Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts

Thursday 9th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rosser]

My Lords, I hesitated before speaking because I intend to be very brief and I was of the view that I would probably finish before everybody had managed to leave the Chamber if I started straight away.

Police authorities currently are covered by the Standards Board for England, but this will not be the case with the new police and crime panels provided for in the Bill. The amendment provides for guidance to continue to be given by the Standards Board for England in relation to the conduct of chief commissioners, members and co-opted members of police and crime panels and the police commissions in England and Wales, and also on the matter of the qualifications and experience that monitoring officers should possess. The current legislation states:

“In exercising its functions the Standards Board for England must have regard to the need to promote and maintain high standards of conduct by members and co-opted members of relevant authorities in England. … The Standards Board for England … may issue guidance to relevant authorities in England and police authorities in Wales on matters relating to the conduct of members and co-opted members of such authorities”.

If the situation is that while police authorities are currently covered by the Standards Board for England but that this will not be the case for the new police and crime panels—indeed, I understand that it is the Government’s intention to abolish the Standards Board—the purpose of this amendment is to ask what the Government intend to do in future in relation, for example, to the new police and crime panels. Is it intended to replicate the functions currently carried out by the Standards Board as far as, for example, the new police and crime panels are concerned and, if so, by which individual, body or organisation? One would have thought that since one of the key functions of the Standards Board for England is to have regard to the need to promote and maintain high standards of conduct, that would be even more important in relation to the new bodies and organisations that will be established under the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill that we are discussing. One finds it difficult to believe that the Government do not intend to provide some sort of substitute for the Standards Board for England, if it is their intention to abolish it, and that they do not intend to ensure that similar guidance is not going to be issued in future in order to maintain high standards of conduct in relation to, among other bodies, the police and crime panels. The purpose of this amendment is to seek to ascertain from the Government what their intentions are in this regard. I beg to move.

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

My Lords, I rise first to speak in support of the amendment moved by my noble friend Lord Rosser. To some extent, we touched on these matters at an earlier stage. The absence of a standards regime for these new bodies which are going to be responsible for the oversight of the police service in England and Wales is really rather extraordinary. In the previous day in Committee, I gave an example of the sorts of things that could happen where having a robust standards regime would be a better solution than one that says that, if these individuals step over the line and actually break the law, they can be investigated by the police—for whom they have a direct responsibility, of course, which raises some interesting questions—and, if necessary, prosecuted. A standards regime that is going to protect the integrity of those individuals and provide assurance to the public that they are acting properly and appropriately is clearly important. It will be interesting to hear from the Minister how the Government envisage that this will be dealt with.

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[Lord Harris of Haringey]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for that reply, which raises quite a number of issues. Let us deal first with the question of standards and what is to happen. I accept that the Committee is in the very difficult position of considering a piece of government legislation that is possibly going to change the law in respect of standards, and trying to deal with a piece of legislation where we have already slightly altered the direction of travel, which may or may not revert. The principle that the Minister seems to be enunciating is that there is nothing below the threshold of criminal activity which will be investigated. That is a very worrying situation to create in areas where there will be all sorts of difficult arguments to be had about the extent to which the functions of overseeing the police service are being properly fulfilled. That is a genuine difficulty.

A further genuine difficulty is who will investigate such matters. In the context of the Localism Bill, if we are talking about the investigation of misbehaviour by a local authority member, then the local police force may well be the adequate route to follow. However, where it is the individual or individuals with responsibility for the oversight of the police service in question who are being investigated, for that force to investigate that individual will raise some real and difficult issues unless it is also being said that, under all those circumstances, the individuals will be suspended. Again, I am not sure that that is the import of the other part of the Bill.

Two questions need to be addressed in respect of the Minister’s answer on standards. First, is there anything below the threshold of criminal activity on which there should be some guidance on standards of behaviour? Secondly, what safeguards exist for the police investigating the people who are responsible for oversight? The latter situation could work both ways. It could be the police going soft on the person who is responsible for oversight, or it could be the police investigating more rigorously than might otherwise be the case the person who has been giving them a hard time in their role of oversight.

