Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Debate between Aidan Burley and Lord Coaker

Monday 12th September 2011 Commons Chamber

[Vernon Coaker]

With the indulgence of the House, let me start by endorsing the comments that the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee made in welcoming the Minister back to full health. I know that the Minister has not been too well, and we missed him on the TV over the summer. In all sincerity, I am pleased that he is back and functioning well.

However, I do not intend to let my feelings of good will towards the Minister prevent me from saying that for a moment at the end of his speech it was like being in church—the “Hallelujah Chorus” was all that was needed to illustrate the promised land to which the Minister believes he is taking us. However, let us be clear about this: what we are doing is quite extraordinary. We are not just repairing a bit of damage or tweaking that the Lords have done; what the Minister is having to do—and in a way that is hugely embarrassing for the Government—is reinsert in the Bill the whole concept of police and crime commissioners. In other words, he is having to reinsert the absolutely fundamental principle of the Bill.

However, one would not have known that from what the Minister said, which was that what we are doing today is nothing more than a tidying-up exercise—a bit of tweaking that the Government have found it necessary to do to ensure that the Lords did not inadvertently cause a problem that they had not intended. However, let us be clear: the Lords absolutely wanted to create a problem for the Government on this issue. What they were saying was that, unlike the Government, they recognise that the proposal has absolutely no support in the country. The only people who support the policy are the Minister, a few of his friends, a couple of people at No. 10 Downing street, a few Back Benchers, a couple of think-tanks and the whipped masses, who we will no doubt see later.

[Mr Aidan Burley (Cannock Chase) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Vernon Coaker]

I will in a moment; I am just getting going. If the hon. Gentleman lets me, I will make a few points and then give way to him—he served on the Committee.

One of my hon. Friends asked the Minister where the evidence was that there was a demand for his proposal out there in the country. The answer was that there was none. I and many others have consistently asked the Minister to publish the results of the public consultation on “Policing in the 21st Century”, a document to which there were approximately 800 responses. We have not heard a word from a Minister about those 800 responses. I wonder why that is. I am sure that if a large number of those responses had been in favour of the proposal, the Minister would have published every one. However, he cannot do that, because we know that very few of those responses were in favour. This Government—who, we are told, are in favour of listening to the people, in this new dawn of not imposing things—say that in this instance they know best. The fact that nobody supports the proposal does not matter to the Minister.

[Mr Burley]

rose—

[Vernon Coaker]

Don’t worry; I have not forgotten the hon. Gentleman.

The same goes for councils. We have just heard about the objections of the Local Government Association and the Association of Police Authorities. The Minister’s answer to them is: “We don’t care what you say—you’re dinosaurs. You’re in the way of me reaching the promised land; you’re in the way of me reaching what I regard as the best reform. You’re people who are out of touch. You will inevitably vote against this proposal because it’s like turkeys voting for Christmas.” However, there are individuals on those local councils and police authorities—members of all parties or none—who have dedicated their lives to the service of their communities and to policing in their communities who fundamentally believe that the Government’s proposal is a bad reform. To dismiss them purely as people who do not want to vote themselves out of a job does them no service at all.

[Mr Burley]

The hon. Gentleman says that there is no support for the reform, but let me read him two quotations. The first is from the Lib Dems’ manifesto, which says on page 72 that they will

“Give local people a real say over their police force through the direct election of police authorities.”

This is the second quotation:

“only direct election, based on geographic constituencies, will deliver the strong connection to the public which is critical”.

That was the hon. Gentleman himself, in a speech in 2008. Rather than there being no support for reform, is it not true that the case for reform of police governance has been made right across the political spectrum?

[Vernon Coaker]

I hope that the hon. Gentleman was not just reading that out; he normally does better than simply reading out Whips’ documents. He will remember, as I do, that in Committee the Liberal Democrats actually voted against their own amendments—

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[Mr Burley]

I agree with nearly everything that the hon. Gentleman has just said. The point is that there is cross-party agreement on the need for reform of police authorities, but there is disagreement on the form that the new model should take.

