this piece of legislation. Such a decision deserves primary legislation, to allow the suggestion to be scrutinised, debated and amended by both Houses of Parliament.
Moreover, I am suspicious of the motivation behind such a change even being contemplated. He has been mentioned already in your Lordships’ House today, but from the very moment he entered office in 2008, the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, began to speak to me, as commissioner, and to others, about the anomaly of the police of London having responsibilities outside London; not only for counterterrorism but for investigations in UK overseas dependent territories and the protection of prominent persons, including the Royal Family, wherever that might be. He and his senior advisers wanted those duties removed. The reason for that was not economy, or the security of London, but so that he and his successors had the untrammelled ability to select and dismiss the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police without reference to the Home Secretary, who currently recommends the person to be appointed to that post to Her Majesty the Queen. I do not know where this idea has come from. I do not know whether the current idea is in some sense about tidying up—a conviction on the part of the Government. However, if it has entered government thinking in order to satisfy a mayoral ambition, that would be wrong both in practice and in principle. I would be grateful to be assured by the Minister that such ambition has no place in this legislation.
As I said at the beginning, I am not here arguing the case for the status quo, nor for change, but merely because I know—having spoken to them—that senior police officers who have current responsibility for these matters believe that the maximum public scrutiny should occur of the reasons for and against such a change. They are owed no less. The people who do this have a very dangerous and responsible job. They believe with me that, “It ain’t broke, so it doesn’t need fixing”.
Lord Condon
My Lords, I support this amendment. However, I must say at the outset that I am not interested in turf wars between the Metropolitan Police and the new NCA; I am not interested in protecting the status quo or over-arguing that it should remain with the Metropolitan Police. But I am passionately engaged in the constitutional issues which have been set out by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, in moving the amendment. This is a hugely important matter that deserves primary legislation rather than an affirmative order, however comprehensive that seeks to be. I had the role for seven years of worrying about terrorism nationally. I worked very closely with all the agencies involved here and abroad. History tells us that more than 80% of terrorist incidents in this country happen in London. The fight against terrorism is as much about hearts and minds as it is about laser-like operations to combat terrorism. That hearts and minds approach involves great co-operation with local communities; in the London context, that has involved working with the Islamic community, with the mosques, the schools and the integration of neighbourhood policing in that preventive role. In London, therefore, there is a very inter-connected prevention and detection response to terrorism which has been built up over many years and in response to terrorism which has emerged from all around the world.
As I say, I am not interested in a turf war or in arguing for the status quo. However, this is hugely important for this country. The Constitution Committee has isolated why this is so important and why primary legislation is more desirable than the super-affirmative process. I support the amendment passionately.
Lord Dear
My Lords, I, too, declare a registered interest from my experience in policing. I would add in this context that I know quite a lot about terrorism, having suffered two determined attempts on my life at the hands of terrorism, once in this country and once in India. We are talking about the National Crime Agency. I have already spoken in your Lordships’ House on 1 November, giving some examples of the gravity of the issues with which the NCA is likely to be confronted once it gets under way. Its role in the whole architecture of policing will be not only important but critical. One should reflect on the fact that it will be responsible for international dimensions, so far as they interface with and affect the United Kingdom, certainly England and Wales: national, cross-border, inter-force and cross-boundary dimensions of crime. That is what we are talking about: whether the NCA is a proper receptacle for this additional responsibility.
Having served in the Metropolitan Police for five years, I, too, recognise the first-class service on counterterrorism that it has given the population, not only of London but of the whole United Kingdom, going all the way back over 100 years to the special Irish branch, which re-named itself the Special Branch; to the 1970s, when the IRA and the Provisional IRA began bombing in London and elsewhere; to the bomb squad, as it was then called; and to the counterterrorist commands that we see today. If there is any logic at all in counterterrorism, it has to be handled nationally—by definition, the National Crime Agency is national.
