Police: Funding

Lord Imbert Excerpts

Wednesday 14th September 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Browning]

My Lords, the noble Lord should step back from the brink. From where we sit, we are peering into the abyss because what we inherited has made this necessary. As a member of the former Government, he will know only too well from the last Labour Home Secretary that had Labour been re-elected, it too would have been making changes and looking for reductions in police force numbers. We have that on the record.

I have to say that noble Lords will have to get over this and face the reality, which is what we have had to do. Forces are focused on protecting front-line services. I have read many comments from chief officers who, I acknowledge, have a difficult and challenging task, but they are going to put the front line first and are rising to that challenge. The most recent report from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, Adapting to Austerity, sets out a summary of force work plans for the spending review period which states that the number working in front-line roles was expected to fall by, on average, just 2 per cent over the two-year period between March 2010 and March 2012. I have every confidence that chief officers will ensure that the front line is protected.

[Lord Imbert]

My Lords, do Her Majesty’s Government expect the British police service to lose its global reputation for being the most accountable, well governed and respected service in the world? If so, do they really care?

[Baroness Browning]

My Lords, not only do we care, but we have every respect for the work done by police forces every day. However, it is time to look at how the police are deployed in these times of austerity—the very title of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate’s report. We have to challenge, as senior police officers are doing up and down the country, the way forces are deployed. For example, we see in the recent report that, astonishingly, there are more front-line police officers on duty on a Monday morning than on a Friday night. Surely that has to be challenged. Surely there are ways better to deploy forces to protect the public and the front line, and to ensure that we maintain the important reputation that the noble Lord is so familiar with.

Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Lord Imbert Excerpts

Thursday 14th July 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe]

My Lords, I am very pleased to add my support to the excellent response that the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, has prepared to the points that arose in Committee. I was one of those who met Professor Keith Humphreys, who is the senior adviser to President Obama on drug and alcohol abuse, who gave us a very helpful presentation indeed on what they are doing in the States. They have made very good progress and are intending to roll out the programme over a much wider front, given the success that they have encountered.

On the point of different cultures, the one thing that those involved in drink and drug issues know is that they are widespread throughout countries in varying degrees. Some places have bigger problems than others, but those who have problems with drink and drugs have a common problem of approach. It behoves us that wherever we see people trying a new approach, if it is producing success and the kind of results that we have heard that this scheme is running, we should spend some time looking to see whether it can be applied in our home country.

The Americans are very progressive in many areas. They try schemes; yes, some of them fail, but they abandon those and move on. The problem I find from my experience of dealing with these issues in this country is that when we get an idea, we believe that it is going to work and research it very well indeed. We then start pouring a lot of money into it, which continues to go in regardless of what is happening with the scheme, yet we continue defending the status quo when others come to suggest trying to look for something a little different.

I hope that the Government will be prepared to think again on this and to be bold. The major issues which were troubling them have, I think, been answered by the noble Baroness in her response but I would underline the two points that I made previously. First, this will not work on a voluntary basis. It will work successfully on that basis in one or two areas, but then you will find that the probation officers move on and the police change. A different culture then occurs in the area where it has been successful, so it is not maintained and it disappears. This is all that we find happens when it is run purely voluntarily on an experimental basis. It needs instead to be in the Bill and to be a compulsory operation—again, on an experimental basis.

Secondly, there is a concern expressed that we might end up with more people going into jail at the end of the day. Well, some of those people will be going to jail in any event and will be costing the taxpayer an awful lot of money in the first instance. If this alternative runs, there is a chance that there will be significantly less cost to the taxpayer and to the public at large. I suggest to the Minister one way around this difficulty. Civil servants hate sunset clauses because they are seen as a mark of failure. We should be much more flexible in our approach to sunset clauses. If they are right that this will end up with more people going to jail—I do not believe that it will, and I think that most people around the House who attended these briefings do not think that—why do the Government not consider making these amendments subject to a sunset clause and bring that back at Third Reading? We can then find a way forward which would answer that problem.

I am sorry to think that my Front Bench is not going to give its full support to this venture. The Labour Party ought to be backing this. From a number of standpoints, it is a very helpful development indeed and even though our Front Bench may not be exalting my colleagues to join us in the Division Lobbies, I personally appeal very strongly indeed to the people on the Labour Benches to vote for this amendment, if we are pushed to a vote. However, I hope that is avoided and that we get a more positive response from the Minister than we have had before.

