Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Tuesday 24th May 2011 Lords Chamber

There will be an extraordinary situation in London if the Government bring forward some of these changes early there, which means that they may occur as soon as 1 October. A set of accounts will have to be produced for the period up to 30 September and then, by 1 October, two entirely separate financial systems will have to be set up. Those will be separately audited in order to produce two completely new sets of audited accounts for the period from 1 October to 31 March. If nothing else, this seems to me a cavalier use of public money at a time when we are told that every effort should be made to economise. I suspect that this duplication is unnecessary and unintended. I hope that the Minister will take this matter back, the Home Office will look at it again and that it can be sorted out without this unnecessary duplication.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew]

My Lords, I speak from a position of neutrality on these amendments. I wish to illustrate my remarks by recounting something that happened to me when I was a Member of the other place. A rave occurred in rural Montgomeryshire, which involved 10,000 people, loosely described as hippies, invading a couple of fields in the south of the constituency. As the local Member of Parliament, I made an arrangement with the police that I would telephone them late every evening for a report on what was going on in relation to public order around the rave and all the other issues that arose. One evening I telephoned at midnight from my then home in Berriew to the public line of the Dyfed Powys police. The telephone was answered by a man called Ray White, who was the chief constable of Dyfed Powys at the time. He was manning the public telephone line, doing his turn in the office of constable.

I tell that anecdote because in my view whether a chief officer of police is a corporation sole and however we dance on the head of a pin about the legal definition of a corporation sole, I suggest that the overwhelming purpose of a chief constable—I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response—is that he acts, albeit as chief, in the office of constable. I therefore urge the Minister to recognise that whatever grand titles are given to him, and whatever the legal technicalities of the matter—far be it from me to avoid legal technicalities; many of my learned friends make a good living from them—it should be recognised that in this legislation we are seeking to strengthen the role of the chief officer of a police force, not in the role of manager but in the office of constable at the head of his force.

Having said that and having watched at close quarters the splendid Mr White, for whom I came to have enormous admiration, running his force, I realised in our many meetings that he was also the chief executive of an organisation that covered in Dyfed Powys a huge area and, like all police forces, had a massive budget and set of responsibilities. As it happens, Mr White had some good management qualifications that he had acquired along the way through his life as a police officer, and he put them to good use. I hope that my noble friend will confirm in her response that the purpose behind the Bill and the creation of a chief constable as a corporation sole is to enable him or her more effectively to be the chief executive of what is, in effect, a large public business, and to remove from that chief officer some of the inhibitions that may currently exist in running that business.

I hope, too, that the Minister will confirm that the chief officer who is a corporation sole will have to pay extremely close attention to employment law and employment law standards as they are today. For example, it was suggested that a chief officer might surround himself or herself with chums—people who he or she likes because they happen to agree with him or her on most issues. As political party leaders learn quickly, it is actually a bad idea not to have among your top team people who are prepared to disagree with you on a daily basis and to act as devil’s advocate in any event.

However, in order to achieve a real top management team, whether or not they agree with the chief constable, I hope that the Minister will confirm that appointments standards will have to be high and that they will have to accord with the self-same standards that are required in the appointment of senior managers in companies. One can also look at the public sector for examples. The Judicial Appointments Commission has a transparent system for the appointment of judges that includes lay membership of appointment bodies. I hope that the Minister will confirm that fair interview techniques and appointment systems will conform to the very best standards in the public sector.

I know that later we will debate matters of discipline, but it would help if at this stage my noble friend also confirmed that in conduct and disciplinary matters—a difficult area for chief officers of police—the same high standards that are applied elsewhere in the public sector will apply to police forces. I hope she can also confirm that a chief officer, albeit as a corporation sole, will never be able to act as judge and jury in their own cause. I promise the Minister that my learned friends will make a real killing if that is what occurs, because every such decision would be open to immediate judicial review, and the chief officer would lose if he or she did not act in a way that was neither arbitrary nor disproportionate.

