Lord Brett
Main Page: Lord Brett (Labour - Life peer)
Lord Brett
My Lords, I join other noble Lords in congratulating my noble friend Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate on securing this timely and important debate. I go further in congratulating him because, with the authority of the experience and knowledge that he brings to policing issues, he has presented a devastating case to the House and made my task much easier. I totally endorse his case and associate myself with the pertinent and crucial questions he has put to the Minister. I look forward to the Minister’s reply with great interest. I recognise that sometimes we tend to overburden Ministers with questions—when I was on the other side of the Chamber I counted 43 on one occasion, but I do not think there are 43 questions today—and, if he is unable to answer all the questions, I trust that he will, in his usual courteous manner, provide written answers to those who have taken part in the debate.
The admirably brief contribution of the noble Viscount, Lord Bridgeman, touched on two issues. He referred to the resourcing of SOCA. Several noble Lords said that SOCA is an innovative step forward in co-ordination, both nationally and internationally. That begs the question of whether the resourcing of SOCA will remain adequate. Are there plans to maintain funding of that very important element?
The noble Viscount’s second point was on elected police commissioners and the balance, as he put it, between the United Kingdom and the United States. In my experience of the United States, it is not the case that police commissioners are elected in major cities. In New York, Los Angeles and Chicago they are appointed by the mayor. There is quite an interchange between city chiefs of police moving from one major city to another. In each case, once they are appointed, they are answerable to the mayor and the authority—be that the city council or city management committee. Therefore, they are accountable to the public of the city of which they are chief of police. It is true that in the county system, the sheriff or deputy sheriff in many cases is elected, with all the dangers that my noble friend Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate set out.
It may have been Winston Churchill who said that truth was the first casualty of war. I sometimes feel that language and its meaning are the first casualties of political exchange. That is certainly the case at the present time with many of the political exchanges that we have had between the Government, the opposition parties, the public, within the coalition and beyond. For example, the Government talk of the millions of pounds to be saved by efficiency savings when in truth that means cuts, as the noble Baroness, Lady Harris of Richmond, said in her very thoughtful and wise contribution. The Government would do themselves a great service by reading it with interest, taking her experience and knowledge into account. She made the point that efficiency savings had been with us for a decade. They have been achieved, but to pretend that they can continue and to multiply that achievement and call it efficiency savings is a misuse of that phrase.
Statistics have been given by a number of noble Lords and the facts are simple. Crime has gone down, according to the BCS on 15 July 2010. But the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister have said that crime has gone up. The Home Secretary said that on 7 June. The truth is that violent crime as recorded has fallen by 50 per cent since 1995 according to the BCS. The British Crime Survey was endorsed, as has been said by my noble friend, by Sir Michael Scholar and the ONS as the best and most authoritative survey to tell us what crime is doing within the country in which we live. The BCS was introduced by the Conservatives in 1991, but now, when its figures produce an inconvenient truth, the Government seek to question them.
Accountability is another word that is strangely abused and misused. My noble friend Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate spelt out the accountability currently falling to the police and the people and representatives to whom they are accountable—everything from courts at one level to the Home Secretary at the other level, through police authorities and so forth. For the life of me, I fail to see how accountability or transparency is improved by taking the accountability currently afforded to the police through the policing pledge and elected and independent members of police authorities and investing that in a single individual—leaving aside the fears and warnings my noble friend spelt out. The Government would do well to consider that when the consultation comes. I am sure the opinion that will be voiced will be that accountability is hardly likely to be increased by such a move.
Another misuse of the language is the word “targets”. The Government tell us that they have removed targets in the health service and in the police service. The target of seeing a cancer specialist within 14 days in the health service and the scrapping of the police pledge were described as the removal of targets. I get off the train on a Monday morning at Euston Station and for the past couple of weeks have been bombarded everywhere by big posters promising me that the National Westminster Bank will do a whole series of things about answering phone calls and dealing with my complaints. They rightly call them commitments because they are committed. They are promises. They are something that they would give me were I a NatWest customer, in return for being such a customer.
