Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

David Ruffley Excerpts

Monday 12th September 2011 Commons Chamber

[Vernon Coaker]

On behalf of the shadow Home Secretary, myself, and all Members of the House, may I wish Mr Hogan-Howe well in his new role as commissioner and in the important job of work that he will have to do?

The issue of the politicisation of operational independence is important, but Members have also referred to the huge problems that will be caused by having one police and crime commissioner to represent such a large number of areas and communities. Despite that, the Government are reinserting the proposal in the Bill with no indication of how they expect such problems to be overcome. We have heard from Devon and Cornwall, and Avon and Somerset, about this issue of size, yet the Minister just says that it will not be a problem. We also learn from the Minister that he believes that the Bill contains proper checks and balances and that, therefore, the reinstatement of the provision is not a problem. However, he fails to point out to Members that the police and crime panel has only two powers. One—to be fair to the Government, they have amended the majority that is required from three quarters to two thirds—is the veto over the appointment of the chief constable, and the other is the veto over the precept. That is it. The police and crime panel has no other power. The policing Minister wants us to disagree with the Lords amendments on the basis of his assertion that the Bill contains proper checks and balances, but I say to him that the police and crime panel has only two real powers to hold the police and crime commissioner to account.

[Mr David Ruffley (Bury St Edmunds) (Con)]

Is not the hon. Gentleman doing a disservice to the future police and crime panels? They will doubtless be composed of notable members of the community, perhaps with expertise in crime and the justice system, and they will have an incredible platform from which to address the local media and engage in a debate on local television and radio. I envisage that kind of check and balance on a potentially wayward police and crime commissioner coming from the panels. So they will not have just two powers; they will probably have three, the third being the power of voice.

--- Later in debate ---

[Vernon Coaker]

I agree with my hon. Friend about the logic of the Government arriving at the date of 15 November. In speaking to the amendment in question, the Minister in effect just said, “We’re changing the date,” in what amounted to not much more than a shrug-of-the-shoulders argument. The House deserved more than that, because many people say that if we are going to delay this, it is much more sensible to delay until May 2013. Why has this date been chosen? Why is it so special? What discussions have taken place with the Liberals?

There has been much debate about the cost of the elections. How has the figure of £25 million been arrived at? The Government have accepted the sum of £50 million, and £25 million is now to be added to that. As shown by Channel 4’s “FactCheck”, there is now a debate. We have also seen that a referendum that was held on the same day as other elections cost £89 million. Admittedly, that did not include Scotland, and this arrangement is just for England and Wales.

Again, there is no proper explanation, and that fault runs all the way through the Bill. Most of the time the Minister relies on assertion and saying, “This is the right thing to do,” or, “I don’t agree with what other people say.” Very little evidence is given, and there is seldom any resort to any studies that might have been done. Instead, there is just an assertion of what the Minister thinks is the right thing to do.

I shall conclude, as I know that many Members wish to speak—and I see that you are getting a bit restless as well, Mr Deputy Speaker. The Government have offered no real argument as to why these measures should be put back into the Bill, and they have no real answers to the questions that were raised throughout the Committee’s proceedings. They have offered no real argument as to why they think this delay is right, nor have they made any real assessment of the costs involved. They have offered no real argument as to why everyone else is wrong and they are right.

Even at this late stage, the Minister pretends to us that another little tidying-up exercise is needed. The change in respect of the financial code of practice is presented as merely a technical amendment, yet one of the key demands made in the Lords was that a code of practice was necessary in respect of the police and crime commissioners. However, apart from a few sentences of assertion from the Minister, we have no real idea even at this late stage about this financial code of practice, which will govern the way the police and crime commissioners operate. The Government have therefore not just produced another tweaking amendment, but have had to bring forward a major change. That is why we tabled our amendment about the importance of this change to chief constables. The Minister again just dismissed this, but perhaps he would agree with those who say, “Why shouldn’t the chief constable have some real say about what should be included in that financial code of practice and about the impact of police grant cuts on officer numbers?”

