Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Lord Beecham Excerpts

Wednesday 27th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, I concur wholeheartedly with the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, my fellow Newcastle city councillor; and I ask the rhetorical question, which was implicit in what he said, as to what the mischief is that the proposal for elected police commissioners purports to address. It appears to consist of an alleged lack of visibility and accountability on the part of police authorities. The noble Lord, Lord Howard, who enthusiastically espoused police authorities and their chairmen when he was Home Secretary, today of course abandons them with equal enthusiasm and says that most people do not know the name of the chair of their police authority, which is probably true. Interestingly, the Northumbria force surveyed the population in 2005 and found at that point that only 55 per cent of the population were aware of the police authority. It addressed that issue and sought to promote public engagement; and in the last survey, last year, it recorded that 88 per cent of people in the force area were aware of the police authority. People may not know the name of the chairman, but they are certainly aware of the authority.

The question continues to be: what is it that this appointment would address? After all, the statutory framework currently provides for extensive consultation by police authorities. The very useful paper distributed by Liberty points out that:

“When discharging its functions, every Police Authority is under a statutory duty to take into account the views of the people in the Authority’s area about policing in their community. Police Authorities are also required by statute to make arrangements for obtaining the views of local people on matters concerning policing of their area and obtaining co-operation in preventing crime. The views obtained must encompass a wide range of people with particular focus on those aged under 21 or over 65 and from people from diverse backgrounds including marginalised groups and those of disadvantaged socio-economic status. The Authority must also ensure that it obtains a sufficient number and range of views so that it does not act on the basis of an unduly limited or unrepresentative sample. The Police Authority must also take into account whether the public in the area has confidence in the police force and whether the public considers that their views are being taken into account”.

These are significant statutory obligations currently laid on police authorities, which would no doubt be carried forward into the new framework.

It seems, with respect to the Minister, that she misinterprets the results of the survey that she quoted, which suggests that the interest of people logging on to the new crime maps is sufficient to drive the model that is now being proposed. However, that of course assumes that people are interested in statistics for the whole area. As the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, has pointed out—it is certainly our experience as councillors in Newcastle, attending public meetings regularly with the police in our areas—the interest is very local indeed. It is not force-wide. It is not even citywide. It is very much area-based. I have been present at countless such meetings. I have no doubt that the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, has as well. Nobody has ever asked about policing in the city as a whole, let alone in the Northumbria force area, which is 70 miles in length and encompasses 1.6 million people. That is the kind of localism that the Bill apparently seeks to address, but that is not localism at all. Localism is very much at a lower level. It is certainly true that accountability at that level has improved over the years. It needs to be reinforced at the basic command unit level, at the divisional level, perhaps at the level of the city or part of the county area. However, to assume that a single individual can be responsible and accountable to an area as wide as that, where there is a population of that size, or greater in many parts of the country, seems wholly unrealistic.

Moreover, there is probably not a real risk of an extremist being elected to a position of police commissioner, as one Member of your Lordships’ House suggested, but it is at least likely, in the context of a campaign on a single issue, that fear of crime will certainly be ratcheted up by those seeking election. Fear of the fear of crime, I am afraid, rather dominated the policy-making of the previous Government to an unfortunate and unnecessary extent, and I suspect that elections of this kind will have that same effect again. Of course, the likely outcome is that there will be a further fragmentation of services, when in fact they need to be brought together, with an elected commissioner having a separate, possibly competing, mandate with the local authorities in the area that he or she would seek to serve and to work with, with their separate mandate and their relatively insignificant contribution to the problems of community safety, which of course transcend merely policing the area. It is arguable that, for the first election, there would be an element of accountability. After a commissioner is elected for the second and last time, there is no further degree of public accountability in again looking to the ballot box, so the accountability argument can certainly be overdone.

There is also the question of the substantial powers that accrue to the elected commissioner. The commissioners would be responsible for something like 11.5 per cent of the council tax levied in England and 15.5 per cent in Wales. That is a significant slice of local taxation levied by a separate authority. This is subject only to a three-quarters veto by the police and crime panel. That scrutinising body would have virtually no power. It would have no power to call in decisions or to play any significant part in the appointment of a chief constable or other officials appointed either by the commissioner or by the chief constable. It would not have the power to agree or amend the crime plans. Indeed, even the chief constable would not have the power to agree a commissioner’s plan, and what would happen if there is a disagreement is entirely unclear within the legislation. Therefore there are significant issues about the degree of power to be vested, in effect, in a single pair of hands without much real accountability at all.

As the Bill goes forward, there are other issues that we will have to address around appointments—around the role, for example, of Her Majesty’s inspectorate, which will no longer have to report to the Secretary of State. It is possible to improve this Bill if the Government are prepared to listen and to act on the genuine concerns expressed on all sides of this House and by other interested organisations, and to recognise that what is most important is to improve accountability at the very local level, and not to vest enormous powers in an individual with a wide geographical and population constituency without having that individual subjected to any significant scrutiny. I am afraid that that is the effect of the Bill as it stands.