Liverpool City Region Combined Authority (Functions and Amendment) Order 2017

Debate between Lord Deben and Lord Alton of Liverpool

Thursday 16th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I shall be brief. I enthusiastically support the remarks that the noble Lord, Lord Young, has just made, notwithstanding the minor caveat that I entered the Chamber as he was replying to the previous order and note the unnecessary duplication and replication which can cause confusion. I encourage him, and the Government generally, to stay in touch with the local authorities that will be affected by the implementation of these orders to see in what ways they impact on them and whether there can be further streamlining and clarification.

It is 45 years since, while I was a student in Liverpool, I was elected to represent an inner-city neighbourhood—a slum clearance area—in the Low Hill ward in the heart of Liverpool. I served that ward on both the city council and on the Merseyside County Council that was created by the then Government, and then abolished by the following Government. During those years, I saw more changes than I cared to see in many respects. I served as deputy leader of the city council and as its housing chairman and had to deal with compulsory purchase orders, which were often imposed centrally with very little say locally on what their impact would be on the neighbourhoods they affected. Therefore, I particularly welcome what the noble Lord said about the devolution of compulsory powers to the city region and the opportunities for development corporations. The great success story on Merseyside, following the riots in Toxteth in 1981, was the creation of the Merseyside Development Corporation. The noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, has recently received some criticism in your Lordships’ House but he deserves great tribute for the work that he did during that period and the achievements that were made. The extraordinary regeneration and renewal of the city of Liverpool had its seeds in the work that he did. In my view the orders that have been laid before your Lordships’ House today with the agreement of the local authorities on Merseyside pave the way for the continued renewal and success story that Liverpool now is. Therefore, I very much welcome what the noble Lord said and commend the orders to your Lordships’ House.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, I shall be short. My noble friend’s explanation of the advantages that these measures will confer on Liverpool contains some very important lessons for central government. He talked about spatial planning which will bring together the whole range of interests in Liverpool. Would it not be a good idea if we introduced that nationally? We do not have spatial planning nationally; we have a ludicrous position in which planning lies with the department for local government. That is not a proper place for it given that local government makes appeals to the Minister for Local Government, which itself is wrong. All the other interests lie with other departments and we suffer from not having a department of land use.

We now have a Government who are busy giving local authorities powers to structure themselves in precisely the way we fail to structure ourselves centrally. The Government will look increasingly peculiar if their central structure is so far out of line with these new structures. However, the Government are not imposing them as they are welcomed by these larger, more powerful local authorities. We have looked afresh at how best to run local government in Liverpool and the Tees Valley and have come to the conclusion that it is better to do it this way. Although my noble friend may well argue that there is something unique about local government which means that it is, of its nature, to be organised differently, I suspect that the truth is that, looking at government, this is where you want to be.

I am reminded of the ability of Americans to ask other people to run their democracies in a way that they do not run their own. For example, they make sure that you do not have gerrymandering of boundaries, that you do not have Christmas tree Bills and that you restrict the amount of money that you spend. That is what the Americans do to other people but they do not learn to do it themselves. I do not want our Government to behave in that way. I hope that we too will learn from what we have seen from our reorganisation of local government—that some very serious reorganisations are necessary at the centre to enable us to look after our land and to have a proper policy of spatial planning, with the special word “joined-up”, which I heard several times from my noble friend.

Immigration Bill

Debate between Lord Deben and Lord Alton of Liverpool

Tuesday 15th March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, it seems to me that a very serious proposition is being made by the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, and I think that we ought to be very careful about it. The proposition being made is that, however valuable this clause is, it should not be passed because we cannot trust the police to carry it through properly. That is a very serious criticism. I have not been alone in my criticism of the police; I think that, particularly in London, there are very serious criticisms to be made. However, if we are to legislate on the basis that we cannot trust the police to behave properly towards the citizens of the United Kingdom, we had better look much more seriously at what we are doing with the police. We really should take it more much more seriously than is proposed here.

I think that many things happen in the police which are unacceptable. It is still true that relationships between the police and the press are far too close, and many of us have significant criticisms. But if the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, suggests that the police cannot carry through a necessary activity to ensure that illegal immigrants are properly dealt with and that the activity should be carried through not by the police but by immigration officials—who, evidently, can be trusted to behave in a proper way—then this is an argument not for this Bill but for a wholesale Bill about the nature of the police.