This is the wrong reform at the wrong time. If we were to ask people whether they would set as a higher priority this Government spending more than £100 million on the ideological experiment of police and crime commissioners or instead spending that money on police officers on the street, I think almost everyone in the country would say, “Let’s have police officers on the street and not spend £100 million on elections that nobody wants.”

[Mr Ruffley]

I support the Government amendments, and would like to favour the House with some recollections from the two and a half years before the last general election when I did the job that the hon. Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) does. In the course of my shadow duties, I had occasion to speak to a great number of police authorities, crime reduction partnerships and voters and I came to the following conclusion: while police authority members believed for wholly honourable motives that the proposed step was retrograde and potentially dangerous, I could find very little antagonism and opposition to the idea of elected police and crime commissioners—and I challenge the Opposition to produce evidence that that idea is unpopular with the British public.

If we rely on MORI—I do not see why we should not rely on it—we know the following about British public opinion. Over the past five or six years, it has regularly produced findings that demonstrate that police authorities, as vehicles for making the police accountable to the public they serve in any locality, are invisible. That is not a term of abuse. Some of my best friends are members of police authorities, and they take umbrage when it is suggested that they do not do a good job. Many of them do a good job, but the fact remains that they are invisible to the public.

The main thrust behind this proposal is to have a single focal point of accountability, much in the way that the disparate things that used to happen under the Greater London council and all the other bodies associated with the running and governance of London were brought together in the shape of a directly elected Mayor. By and large, that has been a very popular programme of government and a very good idea. Having a single focal point of accountability focuses people’s minds, as the public know that if something is going wrong in policing, there is one man or woman to whom they can go to find out whether it can be fixed and when it will be fixed.

[Vernon Coaker]

I acknowledge the experience that the hon. Gentleman brings to these debates from his former shadow policing role. He challenged me to produce evidence of where this approach was not wanted, so may I refer him to the Liberty polling evidence produced a few months ago? I cannot remember the exact month when this was produced, but when people were asked who they would trust more to protect their family from crime, 65% said:

“A Chief Constable reporting to a Police Authority, as now”.

Some 15% said that they would prefer:

“A Chief Constable reporting to an individual politician elected as a Police and Crime Commissioner”.

There is some evidence for him.

[Mr Ruffley]

I will not take issue with the skewed nature of the wording—“politician” is often a dirty word. I have no knowledge of the survey, but what many of the respondents would probably not understand is that the majority of those serving on a 17-person police authority are politicians—nine of them will be indirectly elected council members. So a clear political element is already involved, which brings me on to my next point.

[Steve McCabe]

It is true that the members of police authorities are indirectly elected and are party people. However, is not the difference that most of the commissioners will owe their allegiance directly to the political party that maintains the machine that gets them into power? They will have two obligations—not only to the electorate, but to the political machine—and so they will be party political commissioners.

[Mr Ruffley]

The hon. Gentleman makes the reasonable point that these people will fly under party colours. However, when getting elected as Members of Parliament for our constituencies we all fly under a party label and rely on a smooth-running local party machine—that is what we hope it is—to get us elected, and yet once elected our duty is to serve all our constituents without fear or favour. I know that he is a diligent constituency man, as I hope I am. I take up the issues and concerns raised by each individual who comes to see me in my advice centre, regardless of race, creed, colour, faith, party political persuasion and even whether they are nice to me or rude to me. All of us take that view, because it is in the nature of the office we hold. I would be very disappointed if a police commissioner, elected at the ballot box, as we hope will be the case a year this coming November, did not take that same view.

[Steve McCabe]

I have no doubt that the hon. Gentleman is an extremely diligent MP who does not judge the people who come to his advice centre. The difference is that when a member of the public approaches him they know perfectly well that he is a Tory MP—I do not say that in any disparaging sense, because they would identify me as a Labour MP—but when they approach a member of the police they expect that person to be a politically neutral member of the police. People would not expect such a person to be the Tory or Labour police commissioner, and that is surely the distinction here.

