Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Lord Shipley Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2011 Lords Chamber

I speak on this as a complete fool; I am a simple bishop and I understand nothing about how these things work. However, I have a deep concern for our local communities, the confidence that they have in their police force, and the confidence they can have in that person in whom such trust is placed—the chief constable. I am undecided about this amendment in a way that I was not when the debate started. I can see many more sides to the issue than I could a couple of hours ago. However, the issue of operational independence, and how accountability is set in a properly democratic and neither populist nor party political framework, goes right to the heart of the constitutional dangers in the Bill as it stands at present.

[Lord Shipley]

My Lords, I also welcome the new Minister to her role. I hope that today she will listen carefully to the views expressed in the House on the detail of the Bill. I have previously talked about the problems of elected police commissioners twice in debates in this Chamber. I will not reiterate what I have said on previous occasions. Suffice it to say that we must not, through our debate on the Bill, end up polarising power in the hands of one individual. We should not politicise the police or produce conflict in electoral mandates between councils, their leaders and elected mayors and a police and crime commissioner. We should maintain impartial allocation of resources, preserve the neutrality of the police service and balance operational command with accountability.

Reference has been made to the coalition agreement. I shall quote precisely what it says:

“We will introduce measures to make the police more accountable through oversight by a directly elected individual, who will be subject to strict checks and balances by locally elected representatives”.

The issue is that the checks and balances are not strong enough and they are certainly not strict. They are very weak indeed. As we have heard, the commissioners will have the power of appointment and dismissal of a chief constable. They will have the power to set a precept, which must then be charged by the local authorities. They will have the power to set a budget and agree the heads of expenditure for a whole police area. They will also have the power to issue a detailed police and crime plan.

There are some checks in place. As the Bill makes clear, 75 per cent of the panel voting can veto the appointment of a chief constable, and 75 per cent of a panel can veto the level of the precept. However, as currently stated in the Bill, a panel has no power to veto the police and crime plan. It has no power to veto the budget and no power to veto the dismissal of the chief constable. The panel will be consulted on the plan and the proposal to dismiss a chief constable will have to go to it for consultation, but it does not have the powers to veto either of those areas.

Further, the commissioners will have the right to appoint their own staff directly. Crucially, the commissioners will have no legislature underneath them, unlike London, where there is one. Therefore, there is no structure underneath the commissioners which provides them with the advice, guidance and support that is absolutely required. As set out in the Bill, enhanced powers are needed for the panels in relation to the plan, the budget and the dismissal of the chief constable. The panels need to be bigger; 10 is too small. Geography, diversity, and urban and rural areas all need to be reflected in the panel. The veto should not sit at 75 per cent. Amendments have been tabled calling for two-thirds. The more I think about this, the more I believe that 50 per cent plus one is probably the right level. The panel must have power to scrutinise the police directly, as police authorities currently do. Under the Bill, they will be able to scrutinise only the commissioner, not the police. I do not regard that as acceptable.

The panel should be able to appoint one of its own members as a temporary replacement when the commissioner is incapacitated. As stated in the Bill, it will be required to appoint a member of the commissioner’s staff who has been appointed to that post by the commissioner and who will, by the very nature of the appointment, not be elected. I simply do not see how that is a strict check and balance on the power of the commissioner.

We shall need to debate many questions in relation to the Bill. I raise a further matter which has not been raised today but comes from the Constitution Select Committee and concerns the voting system. Your Lordships may have had quite enough of discussing voting systems, but a major constitutional issue is involved here. The committee states at paragraph 17 of its 14th report:

“The Government should explain clearly the rationale for adopting the supplementary vote system for the election of police and crime commissioners. In particular, the Government should explain why they have seen fit to recommend a different system to either of those put to the vote in the 5 May referendum on the voting system for the House of Commons”.

The point is extremely important because the supplementary vote does not require 50 per cent support. We simply do not know how many candidates there might be, but as people will have only two votes you could end up with a police and crime commissioner being appointed on a very low percentage of votes. I hope that in our debates in Committee we will look very carefully at how people get elected, because in my view the person who is elected a commissioner—should we have one—must have the support of 50 per cent plus one of those who are voting.

