Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Lord Soley Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley]

My Lords, I shall try to be brief; a lot of arguments have been made and I shall try not to repeat them. However, I will repeat the congratulations that have been given to the Minister—although I will change it to commiserations because being dropped into a contentious Bill of this complexity and which has constitutional implications is a big challenge. However, I know she will listen and that is very important.

My reason for offering support to this group of amendments is because we are engaged in something very serious and a pause for thought is right. The trial period might be referred to in a more important group of amendments than this one but it involves the same principle that we need to pause and think about this.

One of the most important statements in the report of the House of Lords Constitution Committee, quite rightly, is:

“From a constitutional perspective, the chief risk with Part 1 is that of politicising operational decision-making”.

That, and what follows from it, is profoundly important. I ask the Minister, when she considers all of these arguments, to take that statement by the Constitution Committee into account more than anything else; it is particularly important.

I shall refer now to the optimism of people who believe that elected police commissioners will address a democratic deficit of some type. I am a strong believer in democracy and in voting generally, but there are times when you need to step back and think about whether it is the best system. The noble Lord, Lord Carlile—who is in a committee at the moment and will not hear my comments—is convinced that it is very important to have the senior officer of the police committee elected in the way described in the Bill. I say to him that one of the things that we all underestimate at times is that the British public as a whole put such great store on their constituency MP that they tend to go to their MP before they think of going to anyone else. Any ex-MP will know that despite the fact that you might say 100 times to an individual, “The local councillor can sort out your problem quicker and better than I can”, they will still go to the MP. That there are people who think that by setting up elected police committees covering large areas they will have people going to them, is a triumph of hope over experience.

The other fear I have was put clearly by my noble friend Lord Beecham and I do not need to repeat it in too much detail. There is a problem about people being elected on the basis of a fear of crime. I listened carefully to the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, but the problem with populism in an area such as crime is that it is based on fear. One of the difficulties in dealing with crime prevention is lowering the fear of crime. The greater the fear of crime, the more people retreat indoors, the more communities get cut off and the greater the risk of crime becomes. There is very strong evidence for that.

One of my objections to, particularly, the tabloid press in the 1970s and 1980s was that it played on the fear of crime to the extent that it drove the crime level up. I shall give a simple example; I shall not delay the House on it. I remember chairing a meeting in my then constituency of Shepherds Bush, with two police officers sitting alongside me, because there had been a murder at the base of a block of flats. The public meeting was very angry and the residents wanted large, 20-foot high gates erected to stop people coming in. They kept referring to three murders and I kept saying, “I know of only one murder”. I asked the police about this and they said, “No, there has been only one murder”. When I talked afterwards to the people, who were, importantly, mainly elderly, they kept referring to three murders. “There were three murders here, Mr Soley. You don’t know what you’re talking about and you’re not listening”, they said. So we went away and researched carefully the papers for the area. There had been three headlines in the paper: one when the murder was committed, one when the guy was caught and one when he was sentenced. The more I think about it, that was a classic example of the fear of crime because people had read it as, “Murder in this block of flats”, and it became three whereas in fact it was one. The fear of crime produces a higher crime level.

I will not go into this now because it is for a future debate on the Bill but I have reservations, too, about confusing crime prevention measures with policing. Police have a critical part in detecting and preventing crime but crime prevention is infinitely more than just policing. In fact, if you try to deal with crime just by dealing with the police you are unlikely to succeed. Those are my reservations about going down the election route without testing it pretty thoroughly first.

A couple of examples have been given, of Derek Hatton and the Bookbinder case. I knew about the latter, incidentally, but not its details. The noble Lord, Lord Dear, might well agree that if it was the first time we had to do it in 50 years—I think his term was “half a century”—that is a pretty impressive success ratio for a system. Any governmental system that lasts for 50 years without a major intervention of that type is one you have to look at carefully and think about copying, because you do not normally get that level of success. You do not need to look just at the Bookbinder case and Hatton examples: as the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, pointed out, Hatton was not a case but could have been. You need to look only at the recent case of Boris Johnson and the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Leaving aside whether the mayor or the commissioner was right, we should bear in mind that we appear to be creating a structure which will make such conflict much more common. Can the Minister keep that very much in mind? It is profoundly important. If we really want to see battles between an elected official and a chief constable, the danger in the Bill is that that will be a high risk.

My other point is one that the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, made carefully with her great experience of Northern Ireland. I remember from my own time dealing with Northern Ireland, both on the Front Bench in the House of Commons and as chair of the Select Committee, that the problem of policing there was extreme. That was because the divisions in the community were based on both national and religious identities, while we had a police force which primarily, and almost entirely, represented one section of the community. The method of control had been by one section of the community. I think my noble friend Lady Henig made the point that if you have large areas in mainland Britain, as opposed to the United Kingdom including Northern Ireland, there will be patches in them where the people are not similar to the whole area. You do not need to take your example from Northern Ireland; you can simply look back to London in the 1970s and 1980s.

