Crime and Policing

Debate between Alan Johnson and Caroline Flint

Wednesday 8th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Alan Johnson]

This is a very different issue from that of elected mayors, because they have a broad remit. We introduced elected mayors, and we agree that the Mayor of London should chair the police authority. The trouble is that he finds doing that too hard, so he has stepped down and his unelected deputy is now chairing it. We agree with the Mayor chairing it, however; that is very important.

To answer the hon. Gentleman’s question, I believe, as do many other Members on both sides of the House, that the narrower a post’s remit, the more difficult is the argument that we should elect someone to the post by individual ballot, which I presume is why the Government are not suggesting electing the local leader of the health service or the local chair of an education authority. This is a fundamental argument. If there is a broad remit, part of which is policing, election is fine, but if someone is being elected to a post that addresses only one narrow remit, then I think it is wrong. I have serious concerns about this, and the Flanagan consultation showed that they were widely shared.

[Caroline Flint (Don Valley) (Lab)]

Does my right hon. Friend share my concern that one of the problems with having elected police commissioners—or whatever they are going to be called—is that policing organised and serious crime, which we do not necessarily hear about on our doorsteps but which reaches into our communities, will get deprioritised and will not be attended to as seriously as it should be?

[Alan Johnson]

I think that is absolutely right, and on this there is no difference between the Front Benchers. The Government refer in their White Paper to the “golden thread” of connectivity. That is a very important point; indeed, Sir Paul Stephenson made it in a recent speech. It is more and more the case that police forces have to co-operate across borders to tackle terrorism, cybercrime and serious organised crime.

Several generations of police reformers in the USA have regarded the British model of insulation from political control as a solution to their problems of corruption and partisanship. They also consider that the fact that America has literally hundreds of police forces makes their job really difficult. The point is that they cannot go back—once this kind of measure is introduced, that is it; there is no return. I therefore think the Government are being extremely foolish in going down this route. They suggest that there will be no political interference and that the commissioner’s powers will be little different from those invested in a police authority now, which begs this question: what is this upheaval for?

The Government say there is the problem of the invisibility of police authorities and we agree, as do the APA and the LGA. That is why so much effort is going into addressing that invisibility issue without jeopardising either the effectiveness of the really good people involved, who have served their communities well, or the crucial principle of the operational independence of chief constables.

I think there is a better solution and I offer it to the Government in a spirit of political generosity. If the Government are wedded to some measure of direct accountability, I believe a solution might be direct elections for the chair of a police authority while leaving police authorities in place and certainly not causing this huge upheaval—[Interruption.] I am sorry, but I did not catch the sedentary comment of the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice; if he wants to intervene he can. I think that such elections would be a far better way forward and that the Government should seriously consider that alternative. Instead of the eight-week consultation period, the Government should opt for 12 weeks at least so that these issues can be properly debated. I also believe that if they decide to plough ahead with this they should at the very least give the local population a chance to decide in a referendum whether it wants to maintain the current system or move to a single directly elected commissioner.

On police powers, I say in the same spirit of political generosity that the Government should maintain the DNA legislation, which they supported in the pre-election wash-up, until 2012 when the database will have been in operation for six years. At that point there should be a review of the actual evidence, instead of us just having the projections that inform both our model of six years and the random guess plucked out of the air, which is how Scotland came up with the three year option. Then we can decide properly on the relative merits of the two models. Otherwise we are going to wipe all the DNA information from the database after three years and find out after six years that it is irrefutable that we needed to maintain that information for that length of time to catch murderers and rapists.

The Government should also not reduce the number of public-space CCTVs. I do not wish to interfere with the CCTVs outside Mrs Smith’s house at 42 Acacia avenue. We do not need to reduce CCTV coverage in public spaces.

On the most important issue—on police funding—the Home Secretary has to fight her corner to ensure that policing and security are prioritised in the comprehensive spending review and that cuts in the police budgets do not exceed 12%. As this Government’s honeymoon period draws to a close, they are vulnerable on many issues, none more so than crime and security, where the issue is not about political vulnerability; it is about the vulnerability of our citizens as they seek to go about their daily lives. Despite the successes of the past 15 years, from Howard to Johnson, the battle against crime and disorder has to be stepped up, not scaled back. I warn this House and Members on the Government Benches that the Government are taking the wrong approach and that by refusing to listen and consult they demonstrate not their commitment to civil liberties, but their failure to protect the most important civil liberty of all: the right to be safe from crime and disorder.