[Mr Ruffley]

There is a difference here, because we are not talking about having police officers—actual law enforcement officers—being party political, and neither is the hon. Gentleman. The commissioner will represent a mode of accountability—on behalf of the public, who will have voted for him or her, and will be able to hold the chief constable to account in a more focused and single-minded way. They will do the job that the police authority attempts to do at the moment. We believe that it can be done better by one individual.

I wish to deal with the issue of politicisation and the democratic mandate. In the last Parliament, the Labour party and my party came to pretty similar conclusions about the accountability arrangements—the answerability arrangements—that currently pertain, as did our colleagues on the Liberal Democrat Benches; we came to the conclusion that those arrangements were not adequate and that there was a democratic deficit. We know that because of what was said by the hon. Member for Gedling, and although that has already been cited by my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Mr Burley), I wish to reinforce the point. In 2008, the then Labour Government’s draft legislative programme announced that there would be a Bill including proposals to provide

“a clear and powerful public voice in decision making through directly elected representatives”.

I understand that in the Committee stages of this Bill there were mild flirtations by Labour Members with various forms of direct election, and I think it is entirely proper for the Labour party to change its mind. I understand that the shadow Home Secretary now wants to ditch the whole idea of elections. However, let us just be non-partisan for a moment and accept that in the previous Parliament all three major political parties concluded that there was an argument for having a sharper, keener focus of responsibility. That involves letting the people or person holding the chief constable to account have a mandate from the public, arising from a direct election, on the basis of one person, one vote, in the police authority area over which a police and crime commissioner would preside. There is something incredibly important about a mandate being secured in that way, as both Labour and the Liberal Democrats were conceding in their policy pronouncements as recently as the end of the previous Parliament. So let us not kid ourselves that the end of the world is nigh as a result of this proposal for police and crime commissioners.

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

I accept the hon. Gentleman’s argument that there is a democratic deficit and that that needs to be addressed. I even accept his argument that the people making the decisions at the moment are not visible. But does he not recognise that there is another problem with electing someone who has responsibility for just one service: it excludes them from the normal political decision making that has to be undertaken by anyone elected to government or local government? Normal decision making would mean that the person involved would have to measure priorities for policing against those for social services, education or recreation. We are really going only half way if we elect only a police commissioner who does not have the rest of the local public services to deal with.

[Mr Ruffley]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. He has huge experience from being leader of one of the great cities of this country, he knows what he is talking about and he spoke eloquently in August about how the riots affected Manchester. His is a genuine point that is not easily resolvable. The idea is that a directly elected police commissioner will be able to set the precept, and one of the strengths of a police authority—probably the only strength I can think of—is the fact that a proportion of the members of that police authority also sit on the precept-raising authority with their councillor’s hat on. That means there is a connection between the council raising the precept and individual members of that council, wearing a different hat, sitting indirectly on the police authority. That was a useful nexus and it will not necessarily be the case here.

In practice, I would expect any police and crime commissioner worth his or her salt to listen carefully to the priorities of, and arguments put by, the leading group on the relevant precept-raising authority. I do not pretend that this proposal is perfect in that regard. There will be quite a big disconnect between the person wishing to set a police precept and the authority that has to go out and raise it, but that might be the rough edge of an otherwise quite unremarkable proposal. That returns me to my theme and my next point.

This is not a radical revolution that will throw all the police cards up in the air and it is not a case of letting the chips fall where they may. I do not believe that that is a sensible way to make public policy nor do I think it is a sensible way of running the police service. I think we are in agreement on that point. However, many of the powers and duties of the new police and crime commissioner will be virtually identical to those of police authorities at the moment.

At the end of the last Parliament, I was rather a sad individual and I counted the number of duties and powers that police authorities had under a wide range of legislation from the Local Government Act 1999, under which they had value-for-money audit responsibilities, to the police Acts and so on. There were about 120 to 130 such duties and responsibilities and it seemed to me that those authorities exercised quite a lot of power over the police, such as the power to call police officers to account. I struggle to see how the panoply of powers possessed by the average police authority is very different from the powers, duties and responsibilities that a police and crime commissioner will have. We know that the setting of a precept is an identical power and we also know that police authorities, in conjunction with a chief constable, set police priorities and objectives for the year. Police authorities have strong views on the strategic objectives for a local police area and it seems to me that the police and crime commissioner will have similar strongly held views but will have the advantage, at least, of a public mandate through the ballot box when he or she sits down with the chief constable and they set out their plan to run the force in any given police area. Equally, police authorities can appoint and, in certain circumstances, dismiss chief constables. That is a power that police and crime commissioners will have, too. For me, those are the big ticket items.

