Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Elfyn Llwyd Excerpts

Wednesday 30th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Nick Herbert]

My hon. Friend’s point is well made. However, the police and crime commissioner, who will have a mandate, could be more assertive. That is the basis and thrust of the chief constables’ concerns. I cited the example of London. The Mayor of London stood on a manifesto of placing uniformed officers on public transport and tackling knife crime. Whether that cut across the operational independence of the Met has been debated but not resolved, but it is significant that those things have happened, and the Metropolitan police have willingly implemented them. We must accept that, to some extent, there are areas of negotiation and shades of grey, which is why all parties agree that it would be a mistake to try to define in statute the notion of operational independence.

However, equally, we are all agreed—as I indicated on Second Reading, the Government were already minded to do this—on drawing up a protocol, as the Home Affairs Committee recommended, to try to set out the precise roles of the police and crime commissioner and the chief constable in the new arrangements, and to broaden the protocol to cover the role of the police and crime panel, given that that is new, and the role of the Home Secretary. It is worth stating that the Government’s intention in introducing that reform is not to abandon the tripartite, but to rebalance it, because we feel that it has been too distorted in the past, particularly in relation to the accrual of power by the centre and the Home Secretary.

[Mr Elfyn Llwyd (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

Can the Minister enlighten us as to what would happen if someone breached the protocol?

[Nick Herbert]

May I come to that in a moment? I will address the status of the document shortly.

As I mentioned earlier, the Home Office has set up a transition board to discuss how the present system will migrate to the new one. One of the issues that we are discussing is the protocol; that work has begun. ACPO has nominated Chief Constable Adrian Lee of Northamptonshire police to be its representative. He will sit on a working party, alongside Home Office officials and representatives from other organisations including the Association of Police Authorities and the Association of Police Authority Chief Executives, to discuss the issue. Work is therefore ongoing.

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I want to turn to the status of the document. New clause 5 seeks to set out the memorandum of understanding in secondary legislation. The right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd) asked what the consequences would be of not following the protocol. We envisage that this will be an extra-statutory document, and that it will be issued in the form of guidance. I am certainly willing to consider what the legal status of the document should be, and whether it should have some kind of statutory imprimatur, but we really need to see what it looks like first. We need to understand how granular it will be, and whether that would effectively define operational independence in a way that, so far, everyone has made it clear we should not so define it. I reassure the hon. Member for Gedling, however, that this matter should be considered, and I have no doubt that the other place will have a view on it.

[Mr Llwyd]

I thank the Minister for replying to my question in such short order, and in as much detail as he could muster. If he is saying that some form of legislative vehicle might encompass the protocol, would not regulation by statutory instrument be the obvious answer?

[Nick Herbert]

I repeat that we do not envisage this being a statutory document. It was originally called a memorandum of understanding by the Select Committee, and I do not think that the Committee’s recommendation envisaged it being a statutory document. Its purpose is to clarify the roles and responsibilities in law. In other words, it will be seeking not to set law but to explain what the law is. The danger is that we will be drawn into a means of setting law, when all the parties involved have so far said that we should not seek to define operational independence by statute. They have said that we should leave the matter to the understanding of the courts and the existing case law.

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[Mr Llwyd]

On the question of granting a warrant on the basis of flimsy evidence, is the right hon. Lady aware that, according to the Director of Public Prosecutions, there have been only 10 applications in the past 10 years, of which only two were granted?

[Ann Clwyd]

That was to have been my very next point. It is amazing that in the past 10 years, there have been just two successful applications for arrest warrants, and that they were then either withdrawn or not acted on.