That is one group of issues that has been addressed in these amendments. I say to the Committee that we really must look at what items we bring together in amendment groupings because it is getting a little bit complicated. I know that on our previous day in Committee we all became confused about where we were and the sheer range of subjects being considered in one group.

The second set of issues related to the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey. Quite understandably, she characterised it as being just about London. But this is Committee stage. Yes, the amendment is cast in terms of London, but the principles apply to everywhere else in the country. If there is a real issue here, we need to look at it across the country and not just in terms of London. Is the Minister saying that there will be mechanisms for an independent appeals process, or will it just voluntarily be done by chief officers of police or, in London’s case, the Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis? How will the power of the local policing body be exercised if it feels that a complaint has not been dealt with properly? Will it simply be a matter of complainants coming to the local policing body and saying, “Hey, our complaint is not being dealt with properly”? In virtually every instance where a person feels that they have a complaint against the police, they will first complain to the police service and then go to the local policing body, which will have no power to do anything about it other than to go back to the chief officer of police and say, “Look at it again”. I suspect that police and crime commissions and commissioners, and the MOPC in London, will end up having to do an enormous amount of complaints work because they will be seen as the route down which you will have go to prod the police to take your complaints seriously.

The final and, I hope, the easiest point for the Minister to answer is on the powers of the local policing body to require information. Is she able to give us an undertaking that that information is about not only mechanisms and numbers but also, potentially, individual cases? There are two reasons for saying that it needs potentially to be about individual cases. First, an individual case may be a matter of local importance—in which case it is important that specific information can be obtained by the local policing body; and, secondly, there is enormous value in local policing bodies having the power to dip sample what has happened in terms of complaints because the dip-sampling process often tells you all kinds of extra information about the way in which the police service is operating in that case.

Finally, can the noble Baroness explain the distinction between a low-level complaint and other matters?

[Baroness Browning]

My Lords, perhaps I may begin with that last point. We all understand complaints which involve criminality—that is fairly clear—but below that there are issues about complaints to do with, for example, time-keeping, absenteeism, rudeness and that kind of thing, which I regard as low-level complaints. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Harris, will accept that those within policing are able to make that distinction quite clearly without too much written information in the Bill.

The noble Lord mentioned standards. A PCC will be subject to interrogation by the IPCC and the local police for criminal allegations, and the IPCC will decide which are the less serious allegations. So the IPCC will act as the arbiter of the panels. Less serious allegations will be decided by the PCP. I hope that there is already clarity about what is regarded as a serious or a low-level problem. PCPs will be subject to the standards applicable to local authorities under the Localism Bill. I shall come back to noble Lords on how we are going to handle having the two Bills before the House.

On the points the noble Lord, Lord Harris, made about London, the Government recognise that sometimes people feel that the independent scrutiny of such matters should be in the Bill but, as I said earlier, we do not agree. We are not persuaded of that and it is not our intention to make any changes in that respect.

I shall have to write to the noble Lord on some of the other points he raised. However, I cannot agree with the suggestion he made about revisiting the situation as it applies to London.

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

Let me be clear: the amendments are couched in terms of London but the principle of an independent element in matters where there are appeals against a chief officer’s decision is important and should apply across the Bill. Clearly there is not an amendment before us which deals with outside London—there may have been one in one of the many groups we dealt with the other day but we lost it in the wash. However, it is an important principle to which we will have to return on Report, as the noble Lord, Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington, has indicated.

The point made by the Minister about PCPs—or, in the case of London, the London Assembly—dealing with lower-than-criminality level complaints about the elected police and crime commissioner or the MOPC in London will create a situation where there will constantly be a party political row in the police and crime panels and the London Assembly panel as to whether the person concerned has performed their duties appropriately. If that is in the absence of a centrally laid down and agreed framework of standards, it will be a constant, politically damaging and wasteful process. There is still a need for a centrally laid down framework of standards for the behaviour and actions of police and crime commissioners.

