Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Hazel Blears Excerpts

Monday 13th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

If the hon. Gentleman will bear with me, I will shortly deal with part of the point that he makes.

Earlier today, we announced police force funding allocations. These ensure equal treatment across all forces, as each force will receive the same percentage reduction to its core Government funding. At the same time, we are giving the police service greater freedom than ever before over how to use its resources. With this new budgetary freedom, police and crime commissioners will be able to make real decisions about funding local priorities.

Concerns have been expressed about placing this degree of power in the hands of one person. The hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) made the point about an individual representing, in some cases, a large area with competing and different requirements within it. The Bill will ensure that there are appropriate checks and balances on those powers.

At the core of our proposals is the establishment of new police and crime panels. These will ensure that there is a robust support and challenge role at force level, and that the decisions of the police and crime commissioners are tested on behalf of the public on a regular basis.

[Hazel Blears (Salford and Eccles) (Lab)]

I share the concerns of my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) about the ability of a single individual to be visible and accountable in an area such as Greater Manchester, with 2.5 million people. Is it not the case that the police and crime panels which the right hon. Lady proposes are remarkably similar to the police authorities, which have been criticised time and again for lack of visibility and lack of accountability?

[Mrs May]

No. I shall come on to describe some of the powers of the police and crime panels. That democratically elected individual is essential, restores a link between the police and the public, and makes sure that at those elections the public are able to have their say about what their police and crime commissioner is doing in terms of the responsibilities of the police. To those who raise the issue of representation of the full area, which is the point made by the hon. Member for Rhondda, I repeat the figure that I gave earlier in my speech: only 8% of local authority wards are currently represented on the police authorities, so the police authorities are not providing representation on the same basis as some of those who call for their continuation would argue.

[Hazel Blears]

rose—

[Mrs May]

I see that the right hon. Lady is eager to jump up again. I will take this intervention, then I will make progress.

[Hazel Blears]

I am very grateful to the Home Secretary, because those issues have obviously tested many Home Secretaries over the past few years. Has the right hon. Lady given any consideration to electing those local representatives, who would then be visible, accountable and have a local mandate?

[Mrs May]

Yes. Indeed, the right hon. Lady’s own Government looked at the possibility of electing police authorities and rejected it, but we are sure about what we are doing through the police and crime commissioners and the police and crime panels. The panels will comprise locally elected councillors and some independent and lay members, who will be able to veto a commissioner’s proposed precept by a three-quarters majority and veto any candidate a commissioner proposes for chief constable by the same majority. The public will also be given opportunities to scrutinise the performance of their police and crime commissioners directly, through enhanced local crime information, including street-level crime maps.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ed Balls]

I do not know whether the Library report quotes the Conservative chair of the police authority in Kent, who, as I understand it, totally disagrees with the hon. Gentleman and says that the proposal is flawed and will not work. It will not be properly representative.

Bizarrely, the coalition came along and proposed the abolition of police authorities, but then realised that it was a flawed policy. It then decided to reinvent police authorities and give them a new name so that they would be called panels rather than authorities. The problem of representation needs to be solved, because it is serious.

[Hazel Blears]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that visibility and accountability have to be balanced with the integration of services, particularly with local authorities and other partners? Partnership working in policing has been shown to work over the past few years, and a single elected commissioner could well tear the system apart and lead to much less effective policing on the ground.

[Ed Balls]

I agree, and effective accountability really ought to happen in the main in the basic command unit. We need to ensure that the police are accountable to their community, but that they can demand support from the local authority, the health service and the other agencies that are vital to tackling the causes of drug crime and wider youth crime. All that will be ripped up under the Government’s proposals, and we will end up instead with one elected person for a massive area, who will be able to visit each ward perhaps once every other year. That is not local accountability at all.

--- Later in debate ---

[Hazel Blears (Salford and Eccles) (Lab)]

I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this Second Reading debate on what I believe to be a very important Bill. The issues are close to my heart, not just because, like the Policing Minister, I struggled with the tension between visibility, accountability and performance for the three years for which I was Policing Minister, but because I know how important those things are to my constituents in Salford and Eccles and to communities across the country.

There is undoubtedly a problem with the visibility and accountability of police authorities. I believe that the public are entitled to know much more clearly who is responsible for setting policing priorities as well as ensuring that chief constables address the issues that are important to local people in an effective way that achieves the best value for money. It is a complex set of tasks for any police service, but over the past few years we have done pretty well. We need to do more, however. Having a safe community not only transforms life for ordinary people but affects business, investment and economic transformation, and that is why it is so important.

