Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill
Lord Wasserman Excerpts(13 years ago)
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Lord Wasserman
I, too, am a great believer in non-executive directors. Having served as a non-executive director on a public company and on several private companies, I think that non-executive directors have an extremely important role to play, but their role is defined as relating to “fiduciary duty”. They are there to look after the interest of the shareholders, or owners, of the company. They understand their role, management understands their role and, where it all works extremely well, as several noble Lords have already said, we know that they appreciate that role.
However, the amendment is not about fiduciary duty but about expertise, advice and management, which are quite different. This is not about the role of a non-executive director, who is an independent director on the board who ensures that the interests of the shareholders are looked after; this is about having a team that will bring expertise, knowledge and advice to the police and crime commissioner. I think that the amendment confuses a non-executive with, as it were, a consultant or a special adviser; they are not quite the same. We ought not to think of this proposal in terms of a board of non-executives who provide independence but in terms of people who provide expertise. The amendment says that these people will advise on financial matters, staff matters and equality matters. It is important that such expertise should be available to PCCs—there is no question about that—but to suggest that these are non-executives who form a non-executive board is, it seems to me, the wrong way to go about it.
Also, we know that it will be open to any PCC to hire advisers and consultants—no doubt some will, and no doubt there will be some who will not who should—so the amendment seems to be rather a sledge-hammer taken to a nut. The amendment would require all 43 or all 41 forces, no matter how small, to have at least four non-executives. I think that the whole thing is far too prescriptive.
And yet the amendment also leaves lots of questions unanswered. For example, how often should the non-executive board meet? If we put this in the Bill, it will be quite open to a PCC never to bring the non-executives together or to bring them together once a year for a meeting lasting half an hour. The PCC would thereby fulfil the terms of the amendment, yet he would not get the advantages of having non-executives. The next thing, we know, is that we will want to set out regulations to make it clear that the PCC has to meet with them and how often he has to meet with them. What papers could the non-executives see? Could they see all papers or only those that relate to their particular subject? Could they see operational papers and all the papers that the PCC sees? Could they be briefed by the chief constable? Could they deal directly with the chief constable and with the management team, or could they only advise the PCC? Finally, how is their effectiveness to be judged? Can the PCC fire them whenever he wants to, or does he have to go back to the panel to fire them? According to this amendment, he does not. It would be a ridiculous situation if he fired them and then hired a new group, the panel approved a new group and then he disagreed with them.
There are several problems, but the main problem is that it is far too prescriptive while leaving these gaps. It smacks too much of central direction. I was thinking of the day when there will be an association of non-executive members of police authorities. They will meet regularly with ACPO at the annual conference and discuss the problems of non-executives. It will be all far too organised. There will certainly be directives out of the Home Office describing in minute detail when they should meet, how often they should meet, what records should be kept and so on.
Even worse than that, I see this as a sort of consultants’ windfall. What will happen, unless we specify that these non-executives have to be resident in the area of the particular force, is that we will have a group of high-powered, well paid, very able and experienced consultants who act as non-executive directors for five, 10 or 20 forces. They will be specialists in equality, finance or staffing. There would be nothing wrong with that; it would achieve what this amendment wants it to achieve—namely, it would bring expertise to the commissioner. It would hold his feet to the fire if he refused to make decisions or, on the other hand, tell him that he has not got all the power in the world. The noble Lord, Lord Harris, suggested that that was one of the functions. I see this very much as a windfall for consultants, and I doubt that we really want that.
While the Bill gives chief constables more freedom to manage, at the same time this amendment gives the PCC less freedom. We are saying on one hand that the chief constable can appoint his top management team and at the same time that the PCC has to have approval for his non-executive team. That seems wrong.
Finally, I think or hope that people see this Bill as strengthening the link between forces and their local communities. This amendment will in effect weaken it by bringing in experts who are not related to the community but are simply there for their expertise, their knowledge and their experience.
