Policing and Crime Bill

Baroness Harris of Richmond Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard - part two): House of Lords
Wednesday 26th October 2016 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Harris of Richmond]

174: Clause 46, page 68, line 7, leave out “rank of constable” and insert “ranks of constable and superintendent”

[Baroness Harris of Richmond (LD)]

My Lords, before I speak to Amendment 174 perhaps I may remind Members of the Committee of my interests around policing in the register. This amendment seeks to insert the rank of superintendent, and indeed to prescribe it, in legislation. The reason for doing so is to track around the leadership review which the College of Policing has been asked to undertake. It has been looking in part at the ranks structure but has come up against the National Police Chiefs’ Council. It cannot agree to the changes in the ranks structure within policing that the college recommends.

I understand that it had been proposed to introduce a new structure. It was to be a sort of mirror of best practice and management within both the private and public sectors, thus operational level, supervisory level, middle management, senior management and executive level. The NPCC does not rule out the possibility of moving to this model in the future but feels that policing is facing more important issues at the moment than looking at changes in the ranks. It also says that there is no compelling evidence to support them. My contention is that there most definitely is, that it is imperative to modernise the ranks structure now, and that this Bill provides the ideal opportunity to do so.

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I believe we should let the work of Chief Constable Francis Habgood continue and not constrain police leaders in how forces should be organised—which is kind of what noble Lords have been saying. Parliament will have the opportunity to examine the proposals for changes to the rank structure once the College of Policing has made its recommendations, as these will need to be set out in regulations, which will be subject to the affirmative procedure. On that basis, I hope the noble Baroness will be content to withdraw her amendment, and that noble Lords will join me in supporting the proposition that Clause 46 stand part of the Bill.

[Baroness Harris of Richmond]

I thank all noble Lords who spoke on this amendment. I thank the Minister, who gave me time earlier to put my views, and her team. I hope that the Home Office will continue to put pressure on the College of Policing to embed these reforms urgently. It cannot wait much longer just because the NPCC does not like it. Balancing the history, legal powers and organisational role of superintendents, I still feel it is important to enshrine the rank in legislation. I am disappointed by the Minister’s response, although I understand it. I will look again at what she said and may come back on Report. In the meantime, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 174 withdrawn.

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[Baroness Henig]

My Lords, I am very conscious of the lateness of the hour and I will try to be brief. I am particularly grateful for being allowed to move the amendment now because next Wednesday I have some important responsibilities; I am captaining the House of Lords bridge team against the House of Commons, and that is why I cannot be here next week. Again, I am grateful that we are able to take the amendment tonight.

I should say at the outset that I have worked alongside and observed the activities of members of the Police Federation for more than 25 years at both the local and national level. I would say that this experience has given me some expertise in Police Federation matters, but of course expertise currently is not something to boast about or perhaps even to lay claim to.

I am sure that we all know that the chief objective of the federation is to represent the interests of its members, and in my experience the Police Federation does this extremely well at both the local and the national level. Indeed, that support network is very necessary. Police officers do a difficult and often dangerous job. They need and deserve the security of knowing that the Police Federation will always be there to defend them if or when things go wrong, particularly legally, but every now and again in relation to terms of service and powers, and politically as well.

It is of course true that the Police Federation should not operate exclusively on behalf of its members. We the public need to have confidence in police officers, so it is important that members and particularly officers of the federation, in carrying out their functions, maintain high standards of conduct and of transparency. Here I have to observe that their conduct has often left something to be desired. I have myself seen at first hand evidence of bullying and of loutish behaviour. I have seen intimidation and ways of operating that manifestly do not command confidence in the integrity of federation officers. I am not alone. There can be no doubt that in recent years their collective actions and attitudes have on occasion grated on successive Governments, and they have alarmed middle England and the devoted readers of the Daily Mail. In the wake of the fiasco surrounding the clash of who said what and did what in Plebgate, the federation itself resolved to carry through a raft of root-and-branch reforms, It asked Sir David Normington to carry out an examination of the structure of the Police Federation and of its objectives. In his resulting report, Sir David proposed among other changes that in fulfilling its statutory responsibilities for the welfare and efficiency of its members, the Police Federation should,

“act in the public interest”.