Let me make it clear that I believe that if local people are given the chance to elect their police representatives, they will do so sensibly and rationally and that the spectre of their electing an extremist candidate is unlikely. It is the responsibility of people like us, in this House and elsewhere, to ensure that, in any direct elections, we get involved, campaign on a proper platform, reflect the people’s priorities, offer political leadership and support our citizens in making their democratic choices. I have always trusted the public and they often—in fact, nearly always—get it right.

I have real concerns, however, about the idea of electing a single individual who is not connected to the rest of the local governance arrangements for the provision of public service. I would be interested to hear from the Minister when he responds to the debate whether he has really considered that issue. Evidence shows that what has worked in policing in the past few years is the integration of services—for example, in family intervention projects and tackling antisocial behaviour—and joint working between agencies, particularly between police and the criminal justice system. On Friday, I visited a new pilot in Greater Manchester of intensive alternatives to custody, which involves embedding police officers with probation and family support workers—again, involving integrated services. Approaches such as the co-location of key staff and the sharing of data have been part of the direction of travel that has led to effective policing.

That is the direction in which all public services are moving. As part of the previous Government, I started the Total Place work to bring all public services together. It is called community budgeting under this Government. I do not mind what it is called, but it is the most effective way to provide services. It is designed to break down barriers, integrate staff, set joint priorities, pool budgets and get more for less. If the move to having a single, elected police and crime commissioner means setting the police apart from the rest of that system, I honestly believe it will be a seriously retrograde step.

[Ms Louise Bagshawe (Corby) (Con)]

Does the right hon. Lady agree that the call for elected police commissioners came precisely because the public do not feel that the current system, integrated or not, is serving them? Is not there a need for the public to have a single voice?

[Hazel Blears]

Indeed, and I am about to put forward an idea that would meet many of those concerns. One way of achieving the greater visibility for policing that the hon. Lady talks about would be having a directly elected person in each local authority area who would be responsible for local policing but would also have a duty to operate within the rest of the local public service framework to mobilise all those resources to make communities safer. Those directly elected local commissioners could act collectively at force level to hold chief constables to account and to provide direct, local links to their communities. I am genuinely concerned about the ability of a single police and crime commissioner to be visible and accountable to 2.5 million people across Greater Manchester in communities as diverse as those in Rochdale, Wigan, Stockport, Oldham, Manchester city centre and Salford. I wonder whether the Minister has considered having directly elected local commissioners. There is all the rhetoric about localism, but then this policy of having a single police and crime commissioner for millions of people. That is not localism.

[Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)]

Is not the right hon. Lady effectively making the case for an elected official for each basic command unit? In such a system there would not be co-ordination between different parts of Greater Manchester, because those people would compete with one another for resources and to work and co-operate with other state agencies. That would be a recipe for duplication, expense and confusion.

[Hazel Blears]

It is a difficult circle to square and I shall suggest how we might address some of those issues. There is no perfect system, but I do not believe that having a single person who is supposed to be visible and accountable to millions of people will work.

I understand that the police and crime panels, which are to be made up of local authority representatives and which will be remarkably similar to the police authorities that have been criticised for their lack of visibility, will have the power to advise and scrutinise the work of commissioners, but would it not be better if those local representatives were elected and therefore had a direct local mandate and accountability? I am very concerned that there will be a lack of consistency between the plans and strategies of local authorities and the health service, plans on tackling drugs and the possible crime plans of the police and crime panels. The local reps could come together and pool the sovereignty of their elected mandates to consider issues of serious, organised and trans-border crime—issues that are properly the concern of whole force areas. Currently, there is concern that police and crime commissioners will concentrate almost solely on very local issues, because of the electoral impetus, and that they might ignore some trans-force, serious and organised crime issues as well as national priorities.

It is inevitable that commissioners will be pressed to prioritise local, visible neighbourhood policing. I do not argue against that, as there is no greater advocate in the House than me of neighbourhood policing. Indeed, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett) and I drove a culture change through the police service to ensure that neighbourhood policing was properly valued and rewarded. Hon. Members will remember that 10 years ago the sexy end of the police business was going out in the squad car with the blues and twos blazing and a helicopter circling overhead. People thought that was real policing. It was not entirely dissimilar from Gene Hunt’s kind of policing and it took a great deal of effort to bring the police back to tackling antisocial behaviour, closing crack houses and tackling prostitution on our estates. That was the really important part of policing for local people. I believe that the police get that now and know that being visible in their communities is hugely important to restoring and improving local people’s confidence, but we still need to keep the pressure on to make sure that that happens.