Finally, I wanted to say something about finance directors. I return to my experience of Dyfed Powys and of some other forces for which I have acted as an adviser professionally, either for the police force or for the police authority. I observed that the chief finance officer of the police force was an extremely important figure, who held a sort of honorary ACPO rank, although he or she was not a police officer. The chief finance officer of the police force and the accounting officer of the police authority seemed to carry out completely different roles. The chief finance officer of the police force was really the chief accountant of a very big business. The accounting officer of the police authority carried out a much more restricted role, because the turnover of the police authority was inevitably much smaller—at least as regards its functions, as opposed to those of the force. Duplication would be unwelcome, and I hope that my noble friend will confirm that if there are to be separate finance officers, they will not carry out duplicated roles. Perhaps she will explain to the House what their different roles will be, at least in outline.

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

Does the noble Lord accept that it is possible to construct a situation where you have a finance officer in the force and a finance officer in the authority, the commission, commissioner or whatever it is, with different roles, so you do not have duplication; but you have removed from the commissioner, authority or whatever the opportunity adequately to control the financial matters which, as the body to which the chief officer of police is accountable, it should control?

[Lord Carlile of Berriew]

I am always prepared to defer to the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, because he is a much greater expert than I am on how police forces are run. I see the potential for constructive tension, if it has to be tension, between two finance officers carrying out different roles. I see them as providing a check and balance on one another and their roles as being markedly different in any event. That is something we can learn from the current situation in which, as I said, the chief finance officer of a police force carries out a major managerial role and the accounting officer of the police authority a very different function.

Can the Minister confirm that the Government feel satisfied that we will not have a high degree of duplication and that the role of the finance officer in the force will be related to operational matters and that of the other finance officer to the rather different strategic matters? There, perhaps, we have the answer to the question of the noble Lord, Lord Harris, about Tasers. Tasers are the sort of thing which may well be strategic and one would expect to be discussed by the commissioner and those to whom he is accountable, whatever structure we end up with at the end of the Bill. The deployment of such Tasers as are purchased at any incident is plainly an operational matter, which must be left in the hands of the chief officer. That is an example of how different functions will deal with different aspects of police activity.

[Lord Dear]

I was going to speak at length about the points that have been very adequately covered by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew, and, not for the first time, I find myself in complete agreement with what he said. I will just pick up one or two of the points in an effort to be brief. Let us get a sense of reality back to this. I have heard phrases such as chief officers getting their own way and blue-eyed boys—by which I assume we mean blue-eyed girls as well. As has been said, no chief officer today or in the past 15 to 20 years could get away with that sort of piratical approach to policing. They have to prefer discussion and challenge. Of course, they like winning but I think that if one gets used to winning all the time, there is an in-built problem with the management style.

As for blue-eyed boys and girls, I suppose that loosely you could say the same thing about generals, captains of industry or the judiciary. The whole point is that if, as I think will be demanded under the new regime, you have a system with independent assessment and/or a proper board structure but, above all, transparency which in the final analysis is defensible in the courts, there is nothing to lose. I, for one, would not want to see the legislation being overprescriptive on this. You have to leave some room for balance and common sense, appreciating that, if you go past a certain line, particularly in the area of appointments, you are going to be challenged, so you do not tread over that line in the first place.

I want to say a brief word about the finance officers. There are of course two in place at the moment—one in the police authority and one within the force itself. I am not sure whether I was the first but I was certainly one of the early chief constables who civilianised the old police role of assistant chief constable, admin and finance, bringing in a very well-qualified civilian. I put them on ACPO rates of pay and ranked them equal with ACPO. You would certainly find that model in many police forces up and down the country today. There is some risk of duplication but I think one has to avoid that risk. One has to recognise the two roles, as has already been said, and expect a constructive tension between them.

I close by saying once again that I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, and I am sure that this will not be the last time that I do so.