[Lord Imbert]

My Lords, I must declare an interest before I begin in that 50 years ago, when on night duty as a new constable on the streets of London, I found that the following morning, for weeks on end, one was standing in court with a defendant who was accused of a crime that turned out to be alcohol-related. As the Committee would expect, I have conferred with my former colleagues and, yesterday morning, I spoke to the territorial operations department of the Metropolitan Police to seek its view on this amendment. It is supportive, with one caveat: that this must be a magistrate’s decision. Police must not be expected to say, “This individual committed the crime because they were drunk”. That must be a decision of the magistrate but, with that one caveat, I know that my former colleagues support this amendment as indeed do I.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Imbert, who is a great deal more experienced in these matters than I am. I am also at one remove in following my namesake, who spoke earlier, and who alluded to the presentation which a number of us received on Monday morning. Reference has been made to the experience of the American professor from Stanford who gave a presentation to us about his White House experience. I would add the footnote that he also holds an honorary degree from King’s College London, so he is not without form on this side of the Atlantic.

Brevity is at a premium, so I shall not cover the ground that other speakers have covered. When the Minister spoke on the previous occasion in Committee, she indicated familiarity with the South Dakota experiment. I have a brief addition to make to that. Monday’s presentation emphasised the experience of the three states where the problem was most severe—North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana—and did so graphically with a parallel line high on the page representing North Dakota. A line at the bottom of the page indicated the average experience in the individual states in the US. A diagonal line from the top of the left-hand corner to the bottom right showed the way that South Dakota’s experience had so dramatically improved.

At the end of the presentation, I asked the professor what had been happening in the states that lay between the average figure at the bottom of the page and the experience in the Dakotas and Montana. He said that a series of them which fell in their own performance between the top and bottom lines had already also adopted the South Dakota experience, North Dakota and Montana having already done so. The most notable example of a state that had, as a result of the South Dakota experience, advanced to putting it on the statute book was California.

Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Lord Imbert Excerpts

Wednesday 18th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bradshaw]

Perhaps I may make a point—

[Lord Imbert]

My Lords, I must admit that I am confused. Regrettably, I was unable to be here on 11 May for the first day of Committee. I received a telephone call in the rehabilitation centre where I was staying for a few days to say, “No worries, we won”. Now I find that the debate is still centring on elected police commissioners.

We have heard a lot about democracy. It seems that some people have the view that if we vote, that is democratic. My view—with which noble Lords may disagree—is that living in a democracy means living where there is a free press, a well informed public and, most importantly, a politically neutral police service. Whichever way this debate goes, we must ensure that the police are not only politically neutral but are seen to be politically neutral. My fear with a party-political, elected commissioner is that the public will not trust that the police are politically neutral. I appeal to all noble Lords not to put politics before common sense. Some will vote for this proposal because that is their political view and they want to follow their party. Others will vote against it because they, too, are following their political party’s views. I ask noble Lords to vote one way or the other to ensure that the public of this country know that we have a politically neutral police service that is also seen to be politically neutral.

[Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton]

My Lords, does the noble Lord, Lord Imbert, recognise the contribution to that political neutrality—and to the confidence expressed by the public in many parts of the country—of the noble Lord, Lord Howard? In the 1980s he was part of a Government who sought to deal with the issue and with these concerns. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Imbert, will seek to prevail on the noble Lord, Lord Howard, to take an evolutionary approach to his many previous successes.

Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Lord Imbert Excerpts

Wednesday 27th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Imbert]

My Lords, like other noble Lords this afternoon, I must declare an interest. I was attested as a constable in the Metropolitan Police in the year that the current commissioner—the real commissioner—was born and I served in every rank in the police service, from constable to chief constable and commissioner. We all know the expression, “like the curate's egg”. It is an appropriate way to describe the Bill. It has some good bits and there is potential for the reform proposals, such as the new strategic policing requirement and national crime agency, to be forces for good. Yet I hope that the new national crime agency will not be just a cheaper, remodelled and less effective SOCA by another name. Like the curate's egg, however, if you swallow a bad bit it is likely to prove fatal to the whole. Your Lordships will not be surprised to know that I, too, consider the fatal bits to be the proposals that there should be elected party-political commissioners for crime and policing.

To call him or her a commissioner is deliberately misleading. We have two commissioners in this country: the Commissioner of the City of London Police and the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis. This newly elected politician is not a commissioner. Despite the Bill being littered with assurances that the operational decisions will remain in the hands of the chief constable—methinks they doth protest too much—let us be realistic. This will not be so in practice. A visiting politician to your Lordships’ House recently said to me, “Of course we will become involved in the operational decisions—that’s why we’re politicians; it’s our nature and purpose to be involved”. To call him or her a commissioner will imbue him or her with the king’s clothes, as the final arbiter of the chief constable’s decisions. The correct definition is not “commissioner”, but—as my noble friend Lord Elystan-Morgan said this afternoon, either on purpose or by accident—“commissar”. If you look at the dictionary definition of that, you will see that it is an official charged with political education. That is who it will be.