[Baroness Hilton of Eggardon]

My Lords, I too speak in support of the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Harris, and the important principle that the police service should remain politically neutral. The current system provides for a spread of political allegiances and representation of many sections of a force area. I cannot see that a single person can fulfil this role or that having the power to set the budget and sack the chief constable will not inevitably interfere with police operational actions.

On Second Reading I talked about my experiences as a chief superintendant and serving police officer at Chiswick, and of the distortions that can occur when policing is influenced by politics. In particular, I spoke about Chiswick and Brentford, where most of the problems of crime and disorder were located on the Brentford half of the ground, but all the public pressure came from the articulate, organised middle classes of Chiswick.

The role of the police service in this country for nearly 200 years has been to be politically neutral. The oath that we all took on joining the police service was that we would act “without fear or favour”. Indeed, in my view, the main role of the police service is to act as a buffer between the strong in society and the weak. This may be to protect specific citizens from attack by violent criminals, but it is also to protect minorities from the overbearing power of the majority, and allow them the space to demonstrate and to represent their points of view. Where this goes horribly wrong has been recently demonstrated in places such as Syria and Libya.

In contrast to the role of the police service, the role of politicians is to represent the interests of those who elected them and to favour policies that will ensure their re-election—not to have regard to the problems of disfranchised minorities. If the Bill becomes law, we will end up with police forces that are almost permanently influenced by one party or another. We will have Tory police forces, Labour police forces and, increasingly, different styles of policing.

My second problem with the provisions of the Bill is the title, “police and crime commissioner”. The introduction of “crime” into the title strikes me as cheap populism. The police service has many other responsibilities, in particular those relating to public order. One of the primary objects of Peel’s police was the preservation of peace and tranquillity. That holds true today. If we are to have these commissioners—which I very much hope we do not—then “crime” should be dropped from their titles.

My final problem with this proposed duopoly of power is that either the relationship will become too close, or there will be a clash of personalities. During my police service, there was a series of scandals in places such as Blackpool and Southend, where chief constables became too close to the local politicians and did them favours, or interfered with prosecutions—often on traffic offences. Alternatively, political differences may lead to, for example, the recent difficulties between the Mayor of London and the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. We have just heard cited the Bookbinder case. The most notorious example of this problem took place some time ago with the chief constable of Nottingham—the gloriously named Captain Athelstan Popkess—who saw his Labour councillors as Soviet sympathisers and had them investigated by his Special Branch. He was subsequently sacked by the Home Office.

The Bill, as it pertains to policing, is wrong in principle. We have a police service in this country that is admired very much throughout the world, despite some reservations elsewhere, for its impartiality and reluctance to act as a tool of politicians. To jeopardise that political neutrality is, I believe, extremely dangerous.

Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Lord Shipley Excerpts

Wednesday 27th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley]

My Lords, we have had a long and very useful debate on the Bill. It has identified a large number of issues which we will need to consider further in Committee. In view of the time, I am going to restrict my comments to the role of the proposed elected police commissioner and to Part 1. Despite the several hours that we have spent in this debate, it still is not clear to me what exactly the problem is that the Government are trying to solve.

The polls show that the public have little interest in changes to police governance and for them, scrutiny and accountability take place at their neighbourhood level. To them, that is local, and in the main it works very well now because of all of the initiatives that have taken place in recent years. As that structure, particularly around partnership working, will continue as now, it would help the Government’s case if they produced evidence of the measurable benefits they seek to deliver. Elections can enhance democracy and accountability and, in theory, commissioners backed by the power of a ballot would enhance the accountability of the police. But it is not as simple as that. Today, we have heard a great deal of the dangers in some of the proposals within the Bill. First, policing could become politicised because many candidates would be nominated by political parties, but only one of them can win. There would therefore be a direct party-political connection with the post of commissioner, which does not occur in the same direct way with the role of the chair of a police authority, who operates much more by consensus.

Secondly, there is a danger that one person cannot represent a population averaging perhaps a million people, which will often be very diverse. That will lead in practice, because of the abolition of the police authority, to a democratic deficit, not to an improvement in democratic accountability.

