Equipment Theft (Prevention) Bill

Lord Wasserman Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 19th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wasserman (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the House for giving me this opportunity to speak in the gap. I am very keen on the Bill and would have been very sorry not to have been able to record my support for it at this early stage. I am also very grateful to my noble friend Lord Blencathra for taking on the more or less thankless task of steering it through your Lordships’ House and on to our statute books. I congratulate him on the clarity, comprehensiveness and persuasiveness—and his usual good humour—of the way he explained the Bill to us.

As I said in a recent debate on a group of amendments to the Levelling-Up and Regeneration Bill, it has long been accepted that the first responsibility of government is to keep us all safe. I went on to say that if we judge this Government and their predecessors stretching back to May 2010 by the objective standard of the crime statistics, I do not think there can be any doubt that they have carried out this vital responsibility pretty successfully.

Most people think that community safety refers mainly to safety from assault and other forms of physical harm. Of course, our main concern is to keep ourselves and our families free from physical harm; that is why our media tend to focus mainly on violence and abuse. But a safe community is much more than that. It is also a community where those who work and live in it feel that their property is safe from theft and damage. Sadly, this aspect of community safety is too often neglected by the media and, hence, too often short-changed when it comes to resources and government action.

The Bill gives us a rare chance to redress that balance—and just as its responsibility for keeping us free from physical harm is one that the Government cannot carry out entirely on their own, so is the responsibility for keeping our property safe. What I mean is that community safety in both senses requires more than an efficient and effective professional police service. It requires that all of us play an active part; and by all of us, I include businesses of all kinds which make up our national economy.

One might have thought that businesses would be prepared to do this without the need for active encouragement. I wish that this were true. But the truth is that successful companies are always on the lookout for ways of cutting costs so as to increase their profitability. They have come to recognise that product features aimed primarily at reducing crime are not the features that are most attractive to customers. On the whole, therefore, such features as immobilisers and forensic marking are seen mainly as optional extras and, as we all know from personal experience, optional extras are features that customers tend to decline when times are tough, as they have been for our farmers in recent years. That is why the Government, if they are really determined to keep communities safe, sometimes have to force the private sector to play its role in fighting crime by introducing legislation of the kind we have been considering today.

My noble friend Lord Blencathra has already explained the Bill to us. I will not say any more about it, except that, based on my long career of working with police forces both here and abroad, I strongly believe that the provisions of the Bill would make the work of our police forces much easier and more effective and, for this reason, would make the lives of those of us who live and work in our rural communities very significantly safer.

I want to make one further point: because of the close links between criminals who operate in rural areas and those who operate in our major cities, I am sure that your Lordships will see that the effects of the Bill will extend far beyond our rural communities. In short, the Bill will make us all much safer. For this reason, I enthusiastically welcome it. I urge noble Lords to give it a Second Reading and a swift passage on to our statute books.

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Lord Wasserman Excerpts

Lords Hansard - part two & Committee stage
Monday 22nd November 2021 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Wasserman]

292G: After Clause 170, insert the following new Clause—
“Recording the sex and acquired gender of alleged victims and perpetrators of crime
After section 44 of the Police Act 1996 insert—“44A Recording sex registered at birth and acquired gender (1) Police forces in England and Wales must keep a record of the sex registered at birth of each person who is—(a) the alleged victim of a crime reported to that police force, or(b) arrested for a crime by a member of that police force.(2) Police forces in England and Wales must keep a record of the acquired gender of each person with a gender recognition certificate who is—(a) the alleged victim of a crime reported to a member of that police force, or(b) arrested for a crime by a member of that police force.(3) Provision by a police force to the Secretary of State of any protected information recorded under subsection (2) above does not constitute an offence under section 22 of the Gender Recognition Act 2004.””Member’s explanatory statement
This amends the Police Act 1996 to ensure that the sex registered at birth and acquired gender, if appropriate, of anyone who is the alleged victim of a crime or who is arrested for a crime will be recorded by police.

[Lord Wasserman (Con)]

My Lords, before I say anything substantive about this amendment standing in my name and the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Morris of Yardley, Lady Grey-Thompson and Lady Ludford—who apologises for not being in her place this evening—I apologise to the House myself for having been unable for medical reasons to attend the Second Reading of this important Bill. However, I watched the debate with much interest, and was impressed by the wide range of issues raised and the very strong feelings with which many of those issues were discussed.

For me, the key point at Second Reading was made by the Minister, my noble friend Lady Williams of Trafford, who, when introducing the debate, described the Bill as having one overarching objective; namely, to keep the public safe. I have devoted almost the whole of my professional life to advancing this objective, both in this country and abroad, and it is for this reason that I enthusiastically welcome the Bill and welcome the opportunity to speak to this amendment.

If I were asked to name the most important lesson I learned from my long experience of policing, on both sides of the Atlantic, I would say that it is the importance of accurate, timely and comprehensive information in reducing crime and making communities safe. Without such information, policing and crime reduction become simply a matter of guesswork and luck. With such information, however, our police forces and those who advise and assist them can begin to understand why, when and where crimes occur, and to develop effective evidence-based plans, strategies and tactics for tackling them. In a nutshell, the more comprehensive, consistent, timely and accurate the information available to our police forces, the more effective their efforts and the safer our communities will be.

Everyone who cares about policing and public safety recognises this, and it is this concern for consistent, accurate and comprehensive national information which accounts for Section 44 of the Police Act 1996, which gives the Home Secretary the power not only to require all forces in England and Wales to collect, maintain and return information about criminal behaviour and policing but to

“specify the form in which information is to be provided.”