At some stage, an argument could well be advanced to move counterterrorism into the ambit and responsibility of the newly formed National Crime Agency, but clearly not yet; the National Crime Agency is not yet born. In its gestation period and infancy, I suspect that it would not be able to pick up and run with the complexities and importance of counterterrorism. But there might come a time in the future when that case can be made—I do not say that it necessarily will be made, but it might be. It seems both sensible and proper that we should be able to legislate to move counterterrorism from the Metropolitan Police to the National Crime Agency if that case is proved.
Like the noble Lord, Lord Condon, I, too, hope that we are not going to get into turf wars over this. The Metropolitan Police has proved itself, as I have already said, and it is right to put on record the high degree of skill that it has demonstrated over many years and indeed the enormous personal bravery of some of its officers on occasions, to whom we owe a great debt. However, I do not think that we should stand in the way of a properly proven logical rearrangement.
The nub of the issue is set out in the Joint Committee on Human Rights paper published on 20 November, which has already been alluded to. I take no position on this, other than to say that on balance—I suppose that I am taking a position; it is a very fine balance—I am prepared to go against the amendment and with the Government. However, I would need reassurance that were such a move to take place—not now but in the months, perhaps even years, to come—there will be a proper consideration of the reasons for such a move, so that one can be satisfied that the decision is being taken in the open, so far as the diktats of confidentiality and so on are concerned. If one follows that line of reasoning, there can be no objection to the clause as it stands.
I do not want to get into a turf war; that would be totally improper. Recognising the severity and the importance of the issues concerned, I simply make the point that a logical rearrangement in the future, if it is so proved, would be the way to go.
Police and Crime Commissioners: Elections
Lord Condon Excerpts(11 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Taylor of Holbeach
That has not been the pattern of elections in the past. Many noble Lords will have participated in elections where turnout has been quite low. I do not believe that that will be the case in these elections. It is interesting that the electorate as a whole are not particularly aware of the role of police authorities and their relationship with police forces. This is a new opportunity to make people aware that there will be direct links between their wishes and the way in which the police force operates in their area. I think that people will take advantage of that.
Lord Condon
My Lords, does the noble Lord share my disappointment that very few genuinely independent candidates are standing for the post of police and crime commissioner and that the overwhelming majority of them are locally nominated political nominees?
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
It is premature to judge whether many independent candidates are standing. Nominations have not closed. They opened only on Monday and do not close until 19 October. Therefore, we should judge that question nearer the time. Meanwhile, noble Lords—
Crime and Courts Bill [HL]
Lord Condon Excerpts(11 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Condon
My Lords, I would not seek to challenge the architecture in the Bill for control and accountability, but it is not a question of all or nothing—there can remain clear direction and control by the director-general and clear accountability to the Home Secretary and onwards to Parliament. Nevertheless, I hope that the Minister will find ways to reassure your Lordships’ House and the wider public that in this day and age notions of good governance demand that there should be something more than just that naked architecture of the DG in control and the Home Secretary being accountable. It would be good to have reassurance around the notion of a management board, a supervisory board, an advisory board or some board mechanism that allows both stakeholder interest and independent voices to contribute to the health and well-being in the future of the NCA so that issues such as value for money, good governance, priorities and so on could somehow be part of a wider debate within that family than just between the DG and the Home Secretary. I understand that the Bill and this agency will deal with some of the most challenging criminal matters facing the country. Should terrorism subsequently also be transferred as a responsibility to the NCA, I understand that there must be very clear direction, control and accountability, but a committee-type model does not fit well with those demands. Nevertheless, there is ample scope for reassurance around the notion of a management board that involves stakeholders from the police service, the emerging police and crime commissioners, the wider local authority family and the business community. I hope that the Minister, today or subsequently, will be able to give us some reassurance that the Bill will be able to move us in that direction.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, I certainly do not want to fall into the trap of automatically accepting the Government’s architecture for these proposals. However, the amendment put forward by my noble friend does not necessarily undermine that architecture. The key point of this part of the proposed legislation is the creation of a new National Crime Agency. That is the key concept, and in this group of amendments we are dealing with some of the accountability mechanisms and the arrangements that will be put around the agency to ensure that its governance is of an appropriate and effective standard.
