Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Baroness Doocey Excerpts

Thursday 9th June 2011 Lords Chamber

I hope that the Minister, in responding, will recognise that that function of monitoring complaints and understanding what is going on will be a critical and necessary part of any body that has oversight of the police service.

[Baroness Doocey]

My Lords, I fully endorse everything my noble friend Lord Harris has just said. I just add that I find it quite extraordinary that this Bill proposes a system whereby the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police would effectively be judge, jury and executioner. It puts a huge amount of power in the hands of one person, which is bad enough without a system where there are absolutely no checks and balances of any description. The proposal is deeply flawed. It also lacks an effective framework to safeguard impartiality.

At the moment complaints against senior officers are dealt with by the Metropolitan Police Authority. There is a very good system and it is dealt with by the Professional Standards Cases Sub-Committee. If officers are unhappy with the rulings of that sub-committee, there is a very clear, very transparent appeals system to the police appeals tribunal. This amendment would restore equivalent safeguards, which I believe is absolutely essential. It would make the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime the appeals body, and I endorse again what my noble friend Lord Harris has said: that in order for that to work it is absolutely essential that the MOPC would have statutory access to information and systems where complaints are recorded. The Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime simply cannot be sitting there waiting for the Metropolitan Police Commissioner to advise it of complaints and conduct matters. It must be able to have statutory access. Without this, I do not believe that it is possible that it can discharge its functions in the Bill; namely, to ensure that chief constables have fulfilled their duty in the handling of such complaints. I believe that it is absolutely essential to put independence, transparency and impartiality back into this process.

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[Baroness Doocey]

My Lords, I have tabled Amendments 221 and 222 in this group, concerning the duty of the Home Secretary to deal with national threats by issuing a strategic policing requirement. As my noble friend Lady Hamwee has already said, the words “have regard to” in the Bill are definitely too weak and need to be changed to a firm obligation. Allowing a PCC to disregard national threats in favour of political expediency or re-election strategies is not a good idea. PCCs are directly elected. There will be political incentives for them to behave partially, particularly in the run-up to an election. Decisions based on a PCC re-election strategy will not necessarily be the best way to address major threats and public order problems.

Imagine a scenario whereby a PCC has been elected on the promise of putting significant additional police officers into an area of high crime and then, two weeks before the next election, is asked to extract those same officers in order to deal with the policing of a major demonstration in London. At best, they will be very torn between the necessity of trying to get themselves re-elected and whether they should “have regard to” sending the officers to London. It is a difficult issue that really needs to be clarified, and to become a firm obligation rather than a suggestion. Under the Bill, the PCC would be free to disregard strategic policing requirements. We cannot afford to have dealing with national threats undermined by decisions taken for reasons of political expediency.

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

My Lords, this part of the Bill is one of the most important. I speak to Amendments 229 and 230 in my name, and also in support of Amendments 221 and 222 to which I have put my name.

This issue is extremely important because, for most citizens, interaction with the police is obviously about what happens at the most local of levels. It is about what is going on at their street corner, the threat of violence in the streets, burglary and anti-social behaviour. However, people take it for granted that more serious crime is being dealt with somewhere. They take it for granted that terrorism is being dealt with somewhere. However, every part of the country must be making its contribution to that effort. If it does not, there is a real danger that terrorism or serious and organised crime cannot be dealt with effectively. There is a need for a national strategic policing requirement. The Government are quite right to place it in the Bill as they have done.

However, there is a danger in the overall governance proposals in terms of whether the same level of priority will be given under the new governance structure to what the current Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis calls the “balanced policing model”: the balance between the handling of the immediate concern of the local citizen and these national contributions to making the country safer. There is a fear—which has just been expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, and by others as well—about the extent to which a directly elected police and crime commissioner, or the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, will necessarily place the same priority on that national obligation as ideally they would. I have heard the Minister of State for Policing get extremely irate on that point. He says that he cannot imagine circumstances in which a responsible person elected to these positions will not take counterterrorism and serious and organised crime seriously. I agree. Most sensible elected politicians would of course give a very high priority to such matters. However, the reality will be, particularly in times of limited resources, that judgments and choices will be made.

I give your Lordships an example. At the moment, police services around the country are facing extremely difficult budget rounds. In those areas of the country without a counterterrorist intelligence unit, questions may well be phrased as to what the appropriate level of requirement for those areas to maintain a level of Special Branch commitment is compared to the past. Local policing bodies, whether under the current model or—even more so—under a directly elected model in the future, may well make a judgment that these issues are not currently significant in their part of the country and that they can reduce their commitment to them. That would be a perfectly sensible and, in many ways, rational judgment.

