Police: Expenditure Cuts

Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton Excerpts

Tuesday 15th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we all face a structural problem that the media and many of the public want higher quality public services and lower taxes. The call from the Labour Party for cuts in VAT, rather than to talk about how we pay for what we need in maintaining public services, is a good example of that.

[Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton]

My Lords, would the Minister care to answer the specific question about money being spent on implementing a policy which to my knowledge his party never voted for—single police chief commissioners? I declare my interest as having served for 20 years as a member of a police authority. Responsible chief constables are saying that to achieve savings of the magnitude needed, even if we accepted that they should be made, requires lead-in time. Rather than have these phoney elections, which will have to be backed up by panels to represent the whole community in the police authority, as the Government have accepted, would it not be better to spend the money on that? I have not met a single senior police officer whose priorities would be different from mine.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I am deeply surprised that the noble Baroness was not aware of the 2006 Liberal Democrat party paper on public service reform, which did indeed raise the question of directly elected police commissioners, so it is not entirely new to our party. I understand that the Labour Party is proposing instead that one should have directly elected chairs of police authorities. I cannot quite get my head around how different that is from what we are proposing.