The Government are taking on board this recommendation but have modified it somewhat to stipulate that the Police Federation must act to “protect the public interest”. I believe this to be a massive overreaction and a serious mistake.

This is for two principal reasons. The first is that I do not know what “protecting the public interest” means. I have served as a local magistrate for 20 years and I know the importance of having laws that are clearly worded and fully understandable to the general public. Opaque words lead to bad law. I have therefore spent some time asking a number of my legal friends, some of them in this House, what they think is meant by “the public interest”. My learned friends cannot tell me. They do not agree and there is no accepted understanding of the phrase, and indeed there is some disagreement on what it might mean. So what precisely are we asking the Police Federation to do? They and we need clarity, so I would like the Minister to spell out to me, and more importantly to the legal profession, what she believes is meant by “protecting the public interest” as it applies to the Police Federation.

My second concern is that in representing its members, which the Police Federation has a prime duty to do, it could easily be drawn into doing the opposite of protecting the public interest. There may be officers whose cases, once the evidence is heard, could undermine trust and confidence in the police and could suggest that they have behaved in ways that have not protected the public interest, either deliberately or inadvertently. Should the federation not represent such officers? It is not difficult to foresee a conflict between the federation’s duty to look after the interests of its members and the obligation to protect the public interest, however it is defined. My strong view is that the federation is first and foremost a staff association, although I accept that it is a body that needs to act in a way which commands the trust and confidence of the public. So while it certainly should maintain high standards of conduct and high levels of transparency, fear of breaching this clause about protecting the public interest should not be able to inhibit the federation from representing the interests of its members. I believe that that might well be a consequence. It sounds grand to bestow on the federation a public purpose, which some of the more grandiose officers in the federation actually rather like, but to my mind it is a hollow aspiration. It is just words that sound good but have no agreed or clear meaning. I therefore believe that the words in proposed new subsection (1A)(a) in Clause 48 should be removed. I beg to move.

[Baroness Harris of Richmond]

My Lords, in drafting this amendment, the noble Baroness, Lady Henig, and I spent many happy hours trying to determine what exactly the “public interest” is, as she has said. It can mean a whole lot of different things to different people and its interpretation is interesting in the context in which it is presented in the Bill.

As we have heard, the Police Federation has followed the recommendation—I emphasise “recommendation” —of Sir David Normington’s review into how to improve itself. It decided that it would establish an independent reference group. At Second Reading I gave your Lordships a full account of how that independent reference group, which I chaired, had been treated. After we were set up as a fully functioning group in January this year, the Police Federation decided it did not want to use us to help it realise its stated purpose of reforming. This was in spite of the membership of that group having within it people with more than 100 years’ experience of working with the police, a very senior and highly respected retired civil servant and the first woman to run a fire authority—so not all of us were politicians, to whom the present chair of the Police Federation was vehemently opposed anyway. Yet all of us were committed to helping the Police Federation improve its image. We were, effectively, sacked in May this year, having been unable to do anything meaningful to help.

I am quizzical about just where the “public interest” fits into this scenario. It is bandied about, as the noble Baroness suggested, but nobody can actually pin down what it means. Is the Police Federation in denial of its obligations to the public interest by behaving in the way it has? If so, what is the meaning of the phrase now? Will the public be pleased at how the organisation has conducted itself—in their interest—or will they be as puzzled as we were about the behaviour of the management of the Police Federation arbitrarily to interpret that interest in this particular way? The phrase needs removing from the Bill unless the Minister can convince me that it is at all meaningful. I would be grateful if she could give me some examples.

