Police and Crime Commissioners

Lord Birt Excerpts

Thursday 28th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, as a young television producer, I encountered Edward Heath on many occasions. Indeed, I spent a few months making a documentary profile of him when he was Prime Minister. I have no hesitation whatsoever in supporting everything that was said by the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong, but I will focus on other matters.

Police activity at the front line is now intensively chronicled by television documentary makers. We see the police coming face to face, day in, day out, with, on the one hand, some of society’s most wicked and organised people and, on the other, some of its most highly disturbed and unsocialised. Overwhelmingly, police officers emerge from these programmes as heroic, patient and stoic, but as with all organisations, the police are not perfect. The present organisational structure needs addressing. Police need to share back-office and other specialist operations. You have only to witness a crime or be the victim of one to experience just how clumsy and chaotic some of the police’s core processes are.

The police lack agility. We have seen an extraordinary epidemic of knife and moped crime in the past few years. I stay during the week in a flat in Clerkenwell, which has the fifth-highest moped crime rate of London’s 654 wards. Last year, Clerkenwell reported 716 moped-related thefts. There is a narrow one-way vehicle cut-through near my flat. It is about 30 metres long and has been the scene of 82 moped crimes in the past five years. We are entitled to a bolder and more effective response from our police. Of course, the Met is accountable to the mayor, not a PCC, but these conditions are mirrored for many forces.

For PCCs, surely it is early days. Certainly the post has yet to excite the electorate and, like all change, PCCs will take some time to bed in. Like the noble Lord, Lord Wasserman, I have seen a better picture: the police in the area of my country home have been galvanised by a new sense of meaningful public accountability to an active, elected commissioner with hire-and-fire powers. But government, working with the inspector and the PCCs, needs to put its foot on the police reform accelerator and identify the capacity needed to counter modern crime and disorder challenges.

That all said, the police cannot counter crime alone. They are but one part of a criminal justice system that has suffered grievously in recent years. The last Labour Government split responsibility for the criminal justice system across two Whitehall departments, and thus removed at a stroke the possibility of a coherent, system-wide overview. The coalition and the successor Government initiated ill-considered, back-of-the-envelope, disabling reform of the prison and probation services. I echo and extend the plea of the noble Lord, Lord Blair, for a fundamental and far-reaching strategic review of the criminal justice system.