Policing and Crime Bill

James Cleverly Excerpts

Monday 13th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Charles Walker]

I wish to speak to new clauses 26, 29, 42 and 43, all of which stand in my name. I will try to be brief. First, I thank the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley), for all the time she has taken over the past few weeks to discuss my concerns with me. I also wish to thank the Minister for Policing, Fire, Criminal Justice and Victims, who has made himself available to me, and the Home Secretary. As hon. Members will know, there is significant concern about the interaction between policing and mental health services, and I wish to turn my attention to that issue.

New clause 26 would place an obligation on chief constables to ensure that their police officers were properly trained in diversity and equality in relation to mental health issues, and specifically issues that relate to ethnic minorities. I have worked closely with Black Mental Health UK over the past five years, and it has raised concerns directly with the Home Office and Members for a number of years. I want to read out a paragraph from its briefing. It states:

“The joint Home Office and Department of Health review of sections 135 and 136 of the Mental Health Act 1983 acknowledged that ‘in particular Black African Caribbean men—are disproportionately over-represented in S136 detentions compared to the general population’ and that ‘Black African Caribbean men in particular reported that the use of force was more likely to be used against them by the police.’”

These are legitimate and real concerns, they have been subject to academic research and they need to be addressed.

Nearly three years ago, the Home Secretary co-hosted a fantastic conference at the QEII Centre with Black Mental Health UK, and my right hon. Friend the Minister for Policing, Fire, Criminal Justice and Victims spoke at it. Great strides are being made, but we need to ensure that further progress happens in the months and years ahead. New clause 26 would therefore require chief police officers to make an annual report to the Home Secretary on what progress has been made in relation to diversity and equality training. I will not push it to a vote tonight, as I have had assurances from Ministers that the matter will be looked at seriously.

[James Cleverly (Braintree) (Con)]

This issue goes to the heart of the concept of policing by consent. I do not think that anybody who has had any involvement in policing will be unaware of the friction that exists between policing and many members of the UK’s black communities. Does my hon. Friend agree that an explicit step in the direction he suggests will go a long way towards building bridges between UK policing and a very significant minority group in the UK?

[Mr Walker]

I agree with my hon. Friend, which is why I am delighted that my concerns have received such close attention from Ministers and will continue to receive attention. I look forward to further updates. The Government are working very closely with Black Mental Health UK and its director Matilda MacAttram, and I hope that those conversations will continue.

I said that I would try to speak for only five minutes, but I might have to stray a little bit over that, Madam Deputy Speaker.

New clause 29 relates to access to legal advice before someone is detained under the Mental Health Act 1983. I know that the Opposition have tabled new clause 24, on advocacy, but mine is a probing new clause. The removal of someone’s liberty should never happen lightly. Again, there is great concern among the African-Caribbean community and Black Mental Health UK that a young black male is more likely than other people to have their liberty removed. New clause 29 is a genuine request to address a genuine concern, but I am not sure whether it is deliverable.

At the point of sectioning, the situation is almost always highly stressed. The needs of the individual who is ill should be central to that sectioning. There is very real concern about this situation. I am interested in the Opposition’s new clause 24 in relation to advocacy. Advocacy is often talked about but has not been delivered in the way that it should be. Again, my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench are aware of that issue.

New clauses 42 and 43 relate to the deployment of police officers on wards and the use of Tasers. I am well aware that the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) will be speaking to new clause 40 on Tasers. I cannot be absolutist in my approach. I know that Black Mental Health UK never wants to see police officers used on mental health wards, and I share that view, but there will always be occasions where that possibility remains. When police officers are deployed to mental health wards, there should be an almost immediate notification to the police and crime commissioner and the Independent Police Complaints Commission that that deployment has taken place. I know that Home Office Ministers are working closely with the Department of Health on collating better statistics about the use of force and restraint, but we cannot wait 365 days before receiving that information. When police are deployed on mental health wards, that information needs to be made available immediately. Again I have received assurances from Ministers that work will be done on that matter. I know that time is short, but when the Minister sums up, I hope that he will again reassure me and Matilda MacAttram that that work will be done.

Finally, I turn to the use of Tasers on mental health wards. The right hon. Member for North Norfolk will argue, with great justification and passion, that Tasers should never be used on mental health wards. My heart is with him, but my head says that there may be some highly charged situations where a Taser needs to be used. Right now, we know that Tasers are being used, but we are not collating or collecting the information, and there is no way for the House to know what is going on, or for concerned individuals to find out what is going on. When a Taser is used—I hope that they will never be used—a report needs to be made within a week to the police and crime commissioner and the IPCC. I am not suggesting for a minute that any police officer will take the action of using a Taser lightly, but we must remember that we are talking about Tasers and force being used in safe hospital environments. Again, I have received assurances from Ministers in relation to the issue, and I hope that the Minister will refer to those assurances in responding to the debate.

Finally, I draw the Minister’s attention to a trial in Los Angeles, where Tasers are linked to body cameras by Bluetooth, so that the camera starts recording immediately when a Taser is drawn. It does not need to be manually started by the police officer. Perhaps the Home Office would like to look at that.