However, the reality is that even—indeed, especially—in the most rural areas of the country there have been organised terrorist training camps. It is a fact, regrettably, that one of the most difficult threats that counterterrorism now faces is the individual who chooses to radicalise themselves on the internet, is not in ready communication with groups which might otherwise be monitored, who decides to build an explosive device following a recipe obtained on the internet, and who then goes out and does something in a local town centre. There have been a number of such individuals in the past few years. Those are precisely the circumstances under which you suddenly discover that that force would have been very well placed to have retained a good, high, strong Special Branch capacity. Yet that is the sort of thing that is vulnerable at the moment. No doubt the Minister will counter that this is not actually a problem, but it is the sort of thing that should be looked at in terms of the level of budgets that have been allocated for those sorts of things.

Similarly, it may not be apparent that activities and organised crime will impact on, say, a rural village, or even some of the leafier suburbs of London. Apart from the fact that these are often precisely the areas where some of the most serious criminals decide they want to live, it is not the case that they do not impact on those areas. Indeed, we have to take into account the insidious way in which serious crime operates, whereby quality of life is diminished over quite a long period. That requires long-term investment in tackling those problems. It is not something that you can just send in a task force to handle; you have to continually work on those areas. There is a risk. There is the sort of conversation which goes, “Why should we, in this force area, maintain a kidnap unit of this capacity and quality, able to deal with these sorts of incidents? Why do we need to do this?”. The reason is that if you do not, or if you do not contribute to something that is provided on a regional or national basis, when something goes wrong it will be your citizens who are potentially vulnerable.

Yesterday, the Home Secretary produced proposals for a national crime agency. One of the central planks is the ability of the national crime agency to direct resources. This will be an interesting way forward, and it will be fascinating to watch some of the discussions which will no doubt take place with chief officers of police as to how this is to be managed and who will have operational control, and all the sorts of counterterrorism issues that have had to be resolved over the past few years. It will be an interesting and exciting set of discussions.

I have no problem with the concept in principle; all I am saying is that it will be that much harder to direct resources if, when you contact the chief constable concerned, you say, “I am sorry. I just don’t have that capacity because I decided I didn’t need that number of detectives or that number of specialist units in my force area because it is not a day-to-day priority as far as I’m concerned. I know there is a problem as this group seems to be operating across my territory but I no longer have the resources”. That is why the strategic policing requirement is so important. I do not believe that sensible police and crime commissioners or the MOPC will deliberately say, “We are going to run down these things”, but when you are faced with difficult budgetary decisions and you are facing a difficult election campaign, having more police tackling day-to-day street crime and anti-social behaviour is a very compelling argument.

In the long distant days when I was a local authority leader, I remember that whatever my personal priorities were in terms of the value of education or the big spending items, the important thing in the run-up to an election was to divert resources to street cleaning as that was the key driver on how people voted. I hesitate to say that there will be similar key drivers in the election for police and crime commissioners or the MOPC in London, but I suspect that there will be. The danger is that the strategic policing obligations will be put to one side, even if for a temporary period, in the run-up to an election. Therefore, there has to be something in the Bill which gives the strategic policing requirement real teeth and real obligations.

My specific proposal is that we should give more powers and responsibilities to Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary. I say that for two reasons. One is that I think that is the sensible way forward. It would mean that the inspectorate would look at the way in which individual forces had chosen to meet their obligations under the strategic policing requirement, and would then report no doubt to the Home Secretary but also to the elected commissioner, the PCP and anyone else involved. Certainly those parts of the report that can be made public should be made public because, if there is a failing in this area, local electorates will want make to take account of it in determining whether they should re-elect a particular individual or deciding whether it is an important issue for their locality. That should be a regular process. Given the pliability of budgets, it should be done at least once a year; otherwise, I am not sure that you will necessarily resolve the matter. That seems to me the appropriate mechanism and it is consistent with the way in which the police service operates.

The other important reason why I think this is the right way forward is that it gets the Government off the hook as regards how much they specify in the strategic policing requirement. I have heard Ministers say—vehemently in the case of the Minister of State—that they do not want to put an enormous shopping list into the strategic policing requirement. As a general principle, that is right. This is not the way to do it because people will simply follow the shopping list, if that is what they are told to do, rather than necessarily working out what is the best way to deliver their obligations under it. However, I have heard counterarguments from chief constables who say that we have to have a document. They are busily preparing volumes of material which they say should underpin the strategic policing requirement.

I propose that there should be a police-led discussion on the most effective way of meeting a strategic policing requirement. The inspectorate would have the key role in determining what it is looking for as it goes round forces to see whether the strategic policing requirement is being met. The Government would not have to specify in mind-boggling detail how many officers should patrol a regional airport, for instance—expect that in that case the airport ought to be paying for them—or specify in enormous detail the size of a force Special Branch or how many detectives it is necessary for each force to maintain so that they have the capacity to receive instructions, guidance and requests from the national crime agency or from the local counterterrorist unit. Those matters would be determined within the police service in discussions led by the inspectorate.

Unless you have this sort of mechanism, it seems to me that despite having a strategic policing requirement there will be no means of making that happen. As a consequence, there is a real danger that over time we will find that we do not have the resources that the country needs to deal with serious organised crime or terrorism.