[Vernon Coaker]

Given the hon. Gentleman’s experience, I am interested in his view about the unfettered power of the police and crime commissioner to sack the chief constable. Does he believe that should be subject to the same veto provisions as the police and crime panel has for appointment and the precept?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Ruffley]

My understanding is that that is not in the Bill, but I envisage that the occasions on which a police and crime commissioner will wish to dismiss a chief constable will be few and far between. As we know, under the old legislation, police authorities had the power to dismiss chief constables, but it was rarely used. The right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett) intervened publicly to say that a police authority should exercise its power to dismiss an allegedly underperforming chief constable. Police authorities used the power extremely rarely, and I have no reason to suppose that an elected police and crime commissioner would be very different.

--- Later in debate ---

[Simon Hart]

Not in Bury St Edmunds!

[Mr Ruffley]

Even in Bury St Edmunds, I dare say. Let me repeat the other statistic, because it is quite shocking. Fewer than one in eight uniformed officers are available to respond to the public visibly. That includes not only response units going around the streets but also those handling such calls—the visible availability. There must be a better way of asking any chief constable searching questions about why that is happening on their patch or police force area.

I conclude by saying that police authorities have had many years to ask some of those difficult questions, but those two statistics, shocking as they are, represented the situation in July 2011. The police authorities have had their fair crack but they have not been able to squeeze the efficiencies and to ask the difficult questions that they should have. It is time for them to move over and for the police and crime commissioners to have a crack and see whether they can do better. It is in that spirit of cheerful optimism that I support the amendments moved by my right hon. Friend the Minister.

[Keith Vaz]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds (Mr Ruffley), who is very knowledgeable about these matters. I shall speak only briefly and I begin by apologising because I have to be away before the end of the debate because the chairman of the committee on homeland security from the United States Congress is coming to meet members of the Select Committee to discuss counter-terrorism.

I want to speak very briefly on these matters and I do not want to repeat the debate we have had before about the principle of police commissioners. However, I accept what my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) said about this being an attempt by the Government to reposition police and crime commissioners at the heart of the Bill. I know that all Members have heard the arguments before and, as we have just heard, opinions are deeply held on both sides of the House.

I shall concentrate on three issues. First, I was disappointed that the announcement of the new Metropolitan Police Commissioner was not made to the House. It has become a feature to announce resignations to the House and I think that such important appointments ought to be announced here first rather than to the BBC and Sky News. However, I am glad that the Home Secretary heard the mood of the House and rushed in here to make her announcement by intervening on my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling. I join the Home Secretary and my hon. Friend in congratulating Bernard Hogan-Howe on his appointment; I know that he comes with enormous experience. He was the only candidate for the position of chief executive of the new National Crime Agency, but he was plucked from that job and made the acting deputy commissioner, and now hehas the top job. It is a very demanding job and I wish him well.

Let me make two quick points about the Bill. As I said in my intervention, I welcome the Minister back, and I think he has done excellent work on the protocol, which is an example of what can happen when a Select Committee makes a recommendation. We called it a memorandum of understanding—we started with the Magna Carta, but felt that was too grand and downgraded it—and it has become a protocol. The Minister and others have been in discussions about the protocol and we look forward to seeing the latest draft—he sent me a draft in July—because it is important that the Select Committee is involved in these processes. That is especially true of the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless), who is not in his place at the moment but is very keen on these matters and wants to be involved in the discussions. We have to remember that although ACPO and the Home Office may agree the protocol, the third part of the triangle has not even been elected yet. We do not have any police and crime commissioners, but if we are to have a protocol, they will have to be consulted on it in some way.