Lord Blair of Boughton
My Lords, I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Newton, for adding to his collection of commissioners and chairmen of police authorities. However, I want to say, having served as a chief officer of police for 15 years, that I served with the police committees that the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Lympne, reformed in order to bring in an independent group of people. The committees were transformed by that process. I know from what I have heard of the speeches of my erstwhile colleagues that all of us feel that the independence of some people around this police and crime commissioner is fundamental. I have not seen a better amendment than the one put forward by the noble Lords, Lord Harris and Lord Stevens, and I support it.
Disabled People
Lord Wasserman Excerpts(13 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Fellowes of West Stafford
My Lords, I have stood before many different audiences in my life, but few as impressive or as daunting as your Lordships. Indeed, I am every day made more aware of the wealth of knowledge and experience by which I am surrounded on every side, making me both humble to have been included in your Lordships’ company and amazed by the support that I have received since my arrival.
I must first thank my sponsors, my noble friends, Lord Northbrook and Lord Marland, my patient mentor, my noble friend Lady Seccombe, and my Whip, my noble friend Lady Rawlings, both of whom have taken so much time and care to lead me through the steps of the dance. Of course, like all of us, I am indebted to the staff who are an outstanding example in their dedication to their tasks. I must especially remember Mrs Banks, who made it her business to ensure that my introduction ran smoothly. It will always remain one of the great days of my life.
Like many Members of your Lordships’ House, I have come to you by a circuitous route, although I was, I suspect, originally destined for a less bumpy and varied journey than the one I have travelled. My upbringing was a traditional one, largely dictated by my dear father who was as straight as a ruled line and who expected, after Ampleforth and Cambridge, that I would seek my goals in the predictable arenas of diplomacy or the City. Instead, for reasons now lost to me, I opted for the hurly burly of show business, passing through drama school and the now extinct system of repertory theatre before coming to London in a comedy, “A Touch of Spring”—a chance that I was given because I was the only actor they could find who was stupid enough to fall down a staircase eight times a week.
However, my arrival in the industry was not well timed. This was the early 1970s, a period of intense political activity, and both my perceived circumstance and my unfashionable allegiance to the Tories rendered me quite wrong for the prevailing zeitgeist. Before very long, I had been told I need not even try to audition for the RSC; I was deselected from a television show, in which I had been cast, because the star would not work with a Conservative; and when I was requested by the director of a restoration revival at the National Theatre, the casting director told me herself this would not happen because my sort of actor was, “better off on the other side of the river”—in other words, in the less intellectually challenging West End. There is a kind of hopelessness when faced with this sort of thing which I would like to think none of your Lordships has encountered, but I know full well that many of you have. It is distressing because it is invariably denied and consequently almost impossible to fight.
Eventually, despairing of my chances here, in the 1980s I left for Los Angeles. Since my intention was to become a film star, I cannot pretend the move was a succès fou, my highest point being the day when I came second to replace the dwarf on “Fantasy Island”, but it was a useful adventure all the same and I came home reinvigorated to find that both the mood in the business and I, myself, had changed. I married and had in fact achieved a respectable acting career and had begun to write when Robert Altman approached me to work on a version of the country house murder mystery. This was in every sense my lucky break, and I was fortunate in being old enough, at 50, to recognise it. When “Gosford Park” was released, I won the Oscar for Best Screenplay, an experience I can heartily recommend, and it led to many opportunities for which I am most grateful.
However, my early years in the business have never left me. This is not a complaint. Indeed, I am sure that the bursting of my bubble of self-confidence was a powerful spur. Like the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass, I had to run twice as fast to stay in the same place, and it served me well. Nevertheless, I have experienced the strangeness of being disliked not for who but for what I am. It is strange, as too many of you will recognise, to be dismissed—or even just assessed—by people who do not take the trouble to know you at all. It has left me with a lasting distaste for generalisations when it comes to people. I do not just mean racist views or religious intolerance, but any opinion about a nationality or an age group, a class, or the members of a club or political party. Even in the pseudo-tribute of praising this group for its rhythm, or that one for its handling of money, there is a patronising distance, a we-they attitude that is never helpful.
