Police: Independent Police Commission Report

Earl Attlee Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Harris, on securing this timely debate as it gives me an opportunity to update your Lordships on progress. I pay tribute to the noble Lord’s work, even if I do not always agree with his views.

Our police are among the best in the world. They maintain law and order, often by putting themselves in harm’s way, but maintain a strong sense of fairness and duty. This is my first major speech on policing, either in government or in opposition. I want to put on record my sincere appreciation for the work of the police, especially at a junior level at the sharp end. Your Lordships will be aware that I have some experience of disciplined, uniformed service as a volunteer in our Army Reserve. However, it is important to understand that we keep the two services separate and that they are very different. There is no organisational connection between the two as there is in other countries. As the noble Lord, Lord Harris, observed, our police are purely civil.

Police organisations are generally always operational, and every day that a PC goes on duty he does not know what will happen. I wish at this point to offer my condolences to the families of the officers who lost their loved ones in Glasgow last Friday: Police Constable Tony Collins, Police Constable Kirsty Nelis, and Captain David Traill. In addition, our thoughts are with the officer who was shot in West Yorkshire yesterday.

Policing is a vital public service. The noble Lord, Lord Stevens, himself a distinguished former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, has spent two years looking into policing. I welcome his views and I join the noble Lord, Lord Harris, in praising him. However, I would not go as far as to call it a royal commission. I can well understand the gentle tease that came from my noble friend Lord Wasserman.

The Government are undertaking the most radical reforms in the history of policing. We inherited a system of policing that was out of date in modern society. It was out of touch with the public it served and was out of shape. The tough fiscal climate demanded better ways of working. My noble friend Lord Wasserman touched on several problems with BME and female representation, as did my noble friend Lady Berridge. To put that right we scrapped targets, restoring officers’ ability to use their professional judgment on how to fight crime. We gave people a real say over policing by introducing directly elected police and crime commissioners. We empowered local communities to hold policing to account through crime maps via the police.uk website. A more independent Inspectorate of Constabulary shines a stronger light on police performance. We are improving policing skills and professionalism through the College of Policing and we are reforming pay and conditions. We have established the National Crime Agency, which builds on and improves on SOCA, which the party opposite created to lead the fight against serious and organised crime. The noble Lord, Lord Harris, referred to some of the emerging challenges for policing.

We have delivered this while having to reduce Home Office police funding by 20% over four years. Our reforms are working. Recorded crime has fallen more than 10% and the independent crime survey shows crime has more than halved since 1995. However, as the Economist noted in July, there is less agreement about why crime has fallen. The report benefited from the input of several prominent criminologists, and I think that the House will be disappointed that we did not get their take on why this is happening—because it is happening all around the developed economies in the world—and what it means for our policing.

There is strong evidence that effective, targeted policing can reduce crime locally. We are tackling the underlying drivers of crime—for example, by reshaping our approach to alcohol, tackling illicit and harmful drug use, and legislating to give the police, councils and others more effective powers to nip anti-social behaviour in the bud.

Our reforms are not complete. The next phase will transform front-line policing to ensure it delivers more effectively. We have set out a vision of digital policing by 2016. This goes beyond the Stevens recommendations of mobile access to police systems—many forces already have this potential. We are harnessing technology to enable officers to spend more time out in communities, providing a better service to the public. Thirty forces have signed up to be digital pathfinders; they aim to become fully digital by testing and developing the required capabilities.

We are improving how policing works with other parts of the criminal justice system. A Strategy & Action Plan to Reform the Criminal Justice System, published in June, sets out how this will happen, including through improved use of technology, streamlining processes and ensuring a joined-up approach. For example, pilots are under way to develop and test digital case files which will mean that information on cases can flow seamlessly between CJS partners.

The report rightly makes much of the need for integrity in policing. I welcome its recognition that our reforms of police pay and conditions are “necessary and overdue”. The report endorses our aspiration to enhance the status of policing as a profession, and welcomes the creation of the College of Policing. The college will introduce a national register of officers struck off from the police; it is consulting on a draft code of ethics that will be issued in the new year which will make clear the standards of behaviour expected of officers, and make them more worthy of the public’s trust. The college is consulting on membership, but it is important to understand that this is a professional body for the police, and not an inspectorate or complaints body. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Henig, for her support for the college’s CPD role.

The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, suggested that the code of ethics did not go far enough. The code is based on standards of professional behaviour which are binding on the police, as are the police regulations. The code will be embedded in forces and present throughout officers’ careers.