It is this power to specify the form of the information to be provided that makes our national collection of criminal statistics so useful, because it permits the Home Office to issue its so-called counting rules—a set of memoranda that spell out in detail what information is to be collected by individual forces. These rules, which are kept regularly up to date to reflect new crimes and other changes in legislation, ensure that our national collection of criminal information is accurate, comprehensive and timely, rather than a set of random figures that reflect the whims and preferences of individual chief constables or police and crime commissioners.

I am making something of these Home Office counting rules because I want noble Lords to appreciate that there are already in place tried and tested arrangements to collect information from the police and to ensure that these collection arrangements are easily amended in the light of practical experience on the ground. For this reason, I very much hope at this late stage of this evening’s debate to concentrate on the main proposals of the amendment and not get bogged down in discussing the modalities of how this information should be collected. These are matters of detail for practitioners to consider in the light of the general principles that Parliament lays down for them, and not really matters for primary legislation.

Let us turn, therefore, to the heart of the amendment. It aims to fill a serious gap in our national collection of criminal statistics caused by the fact that, at present, police forces are not routinely or consistently required to collect data on the sex of all alleged victims or perpetrators of crimes. As a result, practice on the collection of sex data varies across forces and, in recent years, there has been a confusion with gender and related concepts, such as gender identity, which have been compromising the accuracy of our national data relating to sex. For example, most police forces currently allow biologically male alleged perpetrators to self-identify as women, even when charged with rape, and will then record the crime as carried out by a woman.

As is obvious from this example, our present laissez-faire attitude to how sex is recorded by forces across England and Wales has important practical consequences. It deprives policymakers and police practitioners of accurate and consistent national statistical data about discrimination on the basis of sex. It thus makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to develop effective evidence-based policies for fighting these crimes, especially crimes relating to violence against women and girls—the tackling of which is one of the Government’s principal objectives and one to which they are committed by international agreement.

The amendment aims to fix this problem by amending the Police Act 1996 to require all forces to collect, for

“each person who is … the alleged victim of a crime reported to that police force, or … arrested for a crime by a member of that police force”,

at least one and in some cases two pieces of personal information. The first is the sex registered at birth of the alleged victim or arrestee, and the second is the acquired gender of that person, provided that he or she has a gender recognition certificate—known as a GRC—which legally recognises their acquired gender in the UK. I am sure some noble Lords would wish to argue that neither of these categories is appropriate in the context of the criminal justice system and that forces should collect only information on alleged victims’ or arrestees’ gender identity as he or she declares it to be. Let me deal with this argument in stages.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

I thank my noble friend Lord Wasserman and others for explaining this amendment, which relates to the recording of sex and gender by the police.

The Government do not currently stipulate how a victim’s or offender’s sex at birth or gender identity must be recorded by the police. It is an operational matter for each individual police force to decide what information to record in cases where a crime is committed, taking into account any relevant national guidance. There are no other instances across government where there is a mandatory requirement to record both a person’s sex as registered at birth as well as their acquired gender, if that is applicable. The Office for Statistics Regulation is clear that it is for each department to decide when and how it collects data, including data on both sex and gender.

We have already stated that we do not plan to require biological sex to be recorded across the criminal justice system in our response to a recent petition calling for the biological sex of violent and sexual offenders to be so recorded. The response cited the practical difficulties in recording biological sex, some of which have been cited this evening, as well as the implications for those with a gender recognition certificate as justification, the implications of which I will touch on later.

I understand that this issue has received media attention, with the media reporting that there have been cases of sexual offences committed by transgender women where these crimes, which are traditionally male crimes, have been recorded as being committed by women. The Daily Mail reported that the Home Office is working with police to develop a new procedure for officers to record the sex of criminals in order to ensure that crime statistics are more accurate.

As noted in much of this reporting, the Home Office has already started work with the National Police Chiefs’ Council to promote a standardised approach—a phrase that lots of noble Lords have used—to the recording of all protected characteristics, which is currently at an early stage. Further, the Office for Statistics Regulation has issued draft guidance for the collection of sex and gender data for public bodies. This work should bring greater accuracy and consistency of the recording of sex and gender and allow the police to understand how best to collect it. I think it is through these processes, rather than legislation, that it is appropriate to improve the accuracy of the recording of sex and gender.

There are also a number of legal concerns arising from the amendment. It is unclear why the Government would need to mandate the uniform recording of this information regarding both alleged victims and perpetrators for all offences, and how this would be considered both necessary and proportionate for operational purposes. Accordingly, it could amount to an unlawful interference in someone’s right to respect for their private and family life under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The requirement might also breach Article 14 on the basis that it amounted to discrimination where transgender individuals are concerned. It is not clear, due to the scope of the amendment, that such a requirement could be lawfully justified.

I put it to the Committee that legislating so that the police routinely record this type of data is not the solution to the problem of standardising how sex and gender are recorded. Reasonable and appropriate actions are already being taken to address this that do not carry the same potential consequences as mandating it by law. There will be more to be said on this in the coming months, as the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, said, but I hope that for now I have said enough to persuade my noble friend to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Wasserman (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend the Minister for her comments, which were thoughtful and helpful, as ever. I assure the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, that now, after midnight, I will withdraw my amendment. She need not worry about any more debate.

I recognise very much the problems of collecting this information, which is why I went out of my way to speak at some length about the Home Office counting rules. I happened to be involved with their development when I was at the Home Office. They are very much based on consultation with the National Police Chiefs’ Council, experts, think tanks, academics and so on. As I said, these rules ensure that the collection arrangements are easily amended in the light of practical experience on the ground. I have no doubt that any debate about the collection of such information will get careful consideration by the experts at the Home Office who run the counting rules, by the police, and others.