Let us be clear why this is important. The National Crime Agency, as proposed, will be a tremendously significant organisation. It will be responsible for ensuring that as a country we deal effectively with the most serious types of crime. In due course, it may be responsible for dealing with terrorism. This is not some minor government body; it is an extremely important part of the arrangements that we put in place to ensure that our citizens are properly protected against serious crime.
The other fundamental part of the architecture of the Bill, if you are wedded to that architecture, as no doubt the Minister is—no doubt we will come onto this in due course—are the provisions within the legislation that enable the director-general to require from police services around the country various things to happen. There is a potential power of direction—and certainly the expectation in terms of individual operations—that local police forces will work with the National Crime Agency to ensure that certain operations proceed. The relationship between the director-general and individual chief officers of police will be a fundamental one. That is precisely why, when we look at the governance structures and the arrangements that will be put around the director-general, we need to ensure that there are appropriate mechanisms for chief officers of police and those responsible for their governance, in terms of police and crime commissions, to be adequately represented within them.
The Government have to put forward a clear justification as to why this very lean approach to governance has been included in the Bill. As a number of your Lordships have already indicated in Committee, there is a virtue in having a proper governance structure, a group of non-executives and a group of individuals to whom the director-general must report or explain or expand on his or her proposals on how the agency goes forward. That is not to decry the direct accountability to the Home Secretary because it will be the Home Secretary who will, whatever is written into the Bill, have to answer to Parliament as to whether this new structure works. It supports that function and gives the Home Secretary reassurance that all the processes and procedures that any sensible Home Secretary would expect to be around the director-general are in place.
I am not suggesting that the Home Secretary is incapable of providing adequate supervision of the agency. I am simply saying that it is not necessarily the most effective or efficient way of doing it and that some board structure supporting that process is better and more likely to be successful. I have looked for precedents for this sort of one-to-one relationship between the Home Secretary and significant agencies. For 175 years the Home Secretary was the police authority for London and at the end of those 175 years the Metropolitan Police was so well governed, despite the excellent leadership at that stage provided by the noble Lord, Lord Condon, that it did not have a system in place—it was a £2 billion business at the time—for telling whether it had paid a bill more than once. I rather suspect that had the Home Office—I absolve previous Home Secretaries from day-to-day responsibility for this—been doing its job properly proper accountancy systems would have been installed within the organisation. However, the supervision of the Home Office and the Home Secretary was quite properly on the main policing issues, which would have been advised by the noble Lord, Lord Condon, and his predecessors as Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis. This was not about the way in which the organisation was run, administered or governed. That is the natural tendency. Home Secretaries are busy people. They have broad responsibilities. They are not going to be involved in day-to-day issues about the robustness or otherwise of governance structures. The history of the Metropolitan Police is not a sound precedent.
More recently we have the precedent of the border agency. Here, the opposite problem seems to have occurred. You seem to have a Home Secretary—perhaps successive Home Office Ministers would be a fairer way of putting it—who wanted certain things to happen and applied pressure on the border agency to do so. You then end up in arguments about what was said to whom by whom because of that one-to-one relationship. In all the fuss that there was a few months ago about whether certain expectations were being bypassed to let people into the country and remove queues, would it not have been better for there to have been a supervisory board between the Home Secretary and the chief executive of the border agency where there would have been a record, minutes, and perhaps an opportunity for dissent to be expressed? All that would be missing in the arrangements for the National Crime Agency, which raises the question of whether we are not in danger of creating a structure where the Home Secretary has too much of a role in respect of a policing body.
In this country, we have always expressed real concern about politicians having direct operational control of policing. That is part of the reason why there was a little bit of debate about the creation of police and crime commissioners, but that debate has moved on and we are now well into the process with the Labour Party having today announced a selection of candidates for those positions that includes my noble friend Lord Prescott. The Labour Party will clearly have an excellent set of candidates and we wait to see whether the Conservative list will be quite as exciting or interesting. The reason that there was some concern about that and there is even more concern about a national agency directly under the control of a single politician is the danger that that power is abused. I am certainly not accusing the present Home Secretary of having any desire to abuse that power. I am simply saying that we are creating a structure where such an abuse is possible and that it might happen in future.