In that sense, I look to the police pledge as being precisely that—a pledge and a commitment. It was not a target. What did it promise the public? There were a series of 10 pledges that covered treating people fairly with dignity and respect and ensuring fair access at a time reasonable and suitable to them. Others included responding to messages within 24 hours, answering 999 calls within 10 seconds and going to a whole series of regular public meetings. If you were a victim of crime, they would see how often you would like to be informed of progress. You had the right to be kept informed at least every month if you wished for as long as was reasonable. Those were not targets: they were levels of service that we promised the public as part of our commitment in government.
Therefore, my question is a relatively simple one. What are the real reasons for that being scrapped, as it is not a target but a commitment? Has the policing pledge been scrapped because the Government believe that the public do not require the promised levels of service that were being delivered via the pledge? Or is it that, as they know, the intention is to cut policing budgets by 25 per cent, which would guarantee that there would be fewer police and fewer resources, thereby rendering the pledge impossible to meet? That, it seems to me, is the central question and one that I would be grateful if the Minister could address.
The Minister was asked a series of other questions that arise from the commitment to substantially cut funding. Several noble Lords referred to the Audit Commission and HMRC report published on 20 July. Do the Government accept the report of the commission that a funding cut of 12 per cent will negatively affect and impact on front-line police numbers? The simple translation of that question is, do the Government expect police numbers on the front line to be as great at the end of the exercise—perhaps the life of this coalition in four years’ time—as it is now, or are the Government for the first time prepared to admit that there have to be substantial cuts, if only because we know that some 90 per cent of the budget goes on policing and police support finances and only 10 per cent is spent on other issues? Taking 25 from 100 does not leave 90. You have to get something substantially less, which can only mean a loss of numbers. Central to that is whether the Government will continue to fund centrally police salaries. Will that be maintained? Given that the Home Secretary seems to be in denial regarding the record falling crime numbers over a period, and to echo the question asked by my noble friend Lord Mackenzie, do the Government accept the view of the Lord Chancellor, who said that the crime rate had fallen under Labour?
All of the contributions to this debate have been valuable. A number, including those of my noble friend Lady Warwick and the noble Lord, Lord Birt, have brought wider issues into the debate. All point to the difficulty of maintaining anything like the level of service that we provide to the community, which people expect. They will hold to account very closely a Government who reduce that level. They will be even less impressed with a Government who are not honest enough to tell them what they are doing.
Lord De Mauley
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate, for initiating this very important debate. These are vital issues and rightly deserve the proper consideration of your Lordships.
Perhaps I may start by agreeing with the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, and paying tribute to the police for their tireless work on all of our behalves. They work under extreme pressure, often risking their lives, and we owe them a huge debt of gratitude.
I have listened carefully to the contributions of all noble Lords today and take note of what they have all said. I was very much looking forward to the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Wills, whose former constituency is very near my home, on his maiden performance in this House. Perhaps his noble friends will pass him my best wishes for a speedy recovery.
Tackling crime and anti-social behaviour is a priority for this Government. We believe that the best way to achieve this is with a democratically accountable police service that adopts a commonsense approach to policing and is free to tackle local priorities. We need to move away from a centrally micromanaged police service, shackled with unnecessary bureaucracy. The public expects, quite rightly, that police officers should be on the streets, tackling crime and criminal behaviour and helping communities to feel safer, not stuck behind desks, away from the public, completing unnecessary forms. Regrettably, that is what we find—a police service tied up in red tape and denied the discretion to do its job properly.
The noble Lord, Lord Mackenzie, points, among other things, to a 9 per cent drop in crime levels, reported by the British Crime Survey, as a measure of the previous Government’s success. Of course, any fall in crime is very welcome, but this does not show the whole picture. Crime, by any measure, remains too high. As my noble friend Lady Harris said, 26,000 crimes take place every day in our country. The police continue to record more than 1,000 incidents of grievous or aggravated bodily harm each day and perhaps even more worryingly, around 100 incidents of serious knife crime. Muggings and violence against strangers remain stubbornly high, with more than 1 million offences last year, according to the British Crime Survey. The noble Lord, Lord Birt, referred to the fact that we are still a country, in the international context, with a high relative rate of crime. Levels of victimisation are much higher in the UK than in many other countries. The latest International Crime Victimisation Survey in 2004— admittedly that is some years ago now but it is still important—found that over 20 per cent of the population of England and Wales had been the victim of a household crime that year, compared with just 12 per cent in France and 13 per cent in Germany.