[Lord Soley]

The noble Lord is quite right in saying there is potential for political conflict of the type that he describes. Does he foresee that there could then be a danger of a continuing battle over that, which would, in the end, go to the courts?

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

It is certainly possible that it would go the courts. However, I was thinking more of an equally completely draining and pointless political toing and froing over something when, with a clear framework or set of guidance and standards against which any of these allegations could be judged, the situation would be better for all concerned. It seems to me that a PCC, for example, or the MOPC, may have a particular view of the standards they should follow while the PCP or the London Assembly panel might have a different view—that would just lead to endless political argument and rows, rather than saying, “Here is a set of guidance and that is the way we should operate”.

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[Baroness Doocey]

My Lords, I have tabled Amendments 221 and 222 in this group, concerning the duty of the Home Secretary to deal with national threats by issuing a strategic policing requirement. As my noble friend Lady Hamwee has already said, the words “have regard to” in the Bill are definitely too weak and need to be changed to a firm obligation. Allowing a PCC to disregard national threats in favour of political expediency or re-election strategies is not a good idea. PCCs are directly elected. There will be political incentives for them to behave partially, particularly in the run-up to an election. Decisions based on a PCC re-election strategy will not necessarily be the best way to address major threats and public order problems.

Imagine a scenario whereby a PCC has been elected on the promise of putting significant additional police officers into an area of high crime and then, two weeks before the next election, is asked to extract those same officers in order to deal with the policing of a major demonstration in London. At best, they will be very torn between the necessity of trying to get themselves re-elected and whether they should “have regard to” sending the officers to London. It is a difficult issue that really needs to be clarified, and to become a firm obligation rather than a suggestion. Under the Bill, the PCC would be free to disregard strategic policing requirements. We cannot afford to have dealing with national threats undermined by decisions taken for reasons of political expediency.

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

My Lords, this part of the Bill is one of the most important. I speak to Amendments 229 and 230 in my name, and also in support of Amendments 221 and 222 to which I have put my name.

This issue is extremely important because, for most citizens, interaction with the police is obviously about what happens at the most local of levels. It is about what is going on at their street corner, the threat of violence in the streets, burglary and anti-social behaviour. However, people take it for granted that more serious crime is being dealt with somewhere. They take it for granted that terrorism is being dealt with somewhere. However, every part of the country must be making its contribution to that effort. If it does not, there is a real danger that terrorism or serious and organised crime cannot be dealt with effectively. There is a need for a national strategic policing requirement. The Government are quite right to place it in the Bill as they have done.

However, there is a danger in the overall governance proposals in terms of whether the same level of priority will be given under the new governance structure to what the current Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis calls the “balanced policing model”: the balance between the handling of the immediate concern of the local citizen and these national contributions to making the country safer. There is a fear—which has just been expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, and by others as well—about the extent to which a directly elected police and crime commissioner, or the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, will necessarily place the same priority on that national obligation as ideally they would. I have heard the Minister of State for Policing get extremely irate on that point. He says that he cannot imagine circumstances in which a responsible person elected to these positions will not take counterterrorism and serious and organised crime seriously. I agree. Most sensible elected politicians would of course give a very high priority to such matters. However, the reality will be, particularly in times of limited resources, that judgments and choices will be made.

I give your Lordships an example. At the moment, police services around the country are facing extremely difficult budget rounds. In those areas of the country without a counterterrorist intelligence unit, questions may well be phrased as to what the appropriate level of requirement for those areas to maintain a level of Special Branch commitment is compared to the past. Local policing bodies, whether under the current model or—even more so—under a directly elected model in the future, may well make a judgment that these issues are not currently significant in their part of the country and that they can reduce their commitment to them. That would be a perfectly sensible and, in many ways, rational judgment.