Imagine occasions when there is a considerable threat from some organised crime group or a terrorist organisation, if that is the direction that the new agency goes in, and it is the responsibility of the Home Secretary to direct what the agency should do. The guarantees in the Bill for operational independence do not amount to very much in those circumstances. There is no place for control freakery here. This has to be about a proper system of governance. In a few years’ time, I would not want people to be making all sorts of sinister connections between policing operations that happen under the auspices of the National Crime Agency and saying that there are sinister implications that they have been personally directed or required by the Home Secretary, but that is the danger of the governance model that the Government have created.
My final point returns to what I mentioned in passing earlier. A critical part of this new agency will be the ability of the National Crime Agency to say that it wants local police forces to carry out or collaborate on particular operations. The danger of having a National Crime Agency that is divorced from the rest of the police structure is very real. I recall the discussions that took place over several years to try to get a system that worked on counterterrorism with primacy for one force and the ability to make operations happen across the country. It was not an easy process. The Government are making it more difficult for the director-general of the National Crime Agency if there are not police and crime commissioners or chief officers of police playing an active part in the governance of this new organisation. If they are there, if they are around the table and able to say, “This is a better way of doing that”, or to encourage the director-general to do things in a way that ensures their collaboration, that is surely going to mean that it is more likely that this new agency will succeed.
My noble friend’s amendments, which address precisely those points, are very welcome. There is a slight drafting error in that they make no reference to London, but I am sure that could be adjusted when we return to this at a later stage. The key issue that the Minister has to explain today is why this particular governance model has been put forward and why it is genuinely an improvement on a supervisory board which involves, for example, chief officers of police and police and crime commissioners.
Lord Henley
My Lords, I apologise to the noble Lords, Lord Rooker and Lord Smith. The noble Lord, Lord Harris, is absolutely right to say that it is the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, who chairs it. I was just giving it as an example of one of those boards that is slightly different in the way in which it reports to Ministers.
The noble Lord is also right about the importance of when we will be publishing the framework document. We want to share an outline of that document with Parliament in due course and I hope that we can do that before we get to the Report stage of the Bill. I remind noble Lords that the Bill started in this House so we have quite a time before it goes through both Houses. As the noble Lord will be well aware, in terms of the timetable, we will not even finish Committee stage until we return in the autumn, when I think we will have one day of Committee to deal with some matters. I believe it coincides with the Conservative Party conference, which, sadly, I will have to miss, but one often has to make enormous sacrifices in the course of duty and I will be deeply upset to make that sacrifice. However, I will try to ensure that the noble Lord gets the framework document in due course.
I also note exactly what my noble friend said about the importance of making sure that we distinguish between administration and governance. I think that she is right to stress those two points. I hope that noble Lords will bear with me and be prepared to wait for the framework document, which I hope we will get in due course.
Lord Condon
Can the Minister confirm that he is not excluding the notion of key stakeholders being drawn into a formalised relationship with the new NCA, even if it is not a supervisory board or a strategic board? He is acknowledging that the framework document may well create a role for key stakeholders to have a formalised relationship with the new NCA, something more than just being a vague consultee, who receives a letter saying, “What do you think of … ?”.
Lord Henley
My Lords, as the Bill makes clear, it is quite obvious that we want those key stakeholders to be involved. How formalised that should be is another matter. I would hope that the noble Lord would be prepared to wait for the framework document and how we consider it. It will be for all of us to decide how formal, formalised or informal that is, and what is the right balance—again I use that great Home Office word. It is getting the balance right.