I do not believe that the British people would be very happy if this House decided that it would legislate in a way which was less likely to meet the needs as this Bill presents them simply because we have now accepted the inherent racism of the police force. That seems a fundamentally dangerous step to take. I would be very unhappy if the Minister were willing to be led down that route. Yes, of course, we have to have the toughest guidance; yes, of course, we have to make sure that whenever racist or discriminatory activities are found to be in the police they must be dealt with considerable severity; but we have to solve this problem—if it is a problem, and I am prepared to accept the views of the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, from his own experience—by reform and training in the police, not by saying that we will have less efficient laws because they cannot be properly and safely implemented. Are we going to say, therefore, that there should be no stopping of cars being driven in a dangerous condition because the police feel that they would be more likely to stop some kinds of people rather than others? We really cannot run a state on that basis. If this is a real problem—and I am certainly not saying that it is not—it is a problem which has to be dealt with by the Home Office and the police force, and not one which should lead us to make laws which are different from those that we would have made because we are afraid of the way in which they would be implemented.

Therefore, I hope that my noble friend the Minister will take this very seriously, not for the reasons that the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, has presented but for the reason that a democratic society has to have the laws which it needs irrespective of the differing feelings of people of differing ethnic or any other backgrounds. We are touching something fundamentally dangerous. It is precisely that kind of feeling that causes the resentment which one finds widely in Britain—a belief that we do not legislate in a colour-blind manner but in a manner which takes the view of the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, and therefore stops us legislating as effectively as we should. I hope that my noble friend will be very careful in the way in which he responds to this debate.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool]

My Lords, in briefly following what the noble Lord, Lord Deben, has just said, I say that there is a case for examining the way in which policing is conducted, and I agree with him that it is unfortunate that we have to have a debate in the context of the Bill. I support what the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, said, as I did in Committee. That is based not so much on a belief that all our police officers behave badly, but more on the experience I had more than 30 years ago, in 1981, when the Toxteth riots erupted. They did so in part because of bad policing, and indeed they were linked directly to the stopping of a young black man on his motorcycle in Lodge Lane in Toxteth. The riots led to a thousand policemen being hospitalised in Liverpool as a consequence. Everyone who looked at the events in Brixton and in Liverpool afterwards, notably Lord Scarman, found that the overuse of stop-and-search powers had been part and parcel of the problem.

I guess that the question for the House today is: will this take us back to that kind of regime? That is what the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, is asking us to address. I must admit that I looked carefully at the letter kindly sent by the Minister as part of the compendium of letters he has written during the passage of this Bill. They run to page 146, which probably tells noble Lords quite a lot about the volume of correspondence we have had, and that is to the Minister’s credit. I just want to mention two phrases set out in the letter because they help to bring some clarity to what is intended in the Bill and perhaps might reassure both the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, and the noble Baroness, Lady Lawrence of Clarendon. The first is that,

“it is important to bear in mind that the police will use the powers contained in these clauses reactively, after they have stopped a vehicle for an objective reason”.

Later in the same letter, talking not now about vehicles but about the entry into people’s homes, the letter states:

“The officer could then only enter premises where there are reasonable grounds for believing the driving licence could be found there”.

All this revolves around the words “objective” and “reasonable”. When the Minister replies to the debate, I hope that he will explain in a little more detail what kinds of circumstances he envisages as objective and those he regards as reasonable. That might give us greater confidence that the powers suggested here will be used properly.

I conclude by saying that it would be dangerous to presume that the police of our country are incapable of implementing the laws that Parliament passes in an objective way, and the noble Lord, Lord Deben, was right to remind us of that. But we must remember our story. In 1981 Sir Kenneth Oxford was the chief constable for Merseyside. Many people believed, as I did myself at the time, that the policing had been overly aggressive. It is notable that the young assistant chief constable who subsequently came to Merseyside, Bernard Hogan-Howe as he then was, would later rise to become chief constable of the area. He introduced very sensitive community policing, and I suspect that the extremely effective policing he developed during that period is one of the reasons he was appointed the Metropolitan Police Commissioner. Good community relations were built up during that time. I would therefore be very nervous of anything that destabilised that delicate balance, which is why I seek further clarity about the reasonable and objective use of these powers.