[Lord Wasserman (Con)]

My Lords, I very much welcome the amendment. It deals with an issue I raised in the Second Reading debate on the Bill in your Lordships’ House. As I said at that time, and repeat for the sake of maintaining the highest standards of conduct and transparency, I was, until a few months ago, an unpaid adviser to the Police Federation of England and Wales and had been acting in that capacity for the best part of the previous three years.

I hope that I also made clear in that debate that the line I was about to take in respect of Clause 48 had not been prompted by the Police Federation. Indeed, it was not even supported by the leadership of that organisation. That position has not changed. My views on Clause 48 and, in particular, on the four words which this amendment seeks to omit, remain as they were in July—that is, mine and mine alone. Indeed, it is a cause of some regret that not even my noble friends on the Front Bench are likely to agree with me.

I say that this is a cause of some regret because my views stem directly from my experience as an official in the Home Office—an official doing very much the same job as those who prepared the Bill. The rule in the Home Office at that time was that, when preparing legislation, every effort had to be made to avoid giving hostages to fortune, or making rods for one’s own back—or any number of similar clichés. In practice, this meant that one’s seniors and betters were constantly on the lookout for words which they could strike out of draft legislation because they were not absolutely necessary. Every word in every Bill, we were taught, could be used by clever, rapacious lawyers as a stick with which to beat the Government—or at least a stick to beat other clever and rapacious lawyers. For this reason, every word in a piece of draft legislation, particularly primary legislation, had to be justified as being absolutely necessary and not amenable to misinterpretation or exploitation for purposes other than those directly related to the main purpose of the legislation in question.

I regard the words “protect the public interest” in Clause 48, as the noble Baronesses who spoke before me said, as precisely the kind of words that are amenable to misinterpretation and exploitation. They certainly are not necessary to achieve the purposes of this particular part of the Bill. I therefore regard them as prime candidates for omission.

The same problems do not arise with the words in the other two paragraphs. I believe that it is very sensible to place a duty on the federation to maintain high standards of conduct and transparency. Everyone understands what those words mean. More importantly, I believe that they are quite sufficient by themselves to achieve the Government’s aims for the federation. In fact, they are probably more than enough.

All of us who take an interest in policing know very well why the previous Home Secretary felt moved to introduce these words into the Bill. I for one strongly supported her doing so. But the words “protect the public interest” are quite different. The federation is at bottom a staff association and its job is to represent its members. It is clearly in the public interest that it should do so effectively—that is why it was established. And it is clearly in its own interest that it should act, as Sir David Normington said, to maintain exemplary standards of conduct, integrity and professionalism and to retain public confidence.

To require the federation to act to “protect the public interest” is quite another matter. I fear that these words are tantamount to giving the federation a licence to interfere in policing matters well beyond its expertise. For example, I see the federation deciding that it is in the public interest that it should monitor and make recommendations on the type of equipment and systems which police forces purchase and deploy; on the leadership qualities of candidates for chief constable rank and other operational matters; or on issues of police governance such as the size and composition of police and crime panels.

Of course, individual members of the federation will have views on all these matters and on many more besides. But what we would be doing by including the words “support the public interest” in this Bill is to give the leaders of the federation grounds for spending their money on studying these matters and publicly advocating for changes in them. Indeed, I believe that these words would permit the federation to extend its remit almost indefinitely and to employ clever, rapacious lawyers to justify this on the grounds that it has a statutory duty to protect the public interest.

The federation has more than enough on its plate in carrying out its core mission. Placing on the federation a duty to “support the public interest” may sound good, as the noble Baroness, Lady Henig, said, but it does not pass the test of being essential to the purposes of the Bill. In fact, I believe that it falls squarely into the category of words which could come back to bite the Government in very unpleasant ways.

That is why I strongly support this amendment and urge the Minister to agree with me that omitting these four words would in no way weaken the motivation of the federation to operate in the public interest but would minimise the opportunity for it to make trouble for itself and others in due course.