I still think that it is important to have national criminal information. One of the weaknesses of our system, as we said in an earlier debate on the Bill, is that we have 43 separate forces with 43 chief constables, each deciding how they will collect and maintain crime statistics. This is not the best way to do it. Some noble Lords will no doubt suggest a single police force, as in Scotland. That is not such a good idea, but there is another way of doing it—by Parliament setting clear rules at high level, and the experts then deciding how best to collect the information sensitively, with due respect to human rights and to people’s deepest feelings, ensuring that they take the population with them. Having said that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 292G withdrawn.

Police: Sarah Everard Vigils

Lord Wasserman Excerpts

Wednesday 17th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con) [V]]

On the noble Lord’s former point, this is obviously an equal pay matter and that process will take its path. I think that HMICFRS is the right organisation to investigate, because it is the body that we would appoint to do such work.

[Lord Wasserman (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend the Minister and her ministerial colleagues in the Home Office on giving police and crime commissioners their unequivocal support for the internal review of PCCs, the findings of which were announced earlier this week. I express my hope that the electorate across England and Wales will be encouraged by this review to turn out and vote on 6 May for their local PCC. Given that it now appears that PCCs will be with us for some time, does the Minister agree that PCCs should make it a priority to develop close working relationships with their chief constables so that the operational decisions of their chiefs on matters such as the policing of vigils and other major events are publicly supported by the local PCC on the basis that they had been fully consulted about them beforehand?

[The Lord Privy Seal (Baroness Evans of Bowes Park) (Con)]

Before the Minister responds, could I ask noble Lords to please keep their questions brief?

Equality Act 2010 (Amendment) (Disabled Access) Bill [HL]

Lord Wasserman Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 24th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wasserman (Con)]

My Lords, in July 2016, shortly after having been asked by HM the Queen to form a new Government, my right honourable friend the Prime Minister said that it was her “mission” as Prime Minister to make Britain,

“a country that works for everyone”.

She also said that the Government she led,

“will do everything we can to give you more control over your lives”.

If I were asked to propose one short Bill to give effect to the Prime Minister’s twin objectives of building a country that works for everyone and giving ordinary people more control over their own lives, I could not think of anything better than the Bill presently before your Lordships’ House. At a stroke, the Bill would give people control over a large part of their own lives, affecting some 800,000 of our fellow citizens who through no fault of their own, but simply because they are confined to wheelchairs, are unable to enjoy the full benefits of what this great country of ours has to offer.

But this Bill goes very much further than offering a better life to those who are confined to wheelchairs, a point made by my noble friend Lord Borwick and the noble Baroness, Lady Masham. If the Bill were to become law, it would also make life infinitely easier and better for many others: for those who are elderly and find it difficult and dangerous to negotiate steps, particularly in the dark or in the rain; for those with prams, pushchairs and baby buggies; and for those like me who do the weekly shopping with a shopping trolley which by the end of the expedition is usually overflowing with a heavy mixture of boxes and bags, not to mention loose fruit and veg.

Those are some of the social benefits of the Bill, but it would also have significant economic benefits. Indeed, I believe that it could be seen as primarily an economic Bill, as it would make an important contribution to achieving the Government’s newest economic objective, that of improving our nation’s productivity. This it would do in at least two ways, which I will explain. Although the digital economy has made it possible for us to shop for everything from food and drink to furniture and major electrical appliances with no more physical effort than the click of a mouse, it still requires physical effort on the part of someone for our purchases to be delivered to us. Many of these purchases arrive in packages that are bulky or heavy, or both. The easiest and quickest way to handle these packages is to use a porter’s trolley, or what I understand is correctly known as a hand truck. However, manoeuvring hand trucks upstairs, even a single six-inch step, can be tricky and dangerous; with a heavy load, it requires a good deal of brute strength. For this reason, delivery companies are less inclined to use hand trucks than they might otherwise be. As a result, two people are often employed to deliver a van load of packages when the same load could easily be delivered by one person with a hand truck. Although the Bill refers only to public buildings, it would clearly make ramps and the use of hand trucks much more common, thus making the average cost of delivering packages of all kinds, including online purchases, much cheaper as well as quicker.

When the Bill becomes law, it will make a significant contribution to achieving the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s objective of improving our national productivity. However, there is at least one other way in which ramps would contribute to improving that: by reducing the number of work days lost through injury, particularly back injury. According to the latest figures from the Health and Safety Executive, 22% of non-fatal injuries to employees are incurred when lifting or handling goods. I think we can be pretty confident that this figure will keep rising as our use of the digital economy becomes increasingly widespread; there is no doubt that ramps and hand trucks would significantly reduce the number of workplace injuries due to lifting and handling, and hence the number of working days lost each year. That is not the whole story in relation to workplace injuries. I have no doubt that a further large number of workplace injuries are attributable to employees carrying packages and failing to notice the existence of a single shallow step between the pavement and the building entrance. Sadly, the HSE figures I have seen do not identify such accidents separately, but I know from my own experience that they are common and sometimes both painful and very embarrassing. It has just occurred to me that, when one thinks about the economic benefits of the Bill, it should have been introduced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer himself, as a contribution to achieving a faster growing economy, rather than by my noble friend Lord Blencathra, as a contribution to a fairer and more compassionate society.

Finally, I support the Bill because, besides all the practical advantages I have mentioned, it has a strong moral dimension. It gives practical form to a moral teaching that goes back thousands of years to the biblical injunction that one should not place a stumbling block before the blind. If a six-inch stone or concrete step in front of a public building is not a stumbling block for someone in a wheelchair, I do not know what is. For these reasons, both temporal and spiritual, I urge the House to give the Bill a Second Reading and urge the Government to support it enthusiastically.

