Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Baroness Bryan of Partick Excerpts

Lords Hansard - part two & Committee stage
Wednesday 3rd November 2021 Lords Chamber

Amendment 132B would help bring the commissioning and procurement of weapons, surveillance equipment and investigatory technology under the supervision of the Government—whom, of course, we all trust. It is important to ensure that these technologies are commissioned coherently, with proper political oversight and judgment. Ultimately, these are questions about the balance of power between the state and the population. I would like to see even greater oversight—perhaps even a Lords Select Committee should be set up to consider these issues and make recommendations. I hope that the Government will listen.

[Baroness Bryan of Partick (Lab)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 132B in the names of my noble friends Lady Chakrabarti and Lord Hain. Most of us were blissfully unaware that there was something called the National Police Air Service. We might have thought of it monitoring traffic problems and advising on detours, or perhaps tracking a getaway car through the streets. We probably thought that our local police service was undertaking this. Certainly, we would have expected such a service to have been accountable.

We were somewhat surprised to find that responsibility for commissioning this service in England and Wales is held in West Yorkshire and is becoming part of the remit of the Mayor of West Yorkshire. It was unnerving to read in the Guardian that there is to be a massive development in the role of the National Police Air Service without reference to Parliament, especially as it is considering the use of the technologies which have been described and which take us into worrying areas of policing that involve the use of drones, possibly fitted with facial recognition technology, and greatly increase the degree of public surveillance. Can the Minister say how much, if any, of the information captured will be accessible to the private company involved in its provision?

Amendment 132B aims to ensure that the commissioning of such equipment should be a matter for Parliament so as to ensure proper accountability and scrutiny. If there is one thing we should have learned from recent concerns about policing, it is that all aspects of policing should be accountable and open to public scrutiny. The antithesis of accountability is having an election every few years for a police and crime commissioner who is usually elected on the basis of a low turnout with little local understanding of that person’s role.

Can the Minister reassure the Committee about another aspect of accountability? When contracts are awarded for aspects of policing, they should be transparent and not clouded by being classified as commercially sensitive and therefore less open to public scrutiny. As other noble Lords have said, I hope that the Minister will take account of this amendment and the nature of the concerns it expresses.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

I have not engaged with the committee. The committee could invite me, but I think it spoke to Home Secretary in the past few days. Live facial recognition is the comparison of images against a watchlist, whereas heli-tele seems to be—from what the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, was describing—aerial CCTV. The two are quite different and are governed under different laws. The LFR is a comparison against a watchlist, and that is why it is different.

[Baroness Bryan of Partick (Lab)]

I wonder whether the Minister will mind me intervening. My concern was not that the police and crime commissioners were not elected, but that the one that serves West Yorkshire is elected only by West Yorkshire, yet it is commissioning work on behalf of other areas in England and Wales that properly should be done here in Parliament.