[Vernon Coaker]

I do not think there has ever been any disagreement, either in Committee or in any of our other debates on police governance, about the need to make police authorities more visible and find ways of helping them to work more successfully in their neighbourhoods. That has never been in doubt. However, people have certain concerns relating to the introduction of direct elections—whether using the model involving a directly elected police authority, or the one involving a directly elected individual—and I will discuss those worries in due course.

The Minister has failed to provide the House with the evidence for why the Government are taking forward these reforms. He says that there is support for them, but he has failed to put any evidence for that before the House. Let us look at the detail of the Bill. Interestingly, when the Minister argues against the points that have been made on this matter, he simply says that people are wrong, and that he does not agree with them. However, we all know that there are serious issues involved that need to be addressed. He and the Liberal Democrats might have sorted out a way of getting the Bill through, but that does not negate the real concerns that were mentioned by Members on both sides in Committee and that have been mentioned again since.

The Minister says that there is no way in which a police and crime commissioner would be able to influence a chief constable or interfere with the operational independence of the police. He dismisses the politicisation argument with a sweep of his hand, but he knows that real concerns have been expressed about operational independence and politicisation. It is worth repeating some of the points that have been made. Let us imagine that, if the Bill is passed, an election will take place at some time in the distant future, perhaps on 15 November 2012 or on the first Thursday in May 2013. What are the manifesto commitments that the candidates for police and crime commissioner are going to stand on? They are not going to stand on the promise of a better counter-terrorism policy or a decent fraud policy for the pensioners of their area. What they are going to stand on is something like, “We want to see police stations kept open in our community,” or “We want to see more visible police officers going up and down our streets every single day.” That is the sort of manifesto on which police and crime commissioners will stand.

By putting these provisions back into the Bill, the Minister makes it difficult for us to believe that there will not be a conflict between someone elected on a manifesto like that and a chief constable who says, “Hang on a minute. I don’t think that is the right policing priority for this area. The right policing priority for this area is not having police in that neighbourhood. My professional judgment says that they should be placed here, and there. I am going to take some officers from their duty in that neighbourhood and put them into a domestic or sexual violence unit or a fraud unit. These will be front-line officers, but not in the sense of being visible uniformed officers on the street.”

[Vernon Coaker]

I said that I would give way to the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Mr Burley) first.

[Mr Burley]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point, but he lulls us into thinking that this is a new thing. Was not Tony Blair’s summit on knife crime when he was Prime Minister—when he called all the chief constables to No. 10 Downing street to discuss what could be done about that crime—an example of a politician quite rightly reflecting public concern over a type of crime and influencing the police to do something about it? Is that not exactly the same as the power of influence that the police and crime commissioners will have, and is it not a good thing?

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[Vernon Coaker]

Obviously, people try to influence what the police do. I have no problem with that and, of course, I sat on some of the summits that the Prime Minister called, which brought chief constables together to deal with a national issue of importance and concern. What is different is where someone is elected on a manifesto at a local level, which might contain specific commitments about what should happen in that local area. That is the fundamental difference between those circumstances and what the Bill proposes.

[Mr Burley]

Could not a local person stand on a platform of cracking down on knife crime in the local area? What is the difference between that local person saying that and a democratically elected Prime Minister doing the same at the national level?

[Vernon Coaker]

Because the person will have a specific local democratic mandate and will have been elected on certain pledges, it is different from a Prime Minister or other national politicians responding to a problem that has arisen and working with the police to try to deal with it. The context is totally different.

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[Mr Burley]

My hon. Friend makes my point for me. I would be fascinated to know whether any of the 43 police and crime commissioners elected next year will have such low visibility on their websites for people who want to contact them or complain about the police. All those points show why the introduction of police and crime commissioners is so important. They are a key element of the Government’s programme of decentralisation, where power is returned to people and communities.