Brexit: UK-EU Security (EUC Report)

Lord Wasserman Excerpts

Tuesday 7th February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wasserman (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted to be the first speaker after the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, as it gives me the opportunity to be the first to congratulate her and her committee on this important report. Having had both the honour and the pleasure of serving on the Home Affairs Sub-Committee of the European Union Select Committee for two years under her chairmanship, I can attest to her skills in this capacity. She manages to pull together a diverse group of Members drawn from all parts of this House, each with firmly held views of their own, and to persuade them all to affix their signatures to a single document tackling a complex and sometimes highly politically charged topic with limited—although excellent—staff support and in a relatively short time. This in itself is quite an achievement. Even more impressively, she manages to do this gently, patiently and with good humour.

This report is a good example of a Prashar production. It is clear, concise and comprehensive. It provides your Lordships and the world beyond these walls with an extraordinarily useful supply of material on one of the most important subjects facing our country at this time. Speaking of time, however, if there is one word I would not use in describing this report, it is “timely”. For me, as a declared remainer, the report is about 12 months late. I am not saying that I believe the result of the referendum would have been different had this report appeared in December 2015, rather than December 2016. I do not think the electorate were in any mood to take notice of what the House of Lords had to say on this or any other subject, particularly on one which might call into question the benefits of “taking back our country”. But they should at least have had an opportunity to consider the matters discussed in this document and to think in a slightly more informed way about some of the possible consequences for the safety of their communities of voting to leave the European Union.

The sad truth is that most of the points made in this report about the value of EU institutions in the policing and justice field received little or no attention during the referendum campaign. How often did any of the leading figures on the remain side mention Europol or Eurojust, the EU information systems such as ECRIS, the second generation Schengen information system, Prüm and the passenger names records, or valuable EU criminal justice tools such as the European arrest warrant, the European investigation order and the European supervision order? As I said, I doubt that discussing these institutions and systems would have made a jot of difference to the outcome of the referendum. But should not the electorate have at least been aware of the role these institutions and systems play in keeping them safe, and the risks our leading policing experts believe we run in losing them?

Take Europol, for example. Should not the electorate have known that the country’s leading law enforcement professionals believe unequivocally that this organisation, headed by one of our own nationals, is a “critical priority” in keeping us safe? Or that the DPP believes that Eurojust is “essential” to the effectiveness of the Crown Prosecution Service? Or that access to the information and intelligence currently sourced through the EU’s data-sharing mechanisms is seen as,

“mission critical in protecting … the citizens of the UK”?

Or that access to the second generation Schengen information system is described, as the noble Baroness said, as “an absolute game-changer” by our National Crime Agency, which said that access to it by UK police forces,

“is essential for mainstream policing … to safeguard the welfare of people across the country”?

Or that the European Criminal Records Information System—ECRIS—which most people have never heard of, is “critical to volume policing” and that not having access to it would present,

“an ongoing risk to the UK”?

Or that the passenger name record is,

“incredibly important for the security of our border”,

that the European arrest warrant is “absolutely vital”, and that any period without it or a delay in replacing it would pose an “unacceptable risk”?

I very much regret that it took this report, available only in December 2016, long after the referendum votes were counted, to set out clearly in one place all these expert evaluations of the EU’s law enforcement and public safety arrangements and how they affect us day to day. However, there is no point looking back. What about the future? How worried should we be about the consequences for community safety of leaving the EU?

The first point is that the EU’s role in community safety, while important, is limited. As this report states in its very helpful summary, many of the EU measures the UK is now due to leave were deemed vital by the then Home Secretary in order to,

“stop foreign criminals from coming to Britain, deal with European fighters coming back from Syria, stop British criminals evading justice abroad, prevent foreign criminals evading justice by hiding here, and get foreign criminals out of our prisons”.

These are indeed major threats to the safety of our communities. But let us not forget that they are only a small part of the threats we face in our day-to-day lives, and tackling them represents only a small part of the work of our police.

It is worth remembering that 1,732 individuals—men, women and children—died on our roads in 2015 and a similar number are likely to die in traffic accidents this year and next. Let us not forget the many victims of serious domestic violence or the victims of the intolerable anti-social behaviour that blights so many of our cities, towns and villages. All these threats affect our communities each day and will continue to do so whether or not we are in the EU. Our police will still be expected to deal with them, and although Europol and Eurojust are not irrelevant to these threats, their contribution is marginal. I wanted to put that on the record. It is important not to overestimate the dangers to our community safety from leaving the EU with regard to the various institutions we shall be discussing.

However, having said that, let us get back to the EU and its contribution. On this I am generally optimistic about the future, because I share the Government’s view that we will be able to negotiate new arrangements with the 27 EU members that will be at least as good as those we have now. I believe that we will continue to participate in Europol and Eurojust and to use the various information systems which we played such a critical role in creating. I say this not because I am, on the whole, an optimist but because I accept the Government’s view, restated in their latest White Paper, Cm 9417, that:

“The safety of the UK public is the top priority for the Government”.


I note with much pleasure that the report we are debating today appears to take the same line. In paragraph 8 of its summary and conclusions, it quotes the Government’s statement in 2014 that they would,

“never put politics before the protection of the British public”.

The report states that in the committee’s view, this calculation has not changed. I very much agree.

I also believe strongly that the Governments of our 27 EU neighbours share this view. For these countries, and especially for France, Germany and Belgium after their recent experience, the safety of their citizens from international serious and organised crime and terrorism will remain such an overwhelming priority that I am sure they will ensure that Brexit does not put them at risk. Here again, I am delighted to be able to quote the support of this report:

“The UK and the EU-27 share a strong mutual interest in ensuring that there is no diminution in the level of safety and security afforded to their citizens after the UK leaves the EU”.