When the riots broke out in 1981 and the Scarman report came out, Lord Scarman powerfully made the important point that racism within the police had to be tackled. Racism in the London police force at that time was very serious; we all knew that. Despite noble efforts by police at all levels to deal with it, the problem was severe. I say again to the Minister, who I am sure is in her listening mode, that if she is looking at large areas of this country she will find that some of them contain large minority populations who already feel, in some cases, that the policing does not represent them. If we are to go down the road that we are heading down with this Bill without checking it out pretty carefully first, one thing I ask of the Government is to look very carefully at how on earth they make sure that ethnic minorities in those large areas feel represented within that system. London was a classic case of the explosion of anger about policing, when a large and growing section of the community was left out.

I am the first to congratulate the police in the metropolis on all that they have done in recent years; they have worked wonders, and things are infinitely better than they were. As any senior police officer will tell you, though, there is still a problem—in other words, it is not easy to deal with. As the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, pointed out, although we have made enormous strides in this area in Northern Ireland, the idea that somehow we cracked this problem is a triumph of hope over experience.

I said that I would keep my words brief. My single message, picking up on the point made by the Select Committee on the constitution of the House of Lords as well as the points that have been made by myself and others, is that the Government are embarking down a road that has an awful lot of elephant traps in it. When policing is such an important part of our constitution, as the Constitution Committee makes out, the case for making sure that we get the detail right is profoundly important. We will come to this in a later group of amendments, but there is a case for piloting or a pause of some type.

[Lord Blair of Boughton]

My Lords, I declare an interest as the commissioner to whom the noble Lord, Lord Soley, just referred. I am afraid that I will spoil the party of the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, by saying that yes, there is someone here who was a Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and opposes the Bill in root and principle. The reason why I do so is the nature of the beast, in terms of who these police commissioners will be and how they will behave.

I support the amendment because I do not support pilots. We do not need pilots because we can see how the system works. The gentleman who has been mentioned a great deal, Bill Bratton, a good friend of mine, the greatest commissioner and probably the greatest police officer that I have ever met, was fired after 28 months, after reducing crime across the board in New York, including homicide, to limits that had never been seen before. He did that but he crossed Mayor Giuliani by appearing on the front of Time magazine, and was fired instantly. Giuliani of course appointed a man who ended up in prison later on in his undistinguished career. That, I am afraid, is how the beasts behave.

Another example of my worries about the Bill goes back to what the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, said about the protocol. Much was made about the protocol at Second Reading. I have read the protocol and it is not worth the paper that it is written on. It has no statutory basis, and when it comes to the point of hiring and firing the chief constable, there is nothing in that protocol that will stop an individual police and crime commissioner simply announcing that he has got rid of or wishes to get rid of the chief constable, or that he has no confidence in the chief constable. Once that has been announced, the chief constable is almost finished—without any help, because there is no panel there that would be able to support him.

If noble Lords do not think that British politicians would behave like that, I shall give the example—I will not name him, but your Lordships will all know him—of the Home Secretary who tried to have the chief constable of Sussex and the chief constable of Humberside fired, without the power so to do, and he did that effectively on the front pages of the national newspapers. This is for your Lordships’ House to consider: unless someone does something that puts limits around the power of these commissioners, who may well go into office with wonderful ideas and deep integrity but may also see their chances of re-election fall through the floor, and unless their power is constrained in some way, the only answer is for this House to support the amendment put forward by the noble Baroness, Lady Harris.

Crime: Media Reporting

Lord Soley Excerpts

Tuesday 8th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

My Lords, the Attorney-General will obviously take his remit extremely seriously. I do not know whether he will choose that route; the view has certainly been expressed, so I have no doubt that he will take notice of it. I can assure the House that the Attorney-General is quite clear that he needs to examine this issue seriously, because it has considerable ramifications.

[Lord Soley]

My Lords, is the Minister worried by the increasing—

[Lord Borrie]

My Lords, does the noble Baroness agree that it is usually unwise to act to change the law because some unfortunate individual has been embarrassed or irritated? Does she also agree that, in this type of case, questioning and the publication of the questioning by police often encourage potential witnesses to jog their memories and assist in the successful prosecution of somebody, not necessarily the first suspect?

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

My Lords, the police of course have guidance in writing, but the noble Lord is quite right to say that they have to interpret that guidance in light of the operational circumstances of any case. I am sure that that is what they try to do. Clearly there are tensions in the whole question of the freedom of the press, the need for the police to conduct an investigation and the rights of individuals who may be affected by that. It is that balance that we need to strike.

[Lord Soley]

All good things come to those who wait. This is a much wider problem and it needs to be faced. It is not just the trashing of people’s private lives but also the increasing use of fishing expeditions to invade people’s privacy. Is it not time that the Government said to the press that we need to discuss this in a much more serious way? It is a balance between the rights of reporting and the rights of privacy and how that is dealt with. The Government need to take the lead and maybe put it on the agenda of the next meeting in Downing Street.