However, the reality is that even—indeed, especially—in the most rural areas of the country there have been organised terrorist training camps. It is a fact, regrettably, that one of the most difficult threats that counterterrorism now faces is the individual who chooses to radicalise themselves on the internet, is not in ready communication with groups which might otherwise be monitored, who decides to build an explosive device following a recipe obtained on the internet, and who then goes out and does something in a local town centre. There have been a number of such individuals in the past few years. Those are precisely the circumstances under which you suddenly discover that that force would have been very well placed to have retained a good, high, strong Special Branch capacity. Yet that is the sort of thing that is vulnerable at the moment. No doubt the Minister will counter that this is not actually a problem, but it is the sort of thing that should be looked at in terms of the level of budgets that have been allocated for those sorts of things.

Similarly, it may not be apparent that activities and organised crime will impact on, say, a rural village, or even some of the leafier suburbs of London. Apart from the fact that these are often precisely the areas where some of the most serious criminals decide they want to live, it is not the case that they do not impact on those areas. Indeed, we have to take into account the insidious way in which serious crime operates, whereby quality of life is diminished over quite a long period. That requires long-term investment in tackling those problems. It is not something that you can just send in a task force to handle; you have to continually work on those areas. There is a risk. There is the sort of conversation which goes, “Why should we, in this force area, maintain a kidnap unit of this capacity and quality, able to deal with these sorts of incidents? Why do we need to do this?”. The reason is that if you do not, or if you do not contribute to something that is provided on a regional or national basis, when something goes wrong it will be your citizens who are potentially vulnerable.

Yesterday, the Home Secretary produced proposals for a national crime agency. One of the central planks is the ability of the national crime agency to direct resources. This will be an interesting way forward, and it will be fascinating to watch some of the discussions which will no doubt take place with chief officers of police as to how this is to be managed and who will have operational control, and all the sorts of counterterrorism issues that have had to be resolved over the past few years. It will be an interesting and exciting set of discussions.

I have no problem with the concept in principle; all I am saying is that it will be that much harder to direct resources if, when you contact the chief constable concerned, you say, “I am sorry. I just don’t have that capacity because I decided I didn’t need that number of detectives or that number of specialist units in my force area because it is not a day-to-day priority as far as I’m concerned. I know there is a problem as this group seems to be operating across my territory but I no longer have the resources”. That is why the strategic policing requirement is so important. I do not believe that sensible police and crime commissioners or the MOPC will deliberately say, “We are going to run down these things”, but when you are faced with difficult budgetary decisions and you are facing a difficult election campaign, having more police tackling day-to-day street crime and anti-social behaviour is a very compelling argument.

In the long distant days when I was a local authority leader, I remember that whatever my personal priorities were in terms of the value of education or the big spending items, the important thing in the run-up to an election was to divert resources to street cleaning as that was the key driver on how people voted. I hesitate to say that there will be similar key drivers in the election for police and crime commissioners or the MOPC in London, but I suspect that there will be. The danger is that the strategic policing obligations will be put to one side, even if for a temporary period, in the run-up to an election. Therefore, there has to be something in the Bill which gives the strategic policing requirement real teeth and real obligations.

My specific proposal is that we should give more powers and responsibilities to Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary. I say that for two reasons. One is that I think that is the sensible way forward. It would mean that the inspectorate would look at the way in which individual forces had chosen to meet their obligations under the strategic policing requirement, and would then report no doubt to the Home Secretary but also to the elected commissioner, the PCP and anyone else involved. Certainly those parts of the report that can be made public should be made public because, if there is a failing in this area, local electorates will want make to take account of it in determining whether they should re-elect a particular individual or deciding whether it is an important issue for their locality. That should be a regular process. Given the pliability of budgets, it should be done at least once a year; otherwise, I am not sure that you will necessarily resolve the matter. That seems to me the appropriate mechanism and it is consistent with the way in which the police service operates.