More importantly, I believe that our Government and the Governments of our EU neighbours understand also that serious and organised crime and terrorism cannot be tackled by national states on their own. Those who indulge in such activity do not recognise national borders, so dealing with them effectively must be approached internationally. That is why we and our EU partners developed Europol, Eurojust, the European arrest warrant and the various EU information systems. It is not in anyone’s interest, other than that of serious and organised criminals and terrorists, to damage or weaken these institutions and systems. I am sure that our policing professionals and their European colleagues will not let that happen. As the report concludes,

“there is considerable consensus among … law enforcement agencies on the … tools and capabilities they would like to see retained or adequately replaced”.

For me, this is the real reason for optimism.

Having spent most of my career working with police professionals, I have complete confidence that they will do everything they can to keep us safe. That is why I was so pleased when they spoke out so strongly when giving evidence to the committee. I believe that this is only the beginning of their engagement in this matter. Why did they not speak up earlier? I think because, like many of us, they did not believe that the British people would vote to leave. Why would they? From where the police sit, leaving the EU meant losing important weapons in the fight against crime. But now our police professionals are fully aware that the time has come to fight to preserve the institutions and systems they worked so hard to build. They are not going to walk away from this fight, police professionals never do—they run towards danger, not away from it.

Some will no doubt say, and this report gives them some justification for doing so, that this is wishful thinking. In the real world of hard political bargaining, such cross-border co-operation and new agreements are difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. Even where they are achievable, past experience has shown that forging such agreements takes a very long time, thus exposing us to dangers in the meantime. There is no doubt that experience in these matters is not encouraging; or to put it the way the report does, there are no precedents for believing that forging agreements will be easy or quick. Having served in the Home Office as an official for 27 years, I am very familiar with the arguments made based on precedents or lack of them. But I feel that anyone living today in the world of Brexit and President Trump knows that when it comes to judging the future on the basis of the past, all bets are off.

My faith is that our policing professionals and their European colleagues will come to our rescue. The police pride themselves on “getting things done”. As I said earlier, they will rise to the challenge—I am prepared to bet on it. That is why I welcomed this inquiry and welcome this report. It gave our police professionals a legitimate opportunity to speak out on issues which have hitherto been addressed mainly by politicians. I knew they would rise to this challenge and they have justified my faith in them. I am confident they will do so again.

Policing and Crime Bill

Lord Wasserman Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard - part two): House of Lords
Wednesday 26th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Harris of Richmond]

My Lords, in drafting this amendment, the noble Baroness, Lady Henig, and I spent many happy hours trying to determine what exactly the “public interest” is, as she has said. It can mean a whole lot of different things to different people and its interpretation is interesting in the context in which it is presented in the Bill.

As we have heard, the Police Federation has followed the recommendation—I emphasise “recommendation” —of Sir David Normington’s review into how to improve itself. It decided that it would establish an independent reference group. At Second Reading I gave your Lordships a full account of how that independent reference group, which I chaired, had been treated. After we were set up as a fully functioning group in January this year, the Police Federation decided it did not want to use us to help it realise its stated purpose of reforming. This was in spite of the membership of that group having within it people with more than 100 years’ experience of working with the police, a very senior and highly respected retired civil servant and the first woman to run a fire authority—so not all of us were politicians, to whom the present chair of the Police Federation was vehemently opposed anyway. Yet all of us were committed to helping the Police Federation improve its image. We were, effectively, sacked in May this year, having been unable to do anything meaningful to help.

I am quizzical about just where the “public interest” fits into this scenario. It is bandied about, as the noble Baroness suggested, but nobody can actually pin down what it means. Is the Police Federation in denial of its obligations to the public interest by behaving in the way it has? If so, what is the meaning of the phrase now? Will the public be pleased at how the organisation has conducted itself—in their interest—or will they be as puzzled as we were about the behaviour of the management of the Police Federation arbitrarily to interpret that interest in this particular way? The phrase needs removing from the Bill unless the Minister can convince me that it is at all meaningful. I would be grateful if she could give me some examples.

[Lord Wasserman (Con)]

My Lords, I very much welcome the amendment. It deals with an issue I raised in the Second Reading debate on the Bill in your Lordships’ House. As I said at that time, and repeat for the sake of maintaining the highest standards of conduct and transparency, I was, until a few months ago, an unpaid adviser to the Police Federation of England and Wales and had been acting in that capacity for the best part of the previous three years.

I hope that I also made clear in that debate that the line I was about to take in respect of Clause 48 had not been prompted by the Police Federation. Indeed, it was not even supported by the leadership of that organisation. That position has not changed. My views on Clause 48 and, in particular, on the four words which this amendment seeks to omit, remain as they were in July—that is, mine and mine alone. Indeed, it is a cause of some regret that not even my noble friends on the Front Bench are likely to agree with me.

I say that this is a cause of some regret because my views stem directly from my experience as an official in the Home Office—an official doing very much the same job as those who prepared the Bill. The rule in the Home Office at that time was that, when preparing legislation, every effort had to be made to avoid giving hostages to fortune, or making rods for one’s own back—or any number of similar clichés. In practice, this meant that one’s seniors and betters were constantly on the lookout for words which they could strike out of draft legislation because they were not absolutely necessary. Every word in every Bill, we were taught, could be used by clever, rapacious lawyers as a stick with which to beat the Government—or at least a stick to beat other clever and rapacious lawyers. For this reason, every word in a piece of draft legislation, particularly primary legislation, had to be justified as being absolutely necessary and not amenable to misinterpretation or exploitation for purposes other than those directly related to the main purpose of the legislation in question.