Lord Condon
My Lords, at Second Reading I raised concerns about the resourcing of the NCA, not in the sense of special pleading for the police service in general or for the NCA in particular, but having now been around policing for just over 45 years, I have never encountered a time when individual police forces were under such rigorous challenge as regards their resources and their budgets. I totally accept that, as part of the wider challenge that we face economically as a country, there is no element of special pleading in what I am saying, and I am most grateful to the Minister, who very kindly agreed to a meeting last week, at which the new director-general of the NCA and officials were also present. I was reassured, as I knew I would be, by the energy, intelligence and commitment of all those present to give the NCA the best possible start, but having spent over 35 years in and around policing as a serving officer and then over the past 10 or more years as a very interested spectator, I am still left with concerns that the remit for the NCA is going to be tough to deliver against its budget.
Although the Minister may not feel able to concede much on this amendment or be able to put anything similar in the Bill, there is a pragmatic challenge about how the new NCA, with all its co-ordinating tasks, new tasks and the demands put on it, will be able to deliver against the background of its budget. It will work smarter and do more for less, but my experience in both the public and the private sectors is that sometimes you have to spend to save, to get economies of scale, to get new, smarter ways of working and to get synergies. There are start-up costs, and I would like to think that there will be some flexibility around the budget, even if this amendment is not accepted. Like others in this House, I want the NCA to get off to a very good start, and I would not want anxiety around some, relatively speaking, small resource issues to undermine the potential for it to be such a force for good.
Lord Henley
My Lords, I quite understand the concerns expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Condon, and we understand that very difficult decisions have been made by different police forces up and down the country about where they are going to rein in expenditure, just as all agencies of the Government of one form or another are having to make very difficult decisions, but we believe that the cuts that they face are manageable. We also believe, and I think this is something to get over, that merely throwing money at a problem does not necessarily, as we discovered before 2010, solve problems, and increasing budgets does not always bring improvements in the service that the public have a right to expect from all services that the Government and taxpayers provide in one form or another.
It will, no doubt, be difficult for the NCA, which, like SOCA, will have to live within its budget and the review settlement. The NCA’s budget will be based on the budgets of the precursor organisations. It will have to deliver that wider remit through enhanced intelligence, tasking and co-ordination arrangements that I hope will make more effective use of its resources—its own assets and those of others. Creating the agency will also provide opportunities to rationalise some functions, remove duplication in others and generate efficiencies.
Turning to the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, and her question, in effect, about the responsibility of the Home Secretary, the important point is that the Home Secretary is ultimately accountable to Parliament for public protection. She has a vested interest in ensuring that the National Crime Agency has sufficient resources to deliver the priorities set for it. The Home Secretary will want to make sure that sufficient resources are therefore provided for the important work of the NCA when she negotiates with colleagues in the Treasury. The noble Baroness knows exactly what this is like and I look at other Ministers who have negotiated these things in the past. Sometimes those negotiations can be difficult, but it is something that the Home Secretary will have to address after the next spending review.
Importantly, she will remain responsible and answerable to Parliament after those decisions have been taken for making and setting the strategic priorities for the NCA. Again, the Home Secretary will consult others, whether it is the director-general of the NCA or whomsoever. The director-general will be able to provide that operational understanding of the resources required to deliver in this area. He will also need to ensure that the resources are allocated in the most effective and efficient manner. The important work of the NCA will need to be delivered within the budgets of its precursor bodies in those first years of operation. The budget constraints for the remainder of this Parliament will obviously continue to remain challenging. That means that the NCA, like many other bodies, will look closely at identifying duplication of effort and maximising opportunities for savings. I believe it will be able to ensure greater efficiencies by more effective prioritisation and smarter use of its own assets and those of others.
It is in the interests of the Home Secretary to work with the director-general to ensure that there are adequate resources for the National Crime Agency. The fact that my right honourable friend is answerable to Parliament means that the amendment is unnecessary and I hope that the noble Baroness will feel able on this occasion to withdraw it.
Crime and Courts Bill [HL]
Lord Condon Excerpts(11 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Condon
My Lords I declare my registered interests in policing and the private security industry. I want to speak primarily, as you would expect, about Part 1 of the Bill and the creation of the National Crime Agency. I warmly welcome the creation of the National Crime Agency and I wish Keith Bristow, the inaugural director-general, and his team every success. I hope the new agency gets off to a confident and successful start. However, I think the Government still have a huge challenge to demonstrate to your Lordships’ House and beyond how the National Crime Agency and their other proposals for policing all fit together in a cohesive and comprehensive way. Their plans for policing must work from the bottom up from the local level of the police force and from the top down from the new NCA in a joined-up way. The Minister acknowledged this in his opening speech.