The issue about commissioners seeking to direct resources to gain votes has been raised in the Chamber today. There is a real risk that commissioners might seek to do that. There is also a risk that commissioners might champion visible issues to gain votes at the expense of those that are less visible but nevertheless very important to the general public. It has rightly been identified in today's debate that the cost of the new arrangements will be much greater than for the existing police authorities because commissioners will inevitably create their own support staffing structures. The Bill itself says that they must have a chief executive and a chief finance officer, but the staff will inevitably have their own substructures and before we know it costs will rocket.

The Bill says that the costs of commissioners must be contained within existing budgets, but there will be a minimum of 82 further new posts under commissioners. That is low because there would have to be an office, support staff, policy staff and press staff. There may even be a number of finance staff and, for example, a statistician. Every commissioner will have a number of staff and I see no evidence that to date the Government have identified the numbers of those and how much it will all cost.

Then there are the problems associated with the powers of the panels proposed. It seems strange that a single commissioner will be responsible for holding the police to account on behalf of perhaps a million people, but a panel of 10 or more people will be set up to hold to account one commissioner. It seems even stranger that the panels, unlike our current police authorities, will not be able to scrutinise the police. That is a major democratic deficit. The panels, if we have them, must be bigger—at least 15 members to cover the diverse needs of their areas. They will need additional powers to enable them to veto the police and crime plan. A two-thirds majority will be needed here to secure a veto, as with the precept. In addition, the panels must have some greater power over the detailed budget as opposed to just the precept because it is in the detail of the budget that the actual plan—for the distribution of police, for example—will occur.

Then there is the issue that we have heard a little about this afternoon of the dismissal of a chief constable. It seems clear from the Bill that the powers of the commissioner are simply too great and the panel will have to have much greater authority. Looking also at the temporary cover that is proposed where a commissioner is absent, surely a panel must be able to elect one of its members to provide temporary cover for the commissioner. It is odd that the Bill proposes that a member of staff of the commissioner's office—presumably appointed by the commissioner, who could be a junior member of staff—is able to take over the commissioner's role for several months not having been elected. That is not right. The proposal for a deputy commissioner who would be a member of the panel and elected by the panel would give greater legitimacy.

I have two brief points about elections. For a number of reasons, I am in favour of a pilot. First, we would see whether it works. However, elections in 2012, as proposed in this Bill, should not apply to those 12 cities having mayoral referendums. That is because we are going to have not just two democratic organisations in local authorities—councillors and commissioners—but, in 12 English cities, we will perhaps have elected mayors. Who would be in charge in that situation—the elected mayor or the elected police commissioner? The elected mayor will be on the panel. I do not think that will work terribly well or that there should be an elected commissioner in any police area where there is going to be possibly an elected mayor. In London, of course, the political boundaries for the London Assembly and those for the Metropolitan Police are coterminous; but in other cities that is not the case. That seems to be a major problem.

Secondly, I have a real concern about an election using the supplementary vote system, because it does not require the support of 50 per cent of the electorate. You could well end up with somebody with significantly under 50 per cent actually securing the post and then being seen to represent just one part of their geographical area.

In conclusion, I hope that in Committee we have some very detailed discussions on much of what we have debated today and also on what we have not. In the event, I believe that it is right that we should now be seeking to pilot this Bill and not simply to impose it from 2012, lock, stock and barrel.

Identity Documents Bill

Lord Shipley Excerpts

Wednesday 17th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley]

My Lords, I would like to raise a further issue which relates to the wording of the amendment. It requires the surrender of the ID card for there to be a reimbursement of £30. There may well be a category of person who would like the £30 back and feel entitled in law to get the £30 back but who actually wants to keep their ID card. Of course, there is a further issue here, which may have struck a number of us. With only 12,000 or so cards in circulation, the residual value of the identity card in future might well be a great deal higher than £30. So the question may arise of how many people with an eye to the future would be keen to get that £30 back now but to retain their identity card. Some further examination of these and other issues might be helpful.

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

My Lords, I recognise the strength of sentiment expressed on all sides of the House. If the House will permit, I shall explain why I cannot accept the amendment.

The Government set out at an early stage that they would not continue with this legislation and that they would repeal the Bill. That has been the long-standing position of the Government, well known in advance. It is fair to say that the Government made their position known on the fact that the ID cards would no longer have any validity.