There is plenty in the report about what is wrong with policing, and about management. However, I was very surprised that there is very little about leadership. This is an unfortunate omission. Through direct entry, we seek to attract the best people into policing from diverse backgrounds, and the college has a key role in providing leadership across policing. My noble friend Lord Wasserman also explored what was missing from the report—which was quite a lot. He said that it was a very good read; I agree with that sentiment. My noble friend Lady Berridge had something to say on that as well.

On outsourcing, I can assure the noble Viscount, Lord Simon, and others that the Government have made it clear that there is no intention for private companies to carry out activities that require warranted powers, except to the extent already legislated for by the previous Government. On procurement, we already require the police to buy vehicles, body armour, and off-the-shelf IT through national agreements. Better procurement has saved more than £100 million to date. I also point out that it is much easier for adjacent PCCs to co-operate on procurement than it was under the old police authority model. We are already seeing examples of this.

There are, however, some important points of divergence between the Government and the report. We do not believe that the police need a statutory social purpose. It is precisely by cutting crime that the police make a wider positive social impact—not the other way around. Neighbourhood policing is not under threat, as was suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Harris. The Government have no policy against neighbourhood policing; that is a matter for the PCC and the chief constable. The proportion of officers in front-line functions has increased under this Government, from 88.9% in March 2010 to 90.6% in March 2013, as observed by my noble friend Lady Browning. We slashed red tape so that officers can spend more time in neighbourhoods rather than behind their desks.

An effective PCC will work closely with many stakeholders: the police are only part of his remit. I am sure that a competent PCC would not allow his police force to retreat into becoming a purely reactive force. As the noble Lord, Lord Harris, implied, it would be a recipe for disaster in the short term, and in the longer term it could create problems at the ballot box.

My noble friend Lady Browning told us about the danger of bureaucracy in the police sector and the benefits of outcomes, and how a good PCC will set outcomes, not targets. The noble Lord, Lord Harris, when he was talking about social purposes, pointed out that the code of ethics is clear that officers must engage with their communities and understand their priorities.

We disagree that PCCs should be abolished, and so does the Labour PCC for Greater Manchester, Tony Lloyd, who is an experienced parliamentarian. Last week he told the Home Affairs Select Committee that the Stevens report did not take account of the kind of things that PCCs are doing now that would not have been done under the old police authority model. Many noble Lords have claimed that the report is evidence based, and the noble Baroness, Lady Henig, said that the evidence was compelling. But it is not clear to me how that can be in respect of PCCs, given that they have been in place for only about a year.

My noble friend Lady Browning suggested that the report was premature. However, we agree that local democratic accountability is important and needs to be defended and extended. This does not square with the recommendation to replace the simplicity and visibility of directly elected PCCs with a bureaucratic smorgasbord which splits accountability between lower-tier local authorities and a new force-level policing board, each with overlapping responsibilities. This takes power away from the people and puts it back in the hands of committees. Furthermore, as you take bureaucracy down even more to a local level, you run the risk of getting into operational matters.

We face tough and immediate challenges that cannot be delayed. We learnt lessons from where others had failed, and we put a statutory duty on PCCs and chief constables to collaborate in the interests of efficiency and effectiveness. It is working. For example, according to HMIC, Warwickshire and West Mercia’s strategic alliance will allow them to achieve 75% and 94% of their respective spending review savings by 2014-15. We are introducing a police innovation fund worth £50 million a year to stimulate further collaboration from 2014-15, with a £20 million precursor fund available in 2013-14.

Standards and integrity are vital to maintaining public trust in policing, but collapsing two separate organisations with distinct missions—the IPCC and HMIC—into one super-regulator is not the answer. A new name plaque will not tackle the underlying issues. This is why the Government legislated to make the inspectorate more independent and strengthened the IPCC. It is also why the Home Secretary announced a package of measures in February to improve police integrity, committing to transfer resources to the IPCC to enable it to deal with all serious and sensitive cases. The IPCC will begin to take on additional cases from next year, which will put an end to the police investigating the police in such cases. I hope that that will please the noble Earl, Lord Lytton.

I will try to answer as many questions as possible, but where I do not, I will write to the noble Lord, Lord Harris, and to all other noble Lords who have contributed to the debate. Some noble Lords have suggested that there is a fall in confidence in the police, but even at the height of the Andrew Mitchell affair, 82% of respondents to a survey said that they were very likely or fairly likely to believe officers speaking either on television or on the streets while on duty. But we are not complacent. The noble Lord, Lord Condon, referred to the Kent crime figures. However, it was the Kent PCC who called in HMIC to examine Kent’s crime statistics. HMIC’s findings led to a review of Kent’s crime recording practice, which led to the rise in local recorded crime levels that the noble Lord referred to. Thanks to the PCC and HMIC, Kent is now judged to have a much improved adherence to crime recording guidelines.