I apologise for having spoken for a little longer than I said I would, Madam Deputy Speaker.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Neill]

It is appropriate that I follow the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, as I am conscious of the fact that my predecessor as Chair of the Justice Committee was present when those assurances were given. I do not doubt the good intentions of the Minister and I am prepared to cut the Government slack over the matter, but there is an important point that the right hon. Gentleman has just made: it is not purely the high profile cases that are of concern to many professionals in the criminal justice system.

The shadow Home Secretary spoke movingly and passionately about the impact of Hillsborough and other such scandals, but of equal concern to lawyers such as me—I have had 25 years in the criminal courts—is the long-term day-to-day cosiness of relationships that, I am sorry to say, develop between police officers, not necessarily at the highest level but at an operational level, and reporters. Unless something is done to deal with that, there is a risk of miscarriages of justice. However these things are done, they do not come purely on the back of headline catching; there is a more insidious culture in some ways, which can be dealt with only through very firm management by the leadership of the police service, and if that is lacking it needs to be looked at appropriately.

I accept the concern about outstanding cases, but there is no doubt that this issue is potentially important. Any practitioner at the Bar will know of any number of occasions where the local press—this is not just about the nationals—has been aware, surprisingly, that a particular person was going to be arrested or that a particular search was going to be carried out. I am afraid that that cannot happen accidentally, so there is an issue here of general concern.

Let me turn briefly to new clause 23, to which I am a signatory. Again, I accept that the Minister wants to take the issue forward, but I agree with the sentiments expressed by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier). There is inevitably a reluctance among officials—I used to find that as a Minister—and senior officers to complicate regulations if they think that what they have got will do. I do not doubt that the advice the Minister has been given was given in good faith, but I say as a London MP who speaks to officers on the beat—on the frontline—in my constituency that their concerns about the inadequacy of the current provisions are genuine, and their experience perhaps does not mirror the advice the Minister may be getting from some of the top brass in the service. That advice may also not always mirror the concerns of my constituents, who go up to London to work and who are sometimes caught in these particularly unpleasant and intimidating demonstrations. My right hon. and learned Friend therefore makes an important point in his new clause.

Let me turn now to the main issue I wanted to raise, which I hinted at in my two interventions on the Minister: new clause 48 and the fire inspection regime. As I said to the Minister, who was generous in his responses to me, I welcome the change. In some ways, I wish I had been able to bring it in when I was the Minister responsible for the fire services, but the political and administrative climate was not there for it to be done, so I genuinely congratulate him on introducing it. He has more front-line experience of the fire services than I do, having actually done the job of putting fires out. My involvement with the fire services goes back to my involvement with the hon. Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick) some—I hate to say it—30 years ago, when I was the leader of the London Fire and Civil Defence Authority, immediately after the abolition of the Greater London Council. I would like to say that I lied about my age to join up, but that was not quite the case. However, I have been involved with the fire services in one way or another ever since.

At the time, we had the old-school inspectorate. Then we moved to an arrangement with a chief adviser. I think we all hoped that peer review and the work of bodies such as the Chief Fire Officers Association and others would achieve improvement from within. However, the Minister is right to have concluded that that arrangement is not delivering all that we want, and the recent evidence in the Public Accounts Committee report sets that out very clearly. It is therefore right to move to the inspectorate, and I warmly support it.

The reason I have raised what seems an arcane and technical point is this. I have taken on board what the Minister has said, but I want to amplify why I think it is right. One problem with the old inspectorate was that it tended to be a bit of an old boys’ club for retired senior officers. Almost invariably, the inspectors and the assistant and acting inspectors came from a very narrow group of retired senior officers, and there was a bit of a revolving door. There were therefore real questions about the inspectorate being up to the minute in its knowledge and about the degree of independence that it would bring. An inspector can have to say pretty hard things to a chief officer and his management team, and that is not too easy if someone has come fairly recently from within the ranks of a fairly close-knit service.

That is why there should, where appropriate, be greater flexibility to bring in a contractor with expertise in the appropriate fields. That may not be for the whole of an inspection, but it could be for a specific part. The obvious example is in relation to financial matters, but this would also work in relation to things such as the assurance of operational resilience, because there is now expertise in the private sector, as well as in the public sector, that can appropriately be brought to bear.

[James Cleverly]

In the new environment where we are encouraging greater collaboration between the blue-light services, might the fire inspectorate not also want to lean on senior members of the other uniformed blue-light services to add their expertise and to support the inspectorate as part of this multi-agency working?

[Robert Neill]

My hon. Friend is also the former chair of a London fire and emergency planning authority, and he makes an important point. All of us who have taken an interest in fire services over the years favour greater collaboration between the blue-light services, and I know that that is where the Minister wants to go. We all want a formula that will achieve that, but my concern is that the current wording of the Bill might make that harder, although I have absolutely no doubt that that is not the intention of Ministers. The reason I raise this concern is that, as it reads, proposed new subsection (A5), which will be placed in section 28 of the Fire and Rescue Services Act 2004, does not seem to cover the use of contractors.