Police Service: New Governance Structure

Baroness Hamwee Excerpts

Thursday 1st November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, I think the noble Lord has stopped even if he has not concluded. I had in my head that the title of this debate was about challenges facing the police service. In fact, it has a rather more neutral title. Noble Lords on the Cross Benches will not have the experience that the rest of us have of a shoal of invitations arriving during July and August to speak at our party conferences about different topics. I was very struck in the case of the Liberal Democrat conference by the stakeholders who used the term “opportunities”. They were organisations dealing with victims and young people—of course, young people can also be victims. They generally sought debate on the role of police and crime commissioners in the context of the criminal justice system and the rehabilitation landscape. I take my cue from their attitude. Let us not talk down police and crime commissioners. Let us look for the opportunities.

Of course, the agendas will be set substantially by local communities. One of the challenges for police and crime commissioners will be to work up mechanisms to listen to the public, with things like effective public consultation arrangements—I stress “effective” as those of us who have been used to democracy as well as bureaucracy are used to seeing what is badged as consultation actually being information—including people who are likely to be victims of crime, and working out performance indicators. I am not a particular fan of targets but there is a place for indicators which properly reflect local priorities. There is also sharing performance data with the public.

Police and crime commissioners will have quite a lot of local autonomy, which they will need to use to the best effect. One mechanism, which I have seen to some extent in local government, may be to have what in the jargon is participatory budgeting. That uses the budgeting exercise as the basis of a debate with—again, I hate the word—stakeholders as to how the budget should best be spent and involves those who have a stake in it in working towards the decisions. The budgetary role of the commissioners will be one of the most important, even if it is not immediately one of the most obvious.

The local community includes, of course, stakeholders and partners. Most organisations will fall into both categories. Local authorities will be one of those. I think that I have referred before in this Chamber to the work undertaken in the London Borough of Sutton where, for the best part of a decade, the local authority has worked in partnership with the police—crucially, having set up a structure to deal with community safety that has a single line manager—and where multi-agency liaison has been worked on as part of the interface between the Safer Sutton Partnership board and participant agencies. It seems from all the figures, to refer back to performance indicators, to have been very successful. Other partners will be within the wide area of criminal justice.

Earlier this week, noble Lords discussed community sentencing in the context of the Crime and Courts Bill. There was much reference to restorative justice, which is to get its first legislative recognition, and to the importance of the understanding of that by the police. I heard quite a lot about that at the party conference meetings that I mentioned. The new structure, as the noble Baroness, Lady Henig, said, includes police and crime panels. I have said before that despite their limited statutory role, to which she referred, I hope they will be ambitious. They need good access to experts and to others who can assist them in their work, even if they cannot co-opt them. They also need access to both information and to face-to-face meetings with senior officers. Scrutiny is an exercise which I have always thought of as being pro-active, not simply reactive.

Big personalities have been mentioned. I have always been instinctively uncomfortable with personality politics but big personalities have the opportunity to act as leaders, and leadership, as the noble Lord, Lord Wasserman, said, is important in this new structure. There is nothing wrong in itself with an eye-catching initiative; if that is all it is, yes, but if it takes people forward then it may be a good thing. Leadership is important to bring to the local community things that may not immediately be obvious to it, although it should be. Trafficking is an obvious example.

We have heard about the NCA and the College of Policing. One has to admire the Home Secretary who, by sheer force of personality, seems to have brought these two things about. That is not to say that I am not enthusiastic about the National Crime Agency but, as she and others have said, these amount to a lot of change that is not evolutionary. I hope that we do not lose professional development in all this. The police are professionals and I want to keep that in the forefront of my own thinking.

I end by saying that having been defeated in my attempts to persuade the Government that these changes should be piloted, as we are going to see them across the country, that does not mean to say that these changes should not be evaluated and assessed. There should not be an expansion of the role of police and crime commissioner until that has been done. Changes are happening but let us make sure that they happen as well as possible.

[Lord Dear]

My Lords, I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Henig, for focusing on this timely issue just before the country—in very large numbers, we hope, but perhaps they will not be—goes to vote for its local police and crime commissioners. As a declaration of interest, I remind the House of my service for some years in the police service.

We are here to debate the challenges to the police service in the new landscape. This is not necessarily the time to debate too deeply the rights and wrongs, perceived or otherwise, of the concept of police and crime commissioners; we have done that at length in your Lordships’ House in previous months. I personally have supported the concept; I am wary of many of the pitfalls but hope that they will not present themselves. In the short time available, I want to pick up on three issues that I think will define the whole landscape of policing as the new PCCs emerge and begin to make their mark on what is certainly a fundamental change to the whole landscape of policing as we know it. I want to pick up on the lack of a five-year plan, on the National Crime Agency, which has just been mentioned by the previous speaker, and on the whole issue of professionalism.