I regard the words “protect the public interest” in Clause 48, as the noble Baronesses who spoke before me said, as precisely the kind of words that are amenable to misinterpretation and exploitation. They certainly are not necessary to achieve the purposes of this particular part of the Bill. I therefore regard them as prime candidates for omission.

The same problems do not arise with the words in the other two paragraphs. I believe that it is very sensible to place a duty on the federation to maintain high standards of conduct and transparency. Everyone understands what those words mean. More importantly, I believe that they are quite sufficient by themselves to achieve the Government’s aims for the federation. In fact, they are probably more than enough.

All of us who take an interest in policing know very well why the previous Home Secretary felt moved to introduce these words into the Bill. I for one strongly supported her doing so. But the words “protect the public interest” are quite different. The federation is at bottom a staff association and its job is to represent its members. It is clearly in the public interest that it should do so effectively—that is why it was established. And it is clearly in its own interest that it should act, as Sir David Normington said, to maintain exemplary standards of conduct, integrity and professionalism and to retain public confidence.

To require the federation to act to “protect the public interest” is quite another matter. I fear that these words are tantamount to giving the federation a licence to interfere in policing matters well beyond its expertise. For example, I see the federation deciding that it is in the public interest that it should monitor and make recommendations on the type of equipment and systems which police forces purchase and deploy; on the leadership qualities of candidates for chief constable rank and other operational matters; or on issues of police governance such as the size and composition of police and crime panels.

Of course, individual members of the federation will have views on all these matters and on many more besides. But what we would be doing by including the words “support the public interest” in this Bill is to give the leaders of the federation grounds for spending their money on studying these matters and publicly advocating for changes in them. Indeed, I believe that these words would permit the federation to extend its remit almost indefinitely and to employ clever, rapacious lawyers to justify this on the grounds that it has a statutory duty to protect the public interest.

The federation has more than enough on its plate in carrying out its core mission. Placing on the federation a duty to “support the public interest” may sound good, as the noble Baroness, Lady Henig, said, but it does not pass the test of being essential to the purposes of the Bill. In fact, I believe that it falls squarely into the category of words which could come back to bite the Government in very unpleasant ways.

That is why I strongly support this amendment and urge the Minister to agree with me that omitting these four words would in no way weaken the motivation of the federation to operate in the public interest but would minimise the opportunity for it to make trouble for itself and others in due course.

[Lord Paddick]

My Lords, my noble friend Lady Hamwee and I have given notice of our intention to oppose the proposition that Clause 48 stand part. The reason is that all officers of the federation hold public office. They are therefore all subject to the Nolan principles—the seven principles of public life. Can the Minister explain what is to be added by the clause, over and above the Nolan principles?

Policing and Crime Bill

Lord Wasserman Excerpts

Monday 18th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wasserman (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by drawing attention to my interests in policing, as set out in the register of Members’ interests. Some of those are straightforwardly commercial; others, such as my work with the Police Federation of England and Wales, which is relevant to the Bill, are non-remunerated.

I am delighted to see that the noble Lord, Lord Bach, has been able to take time from his police and crime commissioner duties in Leicestershire to participate in this debate. The noble Lord is the first Member of your Lordships’ House to become a PCC. I wish him well and hope he will be followed by many more noble Lords in due course.

Much of the Bill before your Lordships’ House this afternoon may be seen as simply the sequel to the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011. I refer, of course, to the clauses which extend the powers of police and crime commissioners, introduced under that Act, and make a number of other useful changes to the legislation under which PCCs operate. As a strong believer in PCCs, I welcome these provisions and hope they will not be too severely mauled in Committee.

As those noble Lords who participated in the debates preceding the passage of the 2011 Act will recall, a good deal of heat was generated at the time by the proposal to replace police authorities with directly elected police and crime commissioners. Re-reading some of those debates the other day, I was struck by the vehemence with which the idea of PCCs was condemned in this House, including by members of the party which at that time was sitting on this side as a member of the coalition Government. Much water has flowed under many bridges since then.

It is fair to say that, today, the introduction of PCCs, although not yet accepted by everyone as a roaring success, is generally seen as having been a positive change in how local policing services are delivered. In particular, it is generally agreed that PCCs have brought the police much closer to the communities they serve; brought a much more holistic approach to crime reduction; encouraged innovation in operational policing and the management of police forces, with the collaboration between forces and joint working with the other emergency services, both facilitated by the provisions of this Bill, being examples of this; and encouraged much more accountability for police expenditure and better value for money.

PCCs have achieved all this while presiding over a significant fall in most types of crime across England and Wales. I say “presided” because I believe that the real credit for the reduction in crime goes not to them but to the men and women of our police forces who actually do the crime fighting. PCCs of course play a part in reducing crime, and it is a very important part. Their role is to make their police forces more efficient and effective by providing them with adequate resources, clear strategic direction and political leadership. However, the real work is done by their police officers, police staff, specials and other volunteers. It is they who deserve the real credit. These are the men and women who, as we will have seen in reports from the United States in recent days and weeks, put their lives on the line for us every day, placing themselves in harm’s way to keep us safe.

In so far as the Bill, in Part 1, makes PCCs more effective by encouraging them to work more closely with the other emergency services and gives them powers to take responsibility for the fire and rescue service in their areas, I commend it. I can see no sensible argument for preventing these services coming together to save money and serve the public better, provided, of course, that the proposal comes from the local community to the centre and not the other way round.