Some crime is not immediately visible to people on the streets, but is hugely important to address—whether it is counter-terrorism, serious and organised crime, the emerging problems of cybercrime, drug enforcement or tackling knife and gun crime. All that work needs to be done. The Home Secretary can talk about the national policing priorities in the Bill, but there is no provision for those second-tier regional priorities. In my own area, Salford, we have just had a fantastic operation called Operation Gulf, which entailed the long-term surveillance of organised crime gangs, using a range of powers—not police powers, particularly, but bringing in, for example, the Department for Work and Pensions to examine tax and benefits fraud, working with the Security Industry Agency, and investigating illegal protection rackets and pubs that have been used for organised crime. All that is not immediately visible to people on the street, but it is tackling those serious criminals who are role models for many of my young people. It is about confiscating their assets, and it is long-term police work that costs money. I worry enormously that a police commissioner will not give that the priority that it needs.

In the short time left to me, I shall say a word about the people whom we ask to carry out all that work on our behalf. We spent a long time trying to get a proper skill mix within our police service, recognising that we do not need fully warranted officers to do every single job in the service. Peter Fahy, the chief constable of Greater Manchester, has been a tremendous champion of work force modernisation. When I met him last week, he was desperately worried that with the very severe cuts that we have to make in such a short period of time, the people who will be most vulnerable are the PCSOs and the civilian staff who, because of their employee status, can be made redundant, unlike police officers.

I worry that we will go backwards, rather than forwards. We have got police officers away from being escort officers, custody officers or scenes-of-crime officers, and we have got them on the front line. As a result of cutting so quickly and so deeply, we will find uniformed officers again in the back-office doing file preparation or escort duties. That is utterly ludicrous. It is a backward step which will lead to much less effectiveness in our service. Our chief constable must get rid of 3,000 people over the next four years. He has said publicly that that will affect front-line policing. As a result of the speed at which it needs to be done and the arcane employment regulations in the police service, we will find ourselves making the wrong decisions about effectiveness.

The public will judge success not simply by elections. They will judge it by what happens on their streets and in their communities. If they can go to bed at night and not wake up with the fear of being burgled, if they can get up in the morning and find that their car has not been slashed and trashed, that will be the sign of success. Accountability, as commissioners will find, will be a pretty tough thing.

--- Later in debate ---

[Nick Herbert]

Labour’s manifesto at the last election proposed referendums five times over—on the alternative vote, on reform of the other place, on mayors, on further powers for the Welsh Assembly and on the euro. Did Labour Members advance arguments against those democratic pledges on the grounds that they would cost money? Of course not. As my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Mr Burley) pointed out, of course there is a cost to running elections. Police authorities do not have that cost because they are not democratic. That is exactly what we want to fix.

[Hazel Blears]

Will the Minister give way?

[Nick Herbert]

For all Labour’s objections, one could be forgiven for forgetting that the previous Government twice proposed to democratise police authorities. So what happened? They backed down, twice. That is the difference between the previous Government and the coalition. The Opposition retreated from reform at the first whiff of opposition and we are determined to see it through. [Hon. Members: “Give way!”]

One thing is clear. Those on the Opposition Front Bench may be opportunistically opposing this reform, but we know what they really think about the need for it.

“Only direct election, based on geographic constituencies, will deliver the strong connection to the public which is critical.”

Does that sound familiar to the hon. Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker)? It should do. He said it just two years ago.

Is that too long ago? Let us look at what the right hon. Member for Morley and Outwood (Ed Balls) said just two weeks ago. He told the Home Affairs Committee that “the present accountability of police authorities was not optimal.” What a masterpiece of understatement. If police authorities are sub-optimal, what proposals does he have for reform? None. He is silent on the issue. Today the right hon. Gentleman admitted that “there is more we can do to deepen accountability at force level.” What? He will not say. He is against reform of the governance of policing, but he is for it, just as he is against cuts while admitting that he would cut police budgets by more than £1 million a year. Apparently these can be delivered without losing a single police officer. That is what he said today.