My noble friend Lady Harris asked about victim support. We provide funding of £30 million to Victim Support, an organisation that works alongside the National Victims’ Association. I assure my noble friend that we will ensure that victims are at the centre of the criminal justice system, and a new victims’ commission has been appointed to help this. We will not lose sight of the awful anguish that victims feel, and we are reviewing the services provided.
The British Crime Survey is an important survey, but it does not cover all victims or all crimes. It omits rape, sexual assault, drug offences, fraud, forgery, crime against businesses, and even murder. We have long argued the need for it to capture the experience of young people, and only now, for the first time, is there an experimental element to it which reveals, depending on your definition, anything between several hundred thousand and 2 million crimes against those under 16. The Government share the UK Statistics Authority's desire to have crime statistics that are robust and generate public trust. This is a complex issue and we are considering how this should be achieved in consultation with the UK Statistics Authority and others.
The police service needs more freedom from central control, with fewer centrally-driven targets and less intervention and interference from government. That is why we have abolished the centrally-imposed target on police forces to improve public confidence and have scrapped the policing pledge. We want the police to be crime fighters, not form fillers. And yet the police have been spending more time on paperwork than on patrol. That is unacceptable. We will be ruthless in identifying and eradicating processes and procedures that are unnecessarily time-consuming for police officers and support staff, including in the wider criminal justice system. For example, by November we will scrap the stop form in its entirety and reduce the burden of the stop and search procedures. We will also consider how we can maximise the use of technology to reduce the paper work in policing.
To cut crime, policing relies on the consent and co-operation of the public that it serves, but conditions that support this, such as trust in the police, confidence that the police and councils deal effectively with crime and anti-social behaviour and confidence in the wider criminal justice system are still too low. The bond between the police and local people is too weak. This is because the police have been focusing on the issues that national politicians have told them are important rather than their local communities. The police have been reporting their performance to civil servants in Whitehall rather than giving information to their local communities, so they can judge how well they are doing. I respectfully remind the noble Lord, Lord Mackenzie, that only 7 per cent of the public are aware that they can go to their police authority if they are unhappy with their policing. As his noble friend Lord Rooker wisely noted during the passage of the Police Reform Bill in 2002:
“The fact is that if one person in three knows the name of his Member of Parliament, I doubt whether more than one person in a thousand knows the name of any member of the police authority in his area”.—[Official Report, 16/4/2002; col. 828.]
Effective democratic accountability of the police is the bedrock of the policing model in this country. Robert Peel set this out as long ago as 1829, when he said that,
“the police are the public, and the public are the police”,
which continues to be our guiding principle today. The fact is that the existing accountability model is not working. Police authorities are too invisible and in some cases ineffective. People still do not know how to influence how their streets are policed, let alone how to get involved. Only 8 per cent of local councillors are police authority members, and there is no simple way for the public to change them if they feel they are not doing a good job. We need to replace bureaucracy with democratic accountability.
Lord Brett
The Minister is painting a picture of a populace that is totally unaware of what is going on. I live in a small village with a parish council. The local police officer attends the parish council at least every three months and has made everybody aware of the policing pledge, which is printed in a newsletter that goes to everybody in the village. I am not on the parish council and do not take any active part in it, but it seems to me that that would belie the black picture being painted. I do not think that there is any particular peculiarity about Irthington or Brampton in the county of Cumbria compared to other parts of the country.
Lord De Mauley
I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Brett, for his intervention. He is very lucky to live in a small village. I am assured that the case that he has portrayed is not the same everywhere.
We need to replace bureaucracy with democratic accountability, which is why we proposed introducing directly elected individuals, elected by and accountable to the public. They will ensure that the police are held to account by the public that they serve, rather than bureaucrats based in Whitehall who cannot fully appreciate local concerns. As my noble friend Lord Bridgeman said, later this month the Home Office will publish a consultation document, with the final policy to be announced in the autumn. We are very keen to hear the views of the public and policing professionals on how this model should work. As the Home Secretary announced at the APA/ACPO conference earlier in the summer, we will soon be bringing forward detailed proposals and introducing the necessary legislation to be implemented in this Session of Parliament.