Sadly, I still have residual concerns that we may be left with a disjointed patchwork of policing with significant gaps and a lack of co-ordination. I will explain why. Scotland, for example, is taking a different route. Local, regional, national and international policing issues will be delivered by a single police force with local accountability being accommodated within the single force structure. In November we will have over 40 newly elected police and crime commissioners, some of whom may be elected by less than 10% of the electorate if the predictions for very low turnouts come to fruition. These new police and crime commissioners will, by definition, be intensely parochial. They have to be. They will focus only on local issues and will be looking for re-election exclusively on local performance and local popularity. How, then, will the National Crime Agency and any other regional or national structures take care of the very important regional, national and international policing issues and concerns?
Before looking at the Bill’s provisions for the new NCA, it is worth considering just for a moment what is being simultaneously dismantled or potentially downgraded by the Government as they create the NCA. You have already heard that the Serious and Organised Crime Agency has been in place for six years and its staff and functions will provide the core or spine of the new NCA. But the NCA must be far more than just a change of name as SOCA becomes the NCA. I mean no disrespect to the professionalism or the endeavour of colleagues who have worked in SOCA but the metamorphosis from SOCA to NCA must be far more than in name only. The National Policing Improvement Agency which has looked at police leadership, performance standards and information technology will be disbanded and we have no clear picture of how it will be replaced. The future of the Association of Chief Police Officers is uncertain, with its funding and its role still to be resolved, but there is a strong presumption that, at the very least, it will be downgraded in importance and role.
Against this background, how will the new NCA provide all the policing needs above the local police force level? I have three areas of concern: first, resourcing levels, secondly, dealing with terrorism, and thirdly, the gaps and grey areas that may be left out because they do not fall comfortably within the NCA remit. I am concerned about the planned resources for the NCA. I have said many times in your Lordships’ House that the police service cannot be immune from cuts and savings. I have spent the past 12 years in the private sector delivering more for less and I am very comfortable with that concept. However, I do have real concerns about the resources being allocated to the National Crime Agency. New bodies in the public and the private sector inevitably have start-up costs. Other noble Lords have mentioned their concerns about resources. There is no new money for the NCA. It will inherit the budgets and the 20% reductions of the constituent bodies it is taking over. Despite my enthusiasm for the new agency, its budget proposals look perilously stretched. I hope the Minister can reassure your Lordships that the NCA will be more than just a rather feeble co-ordinating mechanism sitting above the units that are already in existence, but I fear that resource limitations may force it down that avenue. The NCA must be better than the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, and it must be better than the UK Border Agency. Good leadership and determination will go a long way to ensuring its success, but this new agency must not be allowed to falter through unrealistic budgets.
My second area of concern relates to terrorism, which other noble Lords have mentioned. Clause 2 sensibly provides for the Secretary of State to make further provision about the NCA counterterrorism functions. In essence, what is at stake here is whether the status quo should prevail, with the Metropolitan Police retaining its national co-ordinating role with operational hubs around the country, or whether the co-ordinating role should be transferred to the NCA, as the Home Affairs Select Committee in another place recommended. Again, very sensibly, the Minister said in opening that no decision will be taken until after the Olympics.
I am genuinely relaxed if there is to be change, but I urge those making the decision to do so on the pragmatic grounds of what is likely to work best and what is likely to provide the best levels of protection for the public. The decision on who should lead on terrorism should not be about what looks tidy on an organisational chart or the seductive impact of the word “national” in an agency’s title. The fight against terrorism is as much about hearts and minds as it is about dramatic operations and arrests. With over 80% of terrorist incidents happening in London and the successful integration of neighbourhood policing, intelligence gathering and hearts and minds projects in the community, it will require strong empirical evidence and a compelling case, as the Minister said, to prove that the new National Crime Agency is better placed than the Metropolitan Police to lead this endeavour. The only assurance I seek from the Minister on counterterrorism is that the decision as to who should lead on combating terrorism will be based on what is most likely to protect the public—no more, no less.