Identity Documents Bill

Lord Shipley Excerpts

Monday 18th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley]

My Lords, this Bill is a most welcome step by the Government. Many people have argued for many years that the introduction of ID cards and the national identity register was flawed on political, technical and financial grounds and would do very little to prevent terrorism, crime or fraud. As we have heard, a national identity register database could actually increase the risk of fraud and terrorism.

At its heart, the ID card and database proposals would, if proceeded with, change irrevocably the relationship of the state with the individual. It is one thing to have some form of personal identification during wartime, as we did 70 years ago, and quite another to create a massive national identity database for which identity cards themselves are simply a means to an end and not an end in themselves. Every swipe of the card could be recorded, as my noble friend Lord Phillips of Sudbury pointed out.

Why did the previous Government want such a database? Why did the obvious flaws not stop them? Why was the attack on individual civil liberties not seen as an issue? Why did the cost not seem to matter, given the serious structural weaknesses of the national identity register, which would have devoured far more money than the Government suggested? This Bill will stop the trend to a society in which private information becomes available on big databases that are accessible to large numbers of people, the vast majority of whom have no need of the information to which they would get access.

Never, since 2002, when the proposal for identity cards and the national identity register was first discussed, have I understood the justification for it. I cannot recall any reasoned, logical analysis of the need for it; that is because the proposal was never properly thought through. The official rationale seemed to be that the cards and the register would help in the fight against terrorism, but when terrorists are UK nationals entitled to an ID card or when they hold valid identification, as in the Madrid bombings, the case does not stand up to scrutiny.

Another ostensible reason was the need to prevent identity fraud, except that that is much more likely if you place lots of personal data in one place on one big database. Proponents of ID cards began to change the emphasis of the grounds of their arguments as the arguments were so convincingly won by those opposed, so we were told that there would be a convenience factor for young people when going to a pub or buying alcohol. As Liberty has pointed out, however, it is a very weak argument that we should construct a massive state database containing billions of biometric and other data, at a cost of several billion pounds, so that people can secure entry to a pub. Then we had the suggestion that ID cards might replace the concessionary bus pass for pensioners. Just imagine it: a multibillion pound scheme for identity cards being used to produce bus tickets.

The whole sorry exercise would have cost around £5 billion, at least—and that for a project that began life as a solution to a set of problems that were never clearly defined. Once the reasons were examined, they were found to be wanting and it became a project in search of a customer for, despite the fact that the Act has been on the statute book for over four years, only 15,000 ID cards have ever been produced. Of those 15,000, meanwhile, 3,000 were given free to airside workers. It now costs £5 million a year to run the current scheme, which is a cost of £400 per head each year. One is left with the impression that the previous Government, having finally grasped the nature of the flawed system they were creating, decided to head for the long grass under the guise of a slow start.

I am still left wondering why the previous Government believed so strongly in the value of big databases in which costs were rarely controlled and the security of data was so often not guaranteed. There are two kinds of scrutiny: first, who has access to what information; and, secondly, how secure it is from hacking or loss. As we know, there have been many major lapses in big government IT projects in recent years, and it seems pretty clear that the bigger the database, the higher the number of people who will need to access it and the weaker the security will inevitably be as a consequence. We should take note of some research undertaken by the Centre for Technology Policy Research at the London School of Economics, which tells us that,

“Despite a spend of as much as £21bn”,

a year,

“on public sector IT, it is difficult to find any compelling examples of direct productivity gains and improved public services”.

This is not just about waste on ID cards, but much more—not least the NHS database.

This Bill will stop the waste on ID cards and the national identity register, and stop the substantial erosion of civil liberties that was promoted by the previous Government. It is part of a broader rejection of intrusion by the state into people’s daily lives, for when the state acts it should be proportionate to the problem that needs resolution. The Bill will now prevent the second generation of passports, which would have added fingerprints to the facial biometric data already present on the biometric chip in UK passports. The previous Government’s plans for ID cards and a national identity register have been described by the director of Liberty as a grand folly. Well, that must be right; follies are created by people who have access to large sums of money and who have a fondness for frittering it on grand gestures. That seems to sum it all up.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws]

My Lords, may I beg the indulgence of the House and be permitted to speak in the gap?