On the subject of ACPO, the noble Lord, Lord Birt, asked about its role. The Government’s position is that ACPO has an important part to play in the effective delivery of policy. We are working with it to focus its role as the organisation responsible for the professional leadership of the police service and we will do so by ensuring that it is properly accountable and transparent in fulfilling that function and spending public money. We also want to see a return to common-sense policing. We must trust the police service and treat the police as professionals, with the discretion to make key decisions. That is why we will be taking action to return more charging decisions to officers for minor offences.
We believe that the police are only part of the solution. Lasting success in tackling crime and anti-social behaviour will lie in the response of local services and communities to the problems they face, and the Government are committed to empowering that response. That is why we will make sure that crime data are published at a level that allows the public to see what is happening on their streets.
We will also support the police to be available and accessible to their communities through regular police beat meetings, giving residents the opportunity to put forward their concerns and hold the police to account for how they are dealing with problems in their area. We would like to see all adults being part of an active neighbourhood group and playing a role in tackling crime in their communities. We want the voluntary and community sector to play an enhanced role, contributing its expertise and innovation.
Engaging other local services and building a culture of local co-operation is vital. These partnerships need to drive joint action, not further bureaucracy, and be more accountable to communities. As we reduce the ring-fences on central programmes, streamline funding and allow autonomy for local agencies to set priorities, we will want them to answer for outcomes, not inputs or processes.
I turn to funding. I have heard the concerns expressed today by noble Lords about this issue. We have made it clear that value for money must be a key driver of everything we do as a Government. The Government’s priority is to cut the budget deficit and get the economy moving in the right direction.
The Budget on 22 June set out our plans to reduce the deficit, including £32 billion per year in spending reductions by 2014-15. The police, along with everyone else, will have to bear a share of that burden. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Birt, for his helpful recommendations, which we will consider carefully.
There has been some speculation—the noble Lords, Lord Mackenzie and Lord Brett, asked about this—that this could lead to a reduction in the number of police officers. All government departments are subject to the comprehensive spending review, which is due to be completed in October. Before then, it would be misleading and unhelpful to speculate about the outcome.
In any case, policing is not a numbers game. The test of an effective police force is not how much it costs or the number of officers it employs but how it protects the public it serves. Our challenge is to use our resources most effectively by freeing up officer time to deal with crime. My noble friend Lady Hamwee made some useful suggestions about certain back-office functions.
I turn to some specific questions. The noble Lord, Lord Birt, raised a point about co-ordination of effort across the piece, from crime to arrest to documentation and through the criminal justice system. That is why the Minister of State for Policing and Criminal Justice, Nick Herbert, has a combined role to enable him to bring together the reform of policy within the wider reform of the criminal justice system. This includes making sure that processes elsewhere in the criminal justice system do not generate excessive bureaucracy for the police.
My noble friends Lord Bridgeman and Lady Harris asked about our approach to serious organised crime. We agree that we need to ensure that the police and agencies have the capacity and structures to fight serious organised crime. Our proposals will enhance the local accountability of police and create stronger arrangements to tackle crimes that cross force borders, including serious organised crime. For example, we are looking at steps that can be taken to strengthen and further develop collaboration between forces. We are committed to ensuring that SOCA makes an effective contribution to the overall law enforcement approach to tackling serious organised crime.
My noble friend Lady Hamwee asked about risk aversion. We agree with her and with Jan Berry that police officers need to be less risk-averse. That is why the Government’s approach to reducing bureaucracy has at its centre the need to return discretion to police officers. Examples of this, as I mentioned earlier, are returning charging decisions to the police for more minor offences and taking action to amend some of the health and safety practices that get in the way of common-sense policy.
The noble Lord, Lord Mackenzie, and my noble friend Lady Harris asked about our attitude to the Sheehy review. We have announced a review of remuneration and conditions of service for police officers and staff. The terms of the review will be announced shortly.
The noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, asked about rehabilitation, a subject that we consider very important. We are conducting a full assessment of sentencing and rehabilitation policy to ensure that it is effective in deterring crime, protecting the public, punishing offenders and cutting reoffending, something that she specifically referred to. We will take time to get this right, and we will consult widely before bringing forward coherent plans for reform. We intend to publish proposals for reform in the autumn that will then be subject to public consultation.
If I have not answered every question that has been raised today, I will write to noble Lords. The changes to policing that I have outlined today will play an important part in giving the public the police service that they deserve—one that is democratically accountable, effective and free to tackle local priorities.