I commend the Bill also for its support for the National Crime Agency. The NCA is, without doubt, one of the most important achievements of my right honourable friend the Prime Minister during her period in the Home Office. In 2010, when she took charge in the Home Office, local policing in England and Wales was governed largely by bureaucrats in Whitehall, while national policing—that is, fighting serious and organised crime that crossed local boundaries—was the responsibility of local chief constables acting together in ad hoc arrangements managed by ACPO. My right honourable friend understood the absurdity of this arrangement and turned it on its head. She gave responsibility for local policing to local people and responsibility for tackling national threats to a new NCA reporting directly to her and, through her, to Parliament. The provisions in Part 9 of the Bill, although hardly earth-shaking, are welcome, because they facilitate the work of the NCA in a number of important ways and will thus make it even more effective in keeping us safe.

I also welcome the provisions in Part 2 dealing with complaints, the work of the IPCC and police discipline. In 2011, when your Lordships debated the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill, police complaints and discipline were nothing like the hot topics they are now. In those debates, one speaker after another was at pains to point out that our police forces were the best in the world, including when it came to integrity, and that any change to the arrangements for governing them was bound to make things worse. To make this point, many speakers referred to America. There, they claimed, elected mayors tolerated, if not encouraged, corrupt police chiefs in an unholy symbiotic relationship which the introduction of PCCs would encourage here.

How things have changed since those days. The Hillsborough verdict was simply the most recent of the many revelations during the past five years which have shocked us all out of our complacency about the state of police integrity. The provisions in Part 2 propose changes to the way in which the IPCC operates and the arrangements for dealing with police discipline. These changes reflect the present view that our police are no better than other professionals when it comes to integrity and the handling of complaints, and tough arrangements are needed to encourage best practice and ensure the highest standards of behaviour in public office.

I want to welcome Clause 38 in Part 3, which deals with defensive sprays, already mentioned and a key element in the police’s armoury of less-than-lethal weapons. The clause gives special constables as well as police civilian volunteers unambiguous authority to carry and deploy defensive sprays such as CS and pepper spray. Thanks to the encouragement of PCCs across the country, volunteers and special constables now play a key role in keeping their communities safe. This clause provides these public-spirited men and women with much-needed protection.

There is another short clause to which I want to draw your Lordships’ attention. This one has me a little worried. I refer to Clause 48 in Chapter 2 of Part 3, dealing with police workforce and representative institutions. As I mentioned, I have been advising the Police Federation of England and Wales for the past few years, but I make it clear that what I am about to say is not prompted by the federation; indeed, it is not even supported by the leadership of that organisation.

My concerns stem from my experience as a civil servant trying to make practical administrative sense of legislative provisions which are not always as clear as they might be. Clause 48 places a duty on the Police Federation, in fulfilling its core purpose, to act to “protect the public interest” as well as to,

“maintain high standards of conduct, and … maintain high standards of transparency”.

The core interest of the federation is set out in primary legislation—the Police Act 1919. It is to,

“consider and bring to the notice of the police authorities and the Secretary of State all matters affecting … welfare and efficiency”,

of members of the police forces of England and Wales.

The Bill does not change the purposes of the Police Federation; it simply states that, in carrying out those purposes, the federation must “protect the public interest”. That sounds simple and sensible enough. However, it is not only vague and unhelpful but potentially dangerous, as it could be used by the federation to justify an extension of its remit into matters that are more properly the responsibilities of PCCs, chief officers or the Secretary of State.

This is not the time to go into great detail about the origin of this subsection except to say that it is a recommendation of the independent panel under Sir David Normington, which the federation itself set up in 2015 to review its workings. Normington was concerned to improve the federation’s image and the confidence which the public did or, more commonly, did not have in it. His report therefore recommended:

“The Federation should adopt … a revised core purpose which reflects the Police Federation’s commitment to act in the public interest, with public accountability, alongside its accountability to its members. This should be incorporated in legislation”.

That is the origin of Clause 48.

Looking at the words in the clause, I have no problem with the requirement that the federation should act to maintain high standards of conduct and maintain high standards of transparency. But for the reasons that I have already stated, I have difficulty with the proposal that it should “protect the public interest”. The federation is, at bottom, a staff association and its job is to represent its members. It is clearly in the public interest that it should do so effectively—that is why it was established—and it is clearly in its own interests that it should act, in Normington’s words, to maintain exemplary standards of conduct, integrity and professionalism and retain public confidence. But I do not understand how the federation is to act “to protect the public interest”. This may seem a trivial point and I do not want to say any more about it today, but the wording of this subsection would benefit from further consideration. Perhaps my noble and learned friend the Minister can help me, either when he replies to this debate or at a later stage in consideration of the Bill.

I have spoken so far about provisions that are set out in this Bill. I shall now speak briefly about a provision that is conspicuous by its absence—a provision to give electors a power of recall for PCCs who are clearly failing to perform their duties adequately. This failure to perform may be due to any number of reasons—personal or even medical. The bottom line, however, is that the electorate should not have to wait for up to five years to put things right. I appreciate that this is tricky territory which would need very careful drafting. I know that a power of recall was considered when the idea of PCCs was first being developed, but was rejected because it was felt that it would not command sufficient parliamentary support, particularly in another place. This is something that will need to be considered at some time in the future, whether at a later stage of our consideration of this Bill or in the next policing Bill, which I am sure will not be very long in coming. Having said that, I welcome the Bill.

Violence Against Women

Lord Wasserman Excerpts

Wednesday 25th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

Yes. In fact, I probably recommended the meeting and I am very happy to sit in on it. We have appointed, for the first time, a Minister for Preventing Abuse and Exploitation, Karen Bradley, in the Home Office. She takes a lead in this area, and I am sure that discussions between those Ministers will be very important. It is very important that we all work together. The key element of the Act passed by the Welsh Assembly was to provide for a strategy. We have that in England and Wales in the cross-government strategy, but we can all learn from each other. It is a very important area and we need to do more.