The other important reason why I think this is the right way forward is that it gets the Government off the hook as regards how much they specify in the strategic policing requirement. I have heard Ministers say—vehemently in the case of the Minister of State—that they do not want to put an enormous shopping list into the strategic policing requirement. As a general principle, that is right. This is not the way to do it because people will simply follow the shopping list, if that is what they are told to do, rather than necessarily working out what is the best way to deliver their obligations under it. However, I have heard counterarguments from chief constables who say that we have to have a document. They are busily preparing volumes of material which they say should underpin the strategic policing requirement.

I propose that there should be a police-led discussion on the most effective way of meeting a strategic policing requirement. The inspectorate would have the key role in determining what it is looking for as it goes round forces to see whether the strategic policing requirement is being met. The Government would not have to specify in mind-boggling detail how many officers should patrol a regional airport, for instance—expect that in that case the airport ought to be paying for them—or specify in enormous detail the size of a force Special Branch or how many detectives it is necessary for each force to maintain so that they have the capacity to receive instructions, guidance and requests from the national crime agency or from the local counterterrorist unit. Those matters would be determined within the police service in discussions led by the inspectorate.

Unless you have this sort of mechanism, it seems to me that despite having a strategic policing requirement there will be no means of making that happen. As a consequence, there is a real danger that over time we will find that we do not have the resources that the country needs to deal with serious organised crime or terrorism.

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the Serious Organised Crime Agency already exists and the national crime agency will be an expansion and revision of the role of the Serious Organised Crime Agency. This is evolution and not revolution.

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

My Lords, the issue is that the national crime agency will have the ability to direct resources which would otherwise be under the control of chief constables. That is precisely the substance of the group of amendments that we are discussing now about the strategic policing requirement, and in this instance we will ensure that those resources are available for the national crime agency to direct.

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

There were so many questions that I missed that point in my notes. My understanding of what was said in the Commons was that the draft protocol was to be published during the passage of the Bill. Several drafts of the strategic policing requirement have been written. They are undergoing extensive consultation and the Government are concerned that they get this right. This will take some time, but I assure the noble Baroness that the process is under way. I was warned that it was quite possible that a Member of this Committee would get up and wave her copy of the report, but perhaps Members of the Committee have not yet seen the drafts. I assure noble Lords that work is under way and that consultations are taking place.

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

I may have missed it, but I do not recall the Minister responding to my point in relation to Amendment 230 about placing an obligation on HMIC to report on the way in which the strategic policing requirement is being met, to make the report available to the Home Secretary, police and crime commissioners and MOPC, and to put it, in some form, in the public domain.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I will take that back before I start to drop my notes. My understanding is that the question of how local forces fulfil the range of their functions will be part of what HMIC will naturally report on; it will necessarily be part of an HMIC report. We will look at that again and make sure that we can satisfy the noble Lord.

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

My reason for pressing the point is that it is extremely important. It is a mechanism that will enable a proper discussion about the real requirements for the strategic policing requirement. It will obviate the need for that to be written into a document that emanates from the Home Office. It will be a process that the police service owns through the inspectorate that will identify and report on whether the spirit of the strategic policing requirement is being honoured. I hope that this will be taken back and considered seriously, because I will press the point on Report unless the Government come forward with a response.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

The strategic policing requirement is intended, among other things, to inform the inspectors on the sort of things that they should be looking at. We are all aware that the strategic policing requirement feeds into a range of discussions. The question of whether there is a division between local and national policing is one that begins to dissolve once you get into it. I had a fascinating briefing some while ago about traffic policing and the extent to which it has to be a co-operative activity between different forces. I had not thought it through before. There was a great deal of linkage all the way through. I am impressed by the extent to which our forces already co-operate in the sort of specialised units that the noble Lord talked about, outside London where there are many forces smaller than the Metropolitan Police. We will look at this and make sure that it is fully in the Bill.