ACPO, with which I have naturally spoken, is determined not to get involved in an unseemly political argument with Government as to the election of PCCs or the disbandment of police authorities. As to the proposed system of PCCs or alternatives, however uncomfortable it might be with the proposal it is clear in acknowledging that it is Parliament's decision who holds the chief constable to account, and how. Despite its widespread doubts—and indeed there are widespread doubts—about the current proposals, it will accept them because they will, of course, work in some areas. That is what police do. If Parliament commands it, they will do their best to continue to give their public the highest level of impartial policing they possibly can.

Noble Lords will be only too well aware that police, like all other public services, will be facing a severe cut in their resources—a 20 per cent reduction. They will of course grumble, but they will get on with it; that is their nature. Many different estimates have been voiced about how many front-line personnel will be withdrawn. Again, despite the cutbacks and their present low morale—because of the danger to their public service pensions for which they have paid and continue to contribute at an incomparably high 11 per cent of their salary—they will get on with it, because that is what they do. We should value that, rather than kicking them again and again.

What are we all worrying about? I am grateful to the Minister for correcting my information in a question that I posed recently; I had understood that the Government would be spending more than £200 million on a system provided for an elected politician to set the police budget and hire, fire and suspend the chief constable as he or she might decide. Are we not fortunate—as the noble Baroness assured me—that it is not £200 million but only £50 million? That is only the beginning, as my noble friend Lord Condon said earlier this afternoon. There is accommodation and other paraphernalia that will go with it. The commissar in every force in the country is likely to receive a salary of something well over £100,000—after all, he would need to be well above the chief constable, would he not? The Bill also makes provision for a well qualified staff for this individual, and the commissar and his staff will want acceptable office accommodation and furniture: carpets, desks, chairs, telephones, headed stationery, computers and printer equipment. That is every force in the country. It is beginning to sound a bit more like £200 million, is it not?

Is it not ironic that we can find all this and much more to ensure that we can introduce this discredited American system, at the same time as we accept that London will lose 700 ambulance drivers to make up a similar amount, a £52 million shortfall? My Lords, do not have a heart attack or a stroke or a sudden illness in the Palace of Westminster after the end of this year, or you will have to get a bus or a taxi to take you to St Thomas's. And who will be there to attend to you? I am told that there will be a severe shortfall of nurses because we cannot afford them. May I be forgiven for thinking that if only we had that £50 million that is planned to be spent on mending something that is not broken and calling it reform—a new definition for reform—we might have enough nursing and ambulance personnel to continue to provide their vital, life-saving work?

I shall leave the incredible costs of this idea to one side for a moment. The originators of this Bill have undoubtedly missed the most important point: that police are not government or political appointees or agents. The office of constable is a Crown appointment, and all officers take an oath at the beginning of their service which begins:

“I (full name) do solemnly and sincerely declare and affirm that I will well and truly serve the Queen”—

yes, the Queen—

“in the office of constable, with fairness, integrity, diligence and impartiality”.

I emphasise that they are not civil servants but Crown servants, who discharge their duties impartially according to law and not according to a political instruction, preference or whim.

Those who are of the same political persuasion as the Bill's originators will, understandably, no doubt vote for this part of the Bill, but how will they feel when we have the first National Front, British National Party or other extremist party-political commissar? Please let us not put our heads in the sand. Let us not ignore that; it could, and no doubt will, happen. How will the chief constable respond if he believes or has information that a planned march or demonstration is likely to result in very serious public disorder, but it is also known that the commissar is of the same political persuasion as the march organisers?

It has already been mentioned this afternoon by noble Lords that a recent YouGov poll showed that 65 per cent of those polled did not want any change from the present system, 15 per cent agreed with it, and 20 per cent did not know. The poll was commissioned by Liberty, which I admit has not been my comfortable bedfellow very often. It is difficult to ignore a poll like this, which shows that a large and representative section of our society is against this proposal, with only a few in favour.

If the Bill is to go through unamended, will we next find a proposal using similar arguments—that we do not know the name of our High Court judges—for the election of High Court judges on a party-political basis? It might sound dramatic, but we would be failing in our duties if we did not remind ourselves that in Germany in the 1930s political direction and action took precedence over real policing of society, as it did in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, 1960s and very early 1970s. I emphasise that I am not saying that that would happen here, but we must beware of the opportunities for an insidious and subtle political creep into ordinary daily even-handed policing decisions.

The Bill as it stands will be the valedictory address for the global reputation of the British police service—the final eulogy for British policing as the world has come to know, admire and emulate it. No longer will we be asked to travel the globe to help and train foreign police forces in the traditional way laid down by Sir Robert Peel in this country.