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

My Lords, I think that many of your Lordships would agree with the proposition that there are wider issues involved. Indeed, there are wider categories of people involved, not simply the persons whom we have just been talking about. The Attorney-General wants to look at, first, the question of balance and, secondly, where you draw the line in relation to categories of people.

Identity Documents Bill

Lord Soley Excerpts

Tuesday 21st December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley]

To follow the noble Lord’s speech is rather pleasant, because he put more passion into it than I could hope to put into mine and because I agree with him. I had not intended to intervene, so I shall brief, but I am increasingly concerned about the way in which the procedures both on issues of this nature and in the House more generally are being changed. As my noble friend pointed out, supported by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, there is a problem about us overturning what the Commons have done. I am not saying that we should do that now, but I am becoming less clear about financial provisions. Very few issues come back to this House that do not involve some expenditure. If the rule is to be no expenditure, there will be an awful lot of things that we will be unable to pursue. That will affect all sides of this House.

I say again, as I have said on many other issues, that the Government are driving through and changing procedures, which is deeply unsatisfactory for this House. We saw it from the Front Bench today. I know that the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, is keen to help the House, but to have a Minister telling another Member of the House not to intervene when the other Minister has already accepted the intervention does not fit with the guidance that the House offers. I have my reservations about whether this really is a self-regulating House, but, if it is, one Minister should not intervene to tell a Back-Bencher to sit down and not intervene on a Minister who has already accepted the intervention. It must be wrong. For the noble Lord, Lord McNally, who is sadly not in his place, to follow that up in the way that he did was not helpful. The Government have to recognise that they are not in charge of Parliament. Parliament controls government; government should not control Parliament. We are seeing far too much of this. I support my noble friend Lord Howarth in his request to the Speakers of the two Houses to try to clarify this important issue of expenditure and finance-raising.

On the issue itself, the noble Baroness has strayed into the area of the pros and cons of ID cards. I was always unsympathetic to the idea of ID cards, but the Minister has problems coming down the line. She might want to have a word with her colleague the Minister for Health in this House, who was very helpful to me. A couple of months ago, I raised with him the situation that is developing in the health service where GPs’ surgeries are refusing to register patients unless they produce their passports as ID. They will not accept any other form of ID. By taking away the ID card, we are creating a situation where other things become an ID card. Please do not think that this issue is going away. It will be difficult.

That is another part of the noble Baroness’s problem. Frankly, what the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, said in his intervention is absolutely right. It is sheer common decency that when a Government take over and choose to reverse a policy taken by the previous Government, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, they must make sure that ordinary citizens do not lose out. That is what is wrong with this. I am afraid that it also fits in with the danger of the Government trying to run Parliament and not the other way round.

--- Later in debate ---

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, my noble friend has numerous points to answer. Let us hear what she says and whether she can convince the House to agree with another place.

[Lord Soley]

That is unacceptable because the noble Baroness gave a commitment to this House, as has been quoted. The answer to the question is a simple yes or no. If she gave that commitment and then did not deliver on it, she needs to say that. The House will not necessarily hang, draw and quarter on the issue, but we need to know the answer. If the Minister cannot answer that question, I am afraid that the Government have to answer the wider question of what they are doing in this regard, given that they are responsible for this department. If she cannot answer the question, the case for adjourning the House while she finds the answer, as the noble Lord has just suggested, or summoning the Leader of the House is very strong. We cannot have a situation whereby other Ministers keep jumping up to defend this Minister; that cannot be right. The Minister must be responsible for what she said at a previous stage and for what she is saying today. If she is not responsible for that, it is a serious matter.

Identity Documents Bill

Lord Soley Excerpts

Wednesday 17th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley]

I am listening with some puzzlement. I am not a lawyer, but the Minister has signed off this Bill as being compatible with the convention on human rights. Yet this identity document is the possession of the Government—it is a government-owned thing—and she is confiscating it without compensation. Would it not be wise to take legal advice as to whether she would face a legal challenge if she went ahead with this?

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

As I have just said, we do not believe that we are expropriating anybody of their rights. If this is challenged in the courts we will obviously defend that position.

Immigration: Detention of Children

Lord Soley Excerpts

Monday 11th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

My Lords, it is perfectly reasonable to make these arrangements. We will certainly be glad to arrange a visit to Yarl’s Wood. The number of children in detention is either zero or two. I cannot give an exact figure as it depends on whether the two children in a family who knowingly entered the country illegally yesterday are still in detention; they may have been briefly. However, the numbers are very low.

[Lord Soley]

Is it not time for both parties in the Government to admit that they made promises to the electorate on this emotive issue which they cannot keep because, if they do, they will end up taking children into care or forcefully separating them from their parents? That admission from the Government is long overdue. We all want to minimise this practice to the absolute smallest limit, but let us be realistic and not make promises which we cannot keep, as the Government have done too often on matters such as this.

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

My Lords, I do not accept that. We are going to keep this promise. We are trying to go upstream of the previous procedures for requiring families to leave by encouraging voluntary return. We are engaged in that pilot with the help of NGOs. We will, and must, honour an undertaking that we have given.