[Lord Wasserman (Con)]

Experience in Spain, Portugal and elsewhere has shown clearly that electronic monitoring or tagging in the context of domestic violence is an effective way of keeping victims of domestic violence alive and safe. As my noble friend will know, several police forces in this country—Hertfordshire, Northumbria and Cheshire—have purchased electronic monitoring equipment but they cannot use it unless the offender agrees. When will the Government amend the present law relating to the use of that technology so that tags can be fitted to domestic violence offenders with the authority of the courts, even if offenders are not minded to wear them?

[Lord Bates]

My noble friend makes a very good point. We have introduced domestic violence protection orders—2,500 have been issued—which have had a positive effect in enabling people to have protection. Often, the victim of domestic violence is the one who is forced to flee their home, whereas it should be the perpetrator who is excluded from the home. That use of technology would seem very worth while. I am certainly happy to follow that up with my noble friend afterwards.

Police: Report of the Committee on Standards in Public Life

Lord Wasserman Excerpts

Monday 23rd November 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Wasserman (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, wish to thank the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, for initiating this debate. The noble Earl has had a long interest in policing generally and in the integrity and accountability of police leaders in particular. It is no surprise, therefore, that he has pressed for a debate on this important report on his specialist subject. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Bew, and his committee on having decided to turn their attention to policing and on producing a report on this subject which is substantial, not only in size but in content.

Police leadership, ethics and accountability have been very much in the news in recent years. Hillsborough and the Stephen Lawrence case continue to attract attention, although the events to which they refer occurred decades ago. Moreover, those issues show no sign of going away. As recently as last Saturday morning, the media were full of stories about the leadership of the Metropolitan Police having to apologise publicly for the behaviour of undercover officers who had “violated the human rights” of women with whom they had had relationships in circumstances which the Met had to admit were a blatant “abuse of police power”.

So it is not surprising that the Committee on Standards in Public Life, whose mission is to advise the Prime Minister on ethical standards across the whole of public life and to monitor and report on issues relating to the standards of conduct of all public officeholders, should have decided that the time had come to turn its attention to policing. The only surprise about that decision is that it took it so long to get around to it. The committee was established more than 20 years ago and this is its 15th report. I should have thought, given the critical importance of honesty, integrity, openness and impartiality in policing, and the public’s concern about how far the police actually incorporate these values in their day-to-day activity, that the committee would have put the police several places higher on its priority list for review. Be that as it may, I am delighted that the committee finally focused on this important public service and I join other noble Lords in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Bew, and his committee.

At the end of what appears to have been a very thorough and comprehensive review of the leadership, ethics and accountability arrangements in our 43 local police forces, the committee came up with 20 main recommendations, several divided into sub-recommendations. There is not nearly enough time in this very short debate to deal with all or even most of these recommendations. All I intend to say is that while I support most of them, there are a few which I feel are a bit too prescriptive and others where I feel that the committee has not been prescriptive enough and has taken the easy way out by passing the buck to the Home Office to put things right.

For example, chapter 5, where the committee discusses the accessibility to the public of information about the performance of their police force, says:

“The public needs to access information to scrutinise the performance of their local police force and to hold the PCC to account”.

Who could possible object to this statement of the obvious? However, when it comes to recommending how this openness should be encouraged and monitored, the committee makes no proposals of its own but simply endorses the recommendation of the National Audit Office that the Home Office should report on how it plans to increase data availability and accessibility to help the public hold PCCs to account. I found this rather disappointing, to say the least.

Sadly, it is not the only case in which the committee deals with a difficult issue by handing it off to the Home Secretary for action. I would not have bothered to highlight this aspect of the committee’s recommendations if I did not think that it reflected what I regard as an important misunderstanding about the way local policing is presently organised. In short, I feel that the committee, by putting forward recommendations of this kind, has either not understood, or perhaps not quite accepted, the world of local policing as it is following the coming into force of the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011—that is, the world of local policing post the introduction of PCCs. In this world, whether we like it or not—I know that many noble Lords do not like it at all—it is the responsibility of PCCs, among other things, to provide adequate information about the performance of their forces and it is up to the public, either through the ballot box or through community groups or specialist organisations such as CoPaCC, mentioned in the report, to ensure that they do.

Even the National Audit Office recognises this. In the third paragraph of this report’s admirable executive summary, the committee quotes with approval the NAO’s statement that the present model of local policing is one of “democratic accountability” in which,

“the public will have elected Police and Crime Commissioners and will be holding them to account for how policing is delivered through their force”.

It could not be clearer, so I do not for a moment believe that the Home Office has no role to play in local policing—far from it. I believe strongly that the Home Office has a vital role to play in local policing, for example, by ensuring that the laws on our statute books reflect the evolution of criminal behaviour; by establishing and maintaining strong national policing agencies to tackle crimes such as human trafficking, cybercrime and economic crime, which cannot be tackled effectively locally; and, of course, by arguing the case for local policing when public expenditure totals come to be distributed between competing public services. But when it comes to most of the issues discussed in this report, the buck must stop with the people directly elected to deliver policing services to their communities. They have the power; they must be held accountable for using it.

Devolution of power to local level does not always work as we would like it to. It is always easier to blame central government for everything that goes wrong locally. But giving local communities responsibility for the professional men and women employed to meet their policing needs must be right. We must give it time to work.

Police and Crime Commissioners

Lord Wasserman Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

I have to be careful about passing judgment on anybody’s fitness. I was aware that the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police had called for an increase in the rigour of the fitness test for police officers, and I am sure that will be taken notice of.

[Lord Wasserman (Con)]

My Lords—

[Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall (Lab)]

My Lords—