As I went through the Bill I made some comments in the margin. Against the election of PCCs I put two comments: one was “dangerous” and the other, if your Lordships will forgive the expression, was “daft”. I realise that to use “daft” is discourteous and would upset many of my Conservative friends, and I have many—at least, I did have until today. Instead of using “dangerous and daft”, I turned to my thesaurus and decided that it would be better to say “dangerous and ill advised”—in fact, grossly ill advised.

Do we cast Peel’s concept of an impartial and entrusted system of policing to the dustbin, and accept that something that has been an example to the rest of the world must now imitate a failed and untrustworthy system from across the Atlantic where another culture prevails? If we want real and well thought-through reform let us do what the Police Federation has, over the past 10 years, been asking for and have a royal commission. Do not let us legislate in haste and repent in future.

Police: Deployment of Workforce

Lord Imbert Excerpts

Tuesday 5th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

My Lords, this is just the kind of work that needs to be done. It is not easy to make those head-count calculations until one has an idea of how each force is going to make the savings, but there is no doubt that if, for instance, one procures much more efficiently than we do at the moment, considerable savings can be made.

[Lord Imbert]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that this Question need not have been asked at all if only a proportion of the £200 million-plus which is planned to be spent on the election of police and crime commissars was to be spent on real policing?

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

My Lords, I think that the figure for the election of PCCs is £50 million, which will be every four years. It has been provided for in the spending round; it does not relate to the police budget.

Police: Officer Numbers

Lord Imbert Excerpts

Tuesday 1st February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

My Lords, I assure the noble Lord that we will certainly be looking at the maintenance of national level capabilities and that is of course why we have taken such care in the case of counterterrorism, where the funding has been kept stable. One of the tasks of the National Crime Agency is to ensure that national capabilities are maintained.

[Lord Imbert]

I understand it will cost a £1 million or so if the new elected political commissioners are put into position to oversee and to hire and fire chief constables. Would it not be better to spend that money on employing more police officers or PCSOs?

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

My Lords, the Government believe in the notion of elected commissioners and direct accountability to localities. It is for that reason that we are introducing this reform. We believe that it will result in more effective policing and more direct accountability to the people the police serve.

Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 (Disclosure of Information by SOCA) Order 2010

Lord Imbert Excerpts

Monday 26th July 2010 Grand Committee

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

My Lords, the noble Baroness raises a number of points. The reason that we have the arrangement of SOCA being willing to provide information to an NDPB is because the sporting community is extremely unwilling to see an extensive criminalisation of the control of doping in sporting activity and wants to try to pursue a policy where best practice, peer pressure and effective action by the sports’ regulatory bodies are the way by which it is controlled. That accounts for doing it this way. Clearly, if it was concluded that that was not effective, one would have to look again at the arrangements, but the doping that goes on at the moment is not so excessive that it is thought necessary to bring in SOCA in a big way.

On the number of people needed, unless I am mistaken, I think that the eight extra staff will not be employed by SOCA but will be acquired by UKAD, because it has to set up a unit to process the information that it gets from SOCA and to decide the action that needs to be taken. Those individuals need some security clearance, so there is a reason for needing a specialised staff. For SOCA, it is true that the information that it is able to supply is in many respects a by-product of other investigations, but it is extremely useful to the sporting regulatory agencies.

As for the question of drugs cheats, one reason why it will be increasingly necessary to go down that road is that the testing procedures have been shown to be only partially adequate, because practices have developed where either substances are used which are extraordinarily difficult to detect in tests, or they are being dosed in such small amounts that they do not show up in a test, such that one has to go to a more forensic approach to dealing with those cheats. That is why, in the end, one has to bring in an agency which might have information about suppliers. It is, in the end, the suppliers whom we need to try to choke off so that the substances never reach the performers. We are witnessing a change in the nature of the doping culture that, in turn, leads to new investigative techniques having to be employed.

[Lord Imbert]

My Lords, first, I apologise to the Minister for rising before she had had an opportunity to respond to the speech of the noble Baroness.

Your Lordships will be relieved to know that my contribution to our proceedings this afternoon will be very brief—in fact, less than three minutes. I hope that that does not diminish the impact of what I say on this most important subject. Illegal drugs have become the scourge of modern society throughout the world. Thousands of deaths are recorded annually, and national and international organised crime thrives on that disgraceful trade worldwide. In some areas of the globe, sport has been wholly corrupted by the poison of performance-improving drugs. No longer, when we see an outstanding sporting performance, can we cheer unreservedly without thinking the unthinkable: was he or she using a performance-enhancing drug? That cynicism among spectators is grossly unfair to those athletes and sportsmen and women who are honest and cast aside the temptation to cheat by the use of such substances.

I believe that, fortunately, the honest athletes and sportspeople are still in the majority, but we must be vigilant. Only by law-abiding individuals and organisations sharing intelligence about the trafficking, sale and use of illegal or performance-enhancing drugs can action be taken to prevent or reduce this evil and destructive business.