I want the new commissioners to be big local figures with a powerful local mandate to drive the fight against crime and antisocial behaviour. After all, they will decide policing strategy; set the force budget and the local council tax precept; and appoint, and if necessary dismiss, the chief constable—that point has been made throughout the debate. They will do those things on behalf of the public who elected them, and who will then hold them to account at the ballot box.

A key point is that the role of commissioners will also be greater than that of the police authorities that they replace. That is the significance of the words “and crime” in their title. Police and crime commissioners will have a broad remit to ensure community safety within their budgets, and to prevent crime and tackle drugs. They will work with local authorities, community safety partnerships and local criminal justice boards, helping to bring a strategic coherence to the actions of those organisations at force level. In future, their role could be extended to other elements of the local criminal justice system, ensuring that the police and those who manage offenders operate together, working to break the cycle of crime.

In short, police and crime commissioners will be big beasts: highly visible, highly accountable and highly effective. The contrast between them and today’s police authorities could hardly be greater.

[Vernon Coaker]

Is the hon. Gentleman arguing for criminal justice commissioners? In other words, does he want locally elected people in an analogous role to that of police and crime commissioners in respect of chief constables? In my view, he does want that, but is that what he is arguing for? The House would like to be clear on whether the next stage is to have criminal justice commissioners elected by the local population.

[Mr Burley]

I am not arguing for that, but speculating how the role of commissioners could develop over time. The key point that I would make to the hon. Gentleman is this: there will be pressure on elected police and crime commissioners to do things in a different way. There will be pressure on them to be far more collaborative with other forces and other police and crime commissioners, for example, as was mentioned earlier in the debate, to drive efficiencies through procurement. There is no real reason at the moment for police forces to collaborate to purchase cars or uniforms together. They have not had that driver, yet they have had increasing budgets for 10 years. The guys who are elected next year will want to work with neighbouring forces. If I were elected as police and crime commissioner for Staffordshire next year, the first call I would make would be to the police and crime commissioner in west midlands, to ask, “Can we do things together? Could we collaborate to procure things together?” I would have a reason to want to reduce my budget so that I could spend it on delivering the pledges that I put in my manifesto, such as a pledge to get more officers on the beat.

The hon. Gentleman and I discussed Tony Blair’s knife crime summit. I was thinking through his logic after he answered my question, but I still do not understand it, so perhaps he could help. It was okay, at a national level, for an elected politician—the former Prime Minister—to hold a summit at No. 10 Downing street, inviting all the chief constables from around the country, who no doubt could have been doing other things with their time, to ask them what they were doing about knife crime, which he had identified as an issue in this country. No doubt he was coming under a lot of pressure from the public, who were contacting him and their MPs demanding that something be done, and quite rightly he called together the police forces to bang heads together and come up with a strategy to deal with knife crime.

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[Mr Burley]

I am fortunate to live in a very well- policed area. Staffordshire has an excellent chief constable. He is one of the few chief constables to come out and say that, despite his budget reductions, he will be making absolutely no cuts to the front line until 2013. We have forward looking police forces.

[Vernon Coaker]

Only to 2013?

[Mr Burley]

He has confirmed to 2013. I do not know how long the hon. Gentleman wants him to confirm.

On the point made by the hon. Member for Bradford East (Mr Ward), I would simply quote his party’s manifesto back at him. Page 72 of the Lib Dem manifesto—I do not know whether he helped to write it—stated:

“We will give local people a real say over their police force through the direct election of police authorities”.

Clearly, there is a problem. All the bodies that he named are bureaucracies. He just reeled off half a dozen bureaucratic bodies that no one has heard of, that no one knows how to contact and that do not deliver what local people want. His own party’s manifesto proposes a highly visible single individual who is accountable at the ballot box, whom people know how to contact and who is not next to the male choir on the website. How can that not be an improvement?