Scotland Bill

Lord McFall of Alcluith Excerpts

Tuesday 19th January 2016 Lords Chamber

Clearly, we cannot unwind the clock and set back what has been done. It is obviously of great importance that the new chief constable is given every support and encouragement to try to bring about the changes that are necessary, so that we do not have the kind of appalling circumstances which we had in Stirling, where someone lay by the side of a motorway for three days after their accident had been reported, or with the elderly lady who went missing in Glasgow, where there were failures of communication. Worst of all, the people at the top then picked on some person way down the line, trying to pin the blame on them for a botched reorganisation with disastrous consequences.

[Lord McFall of Alcluith (Lab)]

Does the noble Lord not agree that one of the real problems a number of years ago was when they got rid of the local police stations and introduced a centralised call centre? Now you phone a central place in Scotland, which is unaware of the locality and the issues in it, and where there are complications with communications. I saw that when I was a Member along the road there. That was the start of the real problem, which led to this centralisation. The more we get back to local police stations and local reporting, so that we can go into our stations and report issues where they understand the local area, the better. We are on the wrong track.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

I entirely agree with the noble Lord. He is absolutely right. In my old constituency of Stirling, we used to have a police station in my own village; we had them in Balfron and elsewhere, but they have all disappeared. We now have two wildlife policemen who are going around trying to find someone to prosecute for something—without much success, I am told, and at vast expense. All of this is absolutely in the face of what local people say they want, which is local policing and local involvement. One of the great ironies of this whole devolution project is that it was supposed to be about returning power to local people, but the Scottish Parliament seems to have been absolutely concerned to centralise everything and to take a very authoritarian view.

This proposal to break up the British Transport Police —I am now on the amendment—is an absolute classic example of the failure of thinking which has brought such disaster to Scotland’s police force. British Transport Police has been there certainly since the 1850s, when it was realised that a railway would enable criminals to move around the country and that it was necessary to have a police force on the trains with the authority to act wherever its officers were. That system has worked brilliantly; it is one of the great success stories.

The truth of the matter is that the reason that the nationalists do not want to have the British Transport Police is because of the “B” in British Transport Police. Perhaps we could just call it something else—perhaps we could call it the “National Transport Police” —and then we could get agreement that it makes sense to have a cross-border force run on a cross-border basis. It has done the most brilliant work, not all of it publicised for obvious reasons, on drugs hauls that have been taken from trains at Glasgow that have come from the south, on the movement of terrorists and others who threaten us, and on the integration of the Glasgow underground with the London Underground and the whole of the transport system. The BTP is a group of people organised in four divisions—there is a Scottish division—who understand and have the expertise to deal with the intricacies of policing a transport system. That is a success, and for it to be smashed up would be crazy.

I know that the Minister will say that the amendment is unnecessary and the clause does not actually provide for the breaking up of the British Transport Police, but we know that that is what the Scottish Government intend to do. In doing so, they will undermine not just the security of people in Scotland, as the noble Lord, Lord Empey, said, but the security and enforcement of law in the United Kingdom as a whole. This is not a matter which should be subject to devolution; this is a matter of national, United Kingdom interest. I very much hope that the Government will drop it from the Bill. The rather throw-away line that we got from the Smith commission, which showed no understanding of what the British Transport Police has been doing, is, to say the least, a disappointment.

The fact that the Justice Minister in Scotland should announce that he wanted to get rid of the British Transport Police and integrate it into the Scottish police with no consultation whatsoever, and in the face of strong opposition from former commanders in Scotland, who actually did the job, but who are ignored, is unacceptable. I very much hope that the Government will feel able to accept the noble Lord’s amendment or, even better, drop the whole thing altogether.