My third and final concern relates to gaps and grey areas and things that the Bill is silent about. The disbanding of the National Policing Improvement Agency and the potential downgrading and functionality of the Association of Chief Police Officers could—I emphasise that it is only “could”—leave gaps and grey areas which the National Crime Agency is not mandated to deliver in any respect at all. Who in the police family will worry about and take responsibility for the police response to multi-location, multi-force riots which historically take place every so often? Who in the police family will worry about and take responsibility for responding to national employment disputes such as the recent tanker drivers’ threatened strike? Who in the police family will worry about multi-force natural disasters such as floods or diseases like foot and mouth?
Clause 5 is about the relationship between the NCA and other agencies. It enables and encourages voluntary arrangements and, in limited circumstances, allows the director-general to direct co-operation from local forces. Very sensibly, the Bill envisages more than one force taking part, with the NCA, in a coalition of the willing or, in extremis, a coalition of the directed, but it does not deal with any of the concerns I mentioned earlier. We need reassurance on who will worry about and co-ordinate some of the issues that do not sit comfortably within the NCA.
In conclusion, I genuinely welcome the Bill. I also welcome the new drug-driving offence, which I think will improve road safety. However, as other noble Lords have said, there are some challenges in the detail. I am excited about the potential of the National Crime Agency, but I am concerned that inadequate resourcing may hamstring it and reduce it to an anodyne co-ordinating body rather than allowing it to be the potent force for good that, in the public interest, it deserves to be. I am concerned about counterterrorism and that changes may be based on organisational tidiness rather than on what is most likely to deliver public safety. Lastly, I am concerned that as the Government dismantle, downgrade and rebuild the constituent parts of our policing model, they may inadvertently—I think it would be inadvertently—create gaps and grey areas which we need to think about plugging and clarifying.
I know that the Government are still making up their mind about some of these issues. However, they have unleashed a programme of change that replaces core elements of police accountability and independence, most of which have been enshrined in our system since 1829. So it is the Government who are under an obligation to convince your Lordships’ House that what they are putting in place will provide the public with joined-up policing locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. The proposals for the NCA are an important part of the overall police jigsaw, but as this Bill passes through your Lordships’ House, I intend to test whether the pieces of the police jigsaw genuinely fit together, whether the Government really know what the picture should look like, and which pieces, if any, are missing.
Police: Race Relations Policies
Lord Condon Excerpts(12 years ago)
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Lord Henley
My Lords, I owe the noble Baroness an apology if I suggested that there was no racism within the Metropolitan Police. It is obviously wrong to suggest that any organisation has no racism within it. What I was trying to get over on that occasion, and on the two occasions last week when I dealt with questions of this sort, was that institutional racism within the Met has largely been dealt with. It was encouraging that the most recent cases of racism were reported by the police themselves and therefore this was a strong sign that these matters were being dealt with.
I would be more than happy to assist in arranging a meeting between the noble Baroness and others and either the Commissioner or the Deputy Commissioner, whomever she considers the most appropriate person to deal with these matters. Meanwhile, as I made clear on the Question from my noble friend Lord Sheikh and the Statement that I made on another occasion when I believe the noble Baroness was present, I believe that the Met is making considerable strides in this area.
Lord Condon
My Lords, does the noble Lord agree that the wider police service must show great vigilance and endeavour to respond well to race and diversity issues? They must not become complacent and somehow see race as yesterday's problem or yesterday’s issue. This is an ongoing challenge that the service must respond to well at all times.
Lord Henley
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Condon, with his great experience, is absolutely correct to express those points. I fully agree with him. I remind him and the House that an important part of the regular reviews by HMIC—the inspectorate of the constabulary—is that any force inspections should always include some detail of an assessment of equality, diversity and those matters.