My noble friend Lady Harris of Richmond made an important contribution about forensic science. The lack of a single strategy on forensic science does not prevent providers and Government working together to make improvements. For example, recent successes include electronic transmission of fingerprints, the Forensic Science Regulator code of practice and the use of mobile devices to check fingerprints out on the streets.

My noble friend Lord Wasserman talked about BME and female representation. The Government want the police to be more representative of the community they serve. Direct entry into the police brings the opportunity of a new route into the police, which may have the potential to improve the numbers of underrepresented groups in the higher ranks. My noble friend will know that the College of Policing is responsible for the direct entry schemes that will start next year.

The noble Lord, Lord Condon, suggested that we need more partnership working in policing. The Police and Social Responsibility Act 2011 requires PCCs and community safety partnerships to co-operate. PCCs are already working with community safety partnerships to make communities safer. That is one of their roles other than policing.

The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, talked about police databases. While I cannot comment on the particular databases that the noble Baroness mentioned, I can say that the Government would expect the police to use databases to fight crime, not to collect trivia. As for the police national computer, I can reassure the House that it is illegal to perform speculative searches or to pass information to those who do not need to see it or know about it.

The noble Viscount, Lord Simon, asked whether we would attract the right police recruits, in view of what he suggested was low pay, and the five-year contracts. Police officers will continue to be better paid than most comparable workers, and chief constables have discretion on starting salaries to ensure that officers can always be paid more than PCSOs. There is no plan, and no proposal, to introduce fixed-term contracts for officers below chief officer ranks, and FTAs will apply only to chief constables and deputy chief constables.

My noble friends Lady Harris of Richmond and Lord Wasserman talked about the Forensic Science Service. The noble Baroness asked me what proposals the Government had to replace loss of experience in the FSS. Private sector forensic suppliers are now carrying out the work formerly done by the FSS. The Government’s priorities are clear: to ensure that the police have the services they need to solve crime, and to provide value for public money. Employment of scientific staff therefore has to reflect the size, shape and make-up of the forensic market that the police and the criminal justice system require.

My noble friend Lady Harris asked who would now do the research previously undertaken by the FSS. The UK’s criminal justice system will continue to be fully supported by the necessary technology, with research and development driven by commercial providers in response to the needs of the CJS. I understand that more than £3 million has been spent on research by the largest providers. She also asked whether the Government thought that commercial pressures would stop suppliers sharing research findings. As in other scientific fields, forensic knowledge is built up through publication of research findings. There may be occasions when suppliers will wish to preserve confidentiality or to obtain patents on new technology for commercial reasons, but this is also true of the FSS. The accreditation of laboratories was also mentioned; I intend to discuss this with the appropriate Minister at the Home Office.

The noble Earl, Lord Lytton, talked about whistleblowing. The code of ethics makes it clear that officers are required to report and challenge unacceptable behaviour in their colleagues. It emphasises that they will be supported by the force when they do so. He also asked a number of important questions about ACPO and some commercial activities of ACPO-controlled organisations. Since the move of national business areas to the College of Policing, ACPO does not—or should not—issue any directives, guidance notes or advisory documents. An exception to this is the ACPO central FOI unit, but it offers guidance to forces merely on FOI responses, not on operational matters.

The best way of dealing with some of the other issues that the noble Earl raised would be in a comprehensive letter. However, officers of chief officer rank are under the same ethical obligations as other officers. The noble Earl also asked about ACPO control of the college and ACPO business areas, but he will have to look forward to my letter.

I have just received further advice which will enable me to be more forthcoming. Business area leads will work co-operatively with the college in the interests of the police and the public. Guidance will be published and taken forward by the college. ACPO no longer has responsibility for such guidelines. The three ACPO members of the board of directors of the college will be distinguished, experienced officers and will not act in the capacity of ACPO officers.

In conclusion, I welcome the opportunity that this report has provided to reflect on the priorities around police reform. There is more in the report than I have been able to address, but I have no doubt that the debate around how to reform one of our most important public services will continue. When the Government embarked on their reform programme three and a half years ago, there was much disagreement about the need for reform. This report now shows us why reform was required.