Possibly no group suffers more from a sometimes benevolent but still ignorant tendency to lump them all together than disabled people. Disablement, whether severe or, as in the case of the majority, something that with proper understanding and training is perfectly compatible with a full and fulfilled life, is no guide whatever to the personality or potential of the sufferer.
I should here declare an interest. For some years, one of my hats has been as chairman of the RNIB Talking Books appeal, a cause that embraces both my enthusiasm for literacy in all its forms, as well as for the empowerment of the disabled—in this case the blind. The organisation is pleasingly non-political—or cross-political. I succeeded the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, and we both consecutively served under the benign chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Low, who has initiated this discussion, today. Above all, I am an admirer of the RNIB’s conviction that blind people should strive for autonomy. In our recording studios in Camden Town, several of the technicians are themselves blind—a living demonstration that disability need not be an embargo to an interesting career, requiring specialist knowledge and highly developed skills.
Surely this must be the guiding principle of any government support for the disabled: a permanent and funded emphasis on helping them take their place in the workforce and in the world. For this reason, and in the mildest possible maiden speech sort of way—and while I am fully aware of the need for cuts at a time when our debts have spiralled not just beyond control but almost beyond comprehension—I would yet argue, like the noble Lord, Lord Low, that, in the coming changes, the employment and support allowance in particular should be as strongly defended as is compatible with the coalition's plans.
There is a suggestion that one year's assistance to find work is to be considered enough, the period to include the 13 weeks required by the initial assessment. However, there is such a thing as a false economy and, as my late mother used to say, “sometimes it's cheaper to pay”. Just as with health spending on blind people, there is no question that money spent on sight loss, where many conditions are now curable, will always cost the country less than supporting the sufferer who could have been cured and is not. Similarly, I remind the powers that if there could be some leeway in the area of training, the resulting gainful employment of disabled candidates would save the state a fortune.
My years at the RNIB and working with other charities, not least Changing Faces, an organisation that deals with shockingly severe facial disfigurement, have convinced me that the core philosophy when dealing with all forms of disablement must be inclusion. These are the days of the big society, and that must mean concentrating on the common ground that binds us all. Above all, it means talking to disabled people in the first person, and not about them in the third.
We hear a lot on the subject of human rights, and I know that I must avoid contention, but I am confident that there is one human right at least that we would all of us, on every side, defend. That is the right to dream. Disabled people must be allowed their dreams of how they would spend their lives, as well as a reasonable chance to achieve them. If their ambitions are unlikely, so what? So were mine, and they all came to pass. However, the dreams of most of our disabled community are not unlikely; they are quite realistic, if they can only persuade our society to treat them as fully paid-up members of it.
Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill
Lord Wasserman Excerpts(13 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Wasserman
My Lords, I, too, begin by declaring an interest. I have been involved with policing for almost the whole of my working life. I cannot claim to have been at the sharp end of policing, unlike some noble Lords who spoke earlier. I have never made an arrest, I have never tackled an angry mob and I have never even walked the beat. My policing experience was gained in much safer conditions. For nearly 27 years I was a member of the Home Office, where I had responsibilities for policing policy and for the provision of national policing support services, including information technology and forensic science. After leaving the Home Office in 1995, I continued my involvement with the police in the United States, where I spent 10 years working on the other side of policing as an adviser to chiefs of police in New York, Philadelphia and a number of other American cities.
This experience has left me with the greatest respect for the professional police officer who puts his or her life on the line each day to keep us safe and free. It has also given me a tremendous sense of admiration for the management and leadership skills of our chief police officers. We are lucky in this country to have at the top of our police service a group of men and women of outstanding ability, unquestioned integrity, a high level of professionalism and a deep commitment to public service. As I shall argue, this Bill recognises the quality of our chief officers and gives them the freedom that they require to exploit their full potential as leaders and managers. I believe also that it keeps us safe from the sort of corruption dangers which other countries have faced and which some noble Lords have mentioned as one of the problems inherent in this Bill.