First, a five-year plan does not exist. Unlike the Armed Forces, which have a national defence review where every five years the whole of the international landscape is scanned, against which one then tries to measure the response that our Armed Forces may well need to adopt to counter growing threats and situations, we do not have one in this area and we never have. It has been a matter of some dismay to me that we do not. Funnily enough, the PCCs, who are essentially elected on local issues, are in a strangely privileged position to be able to address this. I hope that they will not fall into the trap of parochialism. Rather, I hope that, as they almost certainly will, they body together as a grouping of 40 or so individuals nationally every so often to discuss mutual problems. I hope, when they meet as that national body, that they will reflect on the fact that no national business, no commercial concern, with 40 or more regional divisions—that is how one might well look at the police service in this instance—would ever exist without a regular scan of the distant horizon. In business they would need to look, as indeed they do, at demographic issues, socioeconomic issues, climatic issues, the international dimension and so on. There is a need for that, and if the Home Office has not done it—no Home Office under any Government whom I know of has ever done this—then there is a role for the PCCs to do it, and to help with their own local input against the broader canvas.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, said that she was not too sure that she supported the National Crime Agency, if I understood her correctly. I understand where she is coming from as there are indeed doubts about it, but I personally have long supported the concept of it. There is a power for the National Crime Agency to direct the PCCs if push comes to shove, but I hope that that is a stick that will remain in the cupboard. I look for, hope for and probably anticipate that there will be a good deal of mutual understanding between the NCA on the one side and the PCCs on the other, seeking to fit the local issues into the national landscape.

With regard to national and international crime, the national landscape is a problem, and I shall give the House an indication of how big that problem is. Recent estimates are that 30,000 individuals, grouped together in 7,500 groups, are involved in organised crime affecting the UK and its interests. Over 50% of the 7,500 groups operating in the UK are involved in drug trafficking. Last year, Serious Organised Crime Agency-led activity recovered over £450 million worth of drugs in seizures.

The National Fraud Authority indicates that organised crime group activity has resulted in £9.9 billion-worth of fraud committed against individuals in this country. Cybercrime is confidently estimated to be in the order of £27 billion. The last figure I shall weary the House with, in order to put this into a more human dimension, is that the UK Human Trafficking Centre’s assessment is that there were 2,077 adult and child trafficking victims in the UK last year.

All that will have to be played out face to face with the local issues that the PCCs will deal with. I recognise the tensions that may exist, but I indicate my support for the National Crime Agency. It has to be with us, and I hope it will work in harmony with the PCCs.

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, let me make it clear that I support the National Crime Agency.

[Lord Dear]

Finally, I turn to professionalisation in the service. We have recently received two reports from Mr Tom Winsor, who was recently appointed as Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary. Those reports, taken together, produce the most radical review of policing we have seen for at least 50 years. There has been opposition, perhaps understandable opposition, from the Police Federation, and the media interest on the days of the reports’ publication seemed to focus on compulsory fitness tests for police and little else. I support compulsory fitness tests, but there is much more in the reports than that. Mr Winsor seeks, quite rightly, and I support him in it, to sweep away outdated practices in the police service and attract the best recruits to it. His stated aim—and I ask the House to reflect on this—is to create a white-collar profession rather than a blue-collar job. I think that that is long overdue. He seeks to replace the Police Negotiating Board—the PNB—with a salary review body. That is admirable. The PNB has served its purpose very well over the years, but I believe that it is no longer fit for purpose. It needs streamlining; it needs to flatten the rank structure; and particularly, it needs to reward those who contribute massively to the police effort rather than those who are along just for the ride.

I shall touch briefly on two-tier entry. I have spoken before in your Lordships’ House on my support for a streamlined, two-tier entry system. Winsor talks of a three-tier entry system, but I shall leave that for another moment. The two-tier entry system deserves a fair wind because there is no doubt in my mind that we do not get a sufficient number of Russell group graduates coming into the police. The police are not seen as an obvious career of choice in that group. We need to recruit people at that level who have the essential character qualities of integrity, personal value sets, common sense and moral courage and who are leaders, not just managers.

There is one other issue I shall touch on: the college of policing, not the Bramshill staff college. I support it and hope it will see success in coming months and years. It is badly needed to set standards, ethics, style and purpose for the police in a way that has not altogether been clear before. It is something that one hopes will eventually grow to command status and respect like the Royal College of Nursing, the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, the Royal College of Physicians and so on. In that landscape, PCCs will have a vital role to play. They may find their role difficult at times, but I believe that they will contribute much.