Crime and Courts Bill [HL]

Baroness Harris of Richmond Excerpts

Monday 28th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Harris of Richmond]

My Lords, it is always a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Prescott. In general, I am quite happy to support this Bill, and that is not something your Lordships will have heard me say often about the Police Bills that I have debated in this House since becoming a Member 13 years ago. I will therefore restrict my comments to Part 1.

Although it is a long time ago, I must declare that for a number of years I was chair of my local police authority. Also, for some 30 years I have been and still am involved in policing issues. I was a deputy chair of the Association of Police Authorities—soon of course to be abolished—and am currently one of its vice presidents. I was also a member of the National Crime Squad Service Authority and was a member of the Police Negotiating Board, and I held other policing responsibilities within the APA. I would like to thank the APA for the really excellent work it has done over the years. I was a founding member of that organisation and we were blessed to have the professionalism and guidance of Catherine Crawford as our first CEO. She was inspirational in bringing together a rather disparate group of police authorities and she made us into a firm pillar of the tripartite arrangement. For the first time, we spoke as a united body, and we owe her and all the staff of the APA, past and present, a great debt of gratitude, as we do all the members who have worked so hard to deliver great improvements to policing in their communities. The replacement of police authorities by police and crime commissioners is something I would rather not dwell on and my views are well known. I simply did not want this Bill to pass without acknowledgement of the fine work and recognition the APA deserves as it gently vanishes into the sunset.

I have been pleased to see that a number of organisations with an interest in policing have sent briefing notes, in the main supporting Part 1. That is a good start. However, their concerns reflect some of mine. I remember that when SOCA was set up in 2006, I was exercised then by its governance, feeling that it was too narrow and lacked police authority member input. All the vast experience of members of police authorities of former regional crime squad bodies was dismissed out of hand, and we were told that the then chair was not prepared to consider any of those members as suitable to sit on the SOCA board.

That proved to be a great mistake, and was partly rectified by the current chair, Sir Ian Andrews, who recognised the need to engage with a much wider policing environment. I congratulate him and the former director of SOCA, Bill Hughes, as well as the current director, Trevor Pearce, on being much more open and helpful to both police forces and police authorities when they sought help. SOCA is a rather different animal now than it was a few years ago. As we have heard, SOCA will disappear shortly, as will the National Policing Improvement Agency, the NPIA. I cannot let this opportunity go by without saying a word or two about the really excellent work this body has also undertaken. It, too, has brought great improvements to the police service and has been managing the national infrastructure, research and analysis and review of police leadership and training. The NPIA was initially run by Peter Neyroud and more recently by the excellent Nick Gargan as chief executive with Peter Holland as chair. It would be utterly remiss of us not to thank them all for their dedicated work over the years and their determination to see their respective organisations move smoothly to the new framework of the National Crime Agency, and we do.

So it is around the governance of the new agency that I have concerns, just as I did when SOCA was introduced, not least now around the introduction of police and crime commissioners. I believe that insufficient thought has been brought to bear on exactly how this will all work in a sufficiently joined-up way. After all, as the APA and a number of your Lordships have reminded us, the PCCs are responsible for the totality of policing, and we have heard an awful lot about that this afternoon. Why not have a representative number of them embedded in the NCA, an idea I spookily share with the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey? It would be a good opportunity to link up both national and local policing delivery. Who will oversee the work of the NCA? It appears that it will simply be the Secretary of State and I cannot think that will be either practical or desirable. This was a view also shared by my noble friend Lady Anelay of St Johns when speaking to an amendment during Committee on the Serious and Organised Crime and Police Bill. She said:

“It is essential for the maintenance of the rule of law that law enforcement agencies be subject to independent oversight and that they have a measure of operational independence from the Executive. It is highly undesirable that an agency with such extensive powers in relation to information gathering, investigation and prosecution should have such a close and exclusive relationship with a single government department”.—[Official Report, 5/4/05; cols. 599-600.]

There is no board of either specialist professional or independent members as there is with both SOCA and the NPIA. Would it not be at least beneficial to have the Independent Police Complaints Commission scrutinise their work as Liberty suggests?

How will the NCA be so very different from other police forces, Customs and Excise, and immigration, which have all been subject to scrutiny in the past? The NCA will, arguably, be more responsible for a range of policing functions. This is an area which needs revisiting.

My second concern is that the Freedom of Information Act will not apply to the new NCA, as has already been referred to. The Freedom of Information Act has an extensive exemption regime ensuring that sensitive information does not have to be revealed, and I do not understand why the National Crime Agency is to be exempt. Can my noble friend enlighten me? Can he also confirm whether the officers of the NCA will have the right to strike, unlike police officers?

I have a general concern about how the present duties of SOCA and the NPIA would be apportioned—again, that has been referred to. Can my noble friend reassure me that that will be clarified very shortly? At present, SOCA has identified about 38,000 individuals as being involved in organised crime impacting on the UK. In contrast, to deal with those people, SOCA has 3,984 members of staff and, as at March 2011, the NPIA had 1,820 members of staff, although I think that that will have changed radically, as many have been made redundant. Those seem to be small numbers to deal with such important policing matters, and their merging into the NCA will need very careful management. Can I assume that TUPE regulations will apply to all staff moving over to the new agency?

Almost finally, what is going to happen to the premises that SOCA and the NPIA have, some of which, such as Harperley Hall in County Durham and the police college at Bramshill, are superb and of national importance?

Finally, I have a feeling that a great deal of this work will need to be helped by critical systems analysis, if it is all to move smoothly to the new policing landscape. I encourage my noble friend to consider the viable systems model—which I am willing to share with him and his Bill team, but with which I shall not press your Lordships’ patience this evening—which would optimise joined-up, integrated working while delivering high levels of autonomy at all levels, which is just what we need if this new era of policing is to be a success.