A number of noble Lords have argued that one of the major flaws of the Bill is that it is an attempt to copy models of policing accountability from the United States. I can assure your Lordships that that is not the case. There is no American model for the governance of local police forces. American policing is as diverse as America itself. The only thing that American police departments have in common is that they are all paid for locally and they are managed locally. The national Government takes almost no interest in local policing. For this reason, the governance arrangements for these forces, and there are some 18,000 of them—some noble Lords have mentioned 17,000 while others have quoted 19,000; no one knows because some of them are one-man bands where a single officer fulfils every role from chief constable to the constable on the beat—are all home-grown; that is, they reflect the governance of the local communities that they serve.
In New York, for example, the police chief is appointed by and reports to the mayor. In other cities, including Miami, the police chief reports to the city manager. In Los Angeles, the mayor appoints the police chief, but the chief reports to a five-person board of police commissioners, who, in turn, are appointed by the mayor. As Americans are fond of saying, “You pays your money, you takes your choice”. I cannot swear that there is not a single police force somewhere in America with governance arrangements that resemble what is proposed in this Bill, but if there is I do not know about it. Even if there were, that does not affect the fact that, as my noble friend Lord Howard of Lympne told us what seems like many hours ago, the proposal for directly elected PCCs set out in this Bill was developed to meet a particularly British policing need: the need to re-establish close links between local people and their police force.
I use the word “re-establish” advisedly when referring to these links, because our police forces grew out of our local communities and at one time could not have been closer to them. I have no doubt that many noble Lords will remember the pre-amalgamation days when there were nearly 200 local police forces and when chief constables were familiar local figures. Over the years, forces have grown larger and more dependent on central support services such as the police national computer, the police national network and other information and communications systems. They have had to give more attention to such things as serious and organised crime, illegal immigration, internet crime and terrorism, all of which can be tackled effectively only through the strong national and even international collaboration that had to be put in place.
All this has led to a steady growth in the influence of central government on local forces. Chief constables have been drawn inexorably to the Home Office for leadership, direction and funding. Inevitably, this has meant that they have had far less time to spend in their local communities. In fact, some of our best chief constables spend several days a week in London at meetings with Home Office officials and others developing new “policies and initiatives”. The police authorities set up in the 1960s to be responsible for these forces have proved too weak to overcome these pressures from Whitehall. They have had to accept the demands set centrally and sit by and watch their chief constables tick the boxes, complete the report cards and strive to meet the national targets that often bear no relationship to the crime and anti-social behaviour problems that they see all around them.
This Bill stops that trend dead in its tracks. It returns responsibility for local policing to local people. It gives responsibility for identifying and prioritising local policing needs to a local individual who understands the needs of the community and is very much part of it. Most important of all, it makes this individual directly accountable to the community, through the ballot box, for meeting those needs. Many noble Lords have said that PPCs will not know anything about policing. In my view, that is a very good thing. Their job is to identify the policing needs of their communities, not to deliver the policing services required to meet those needs. That is the job of the professional, the chief constable. In parentheses, I can say from first-hand experience that those Ministers who come into office thinking that they know all about the subject for which they now find themselves responsible are not always the most successful.
This Bill does all this without in any way affecting the complex structure of national support and crime-fighting arrangements which have been put in place over the past 50 years and which are rightly admired around the world. At the same time, the Bill significantly strengthens the management role of chief constables. It gives them the freedom to use their professional skills to manage their forces as they judge best. It treats them like proper chief executives of major organisations, which is exactly what they are. It gives them, for the first time, the power to appoint their own top management teams rather than having to make do with a team imposed by their police authorities. It also provides for them to be corporations sole, which means that the force’s civilian staff can be employed by them rather than by the police authority.
Most important, this Bill formalises a process that began when this Government took office a year ago. It frees chief constables from the bureaucratic accountability of the Home Office. It relieves them of the constant flow of guidance, advice, report cards, targets and ring-fenced grants issued by successive Ministers with the encouragement of enthusiastic officials like me, who themselves have had no direct experience of policing and whose knowledge of the local circumstances in which all this guidance and advice have to be applied is at best second-hand. In short, this Bill recognises that local policing needs can be identified only at the local level and that it is only the local chief constable who can decide how best to deliver the policing required to meet those needs. I commend it to the House in the strongest possible terms.