--- Later in debate ---

I turn to the question of the cost of having two finance officers. As has already been mentioned, forces already have finance directors, so this is not that great a change. I stress here that it is the Government’s intention that each chief finance officer be responsible for their corporation sole for ensuring the proper management of the corporation’s financial affairs. This is the duty that Section 151 of the Local Government Act 1972 places on a local authority, which is extended to all police authorities by Section 112 of the Local Government Finance Act 1988. Therefore, it simply cannot be appropriate for a chief officer to have a discretion as to whether to have a chief finance officer with these important statutory duties. It is necessary for a safeguard to be in place which ensures that if the chief officer were to make, or plan to make, an illegal or unlawful transaction, then the chief finance officer would be bound by the legislation to which I have referred to make a report to the chief officer informing them of their view, and copy this to the accountable authority. In this case, the authority would be the PCC. I therefore respectfully ask that noble Lords who have tabled these amendments consider not pressing them.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew]

Before the Minister sits down—and I apologise for interrupting her—I have been slowly digesting something she said about the making of contracts. I well understand what she said about the Government reconsidering issues about whether chief constables could make contracts, but can she reassure us that there will be no inhibition on the making of contracts required for the best conduct of individual investigations? I am not citing “Cracker” as a good example of what occurs, because it does not occur; but sometimes it is true that one-off forensic science services are required for a particular investigation at short notice. Sometimes one-off accountancy services are required for investigations at short notice, and one can think of many other examples. Can she confirm that the chief officer will be able to purchase those services in such circumstances without having to go through elaborate consultation hoops on contracts?

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, there is a long list of amendments because there are a lot of issues. I would have been considerably happier if we had been able to unpack this package somewhat. From listening to the Minister’s reply—she has been saddled with this, I accept—it seems to me that some of the provisions are straining to apply to London the model provided for the rest of England and Wales. That feels very awkward and very inappropriate. I cannot see that we will finish the debate about London tonight, so I think that we will have to come back to aspects of it.

On delegation, at one point I referred to that as “trickle-down”, but I think that the Minister’s reply vindicates that description. I have realised, a bit late in the day, that “Delegatus non potest delegare”, as we all say—

[Lord Carlile of Berriew]

We say nothing else.

[Baroness Hamwee]

That is an important principle. I am really troubled that so much of this debate is described as being about delegation, whereas actually it is about getting other people to do a job in a way that, in other businesses, would be quite natural. That is not the same as delegation.

On the term limit, had the Public Bill Office allowed my amendment, it would have addressed all the points that the Minister made. However, the Minister did not address the problem—or, perhaps it would be fairer to say, the question that I asked—which is, “Why is London different in this respect?”.

Let me mention two final issues. The first is about the arrangements that the London Assembly makes and the Government’s insistence on requiring a bespoke committee. The Minister said that this is a matter of practicality. Well, there are practical considerations, but if central government is going to keep out of these things, central government should let the London Assembly work out for itself what the best practical arrangements would be. Frankly, I think that it is a bit paternalistic for central government to say, “You 25 people won’t be able to cope, so let us tell you how best to do it”. It seems to me that certain matters could and would be best handled by a committee, whereas some issues—the budget is obviously one of them—would be matters for the whole Assembly. The Government’s proposal seems an unnecessary intervention.

Finally, on the issue of appointments, although bureaucracy has been blamed, sometimes bureaucracy is a good thing. Actually, the point made is the one raised by the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, about the lines of connection—I had better avoid words like “accountability”—which I think is the right approach. I do not think that one should be saying that, in the name of avoiding bureaucracy, we will make the process, frankly, rather dodgy.

I am sorry that it must have been quite difficult for those Members of the House who are not directly involved in these matters to have tried to follow the debate, but certain themes have come out. I think that I look forward to—I anticipate with some sort of emotion—discussing these issues further with the Minister, because there are a number of points on which we have now teased out some of the Government’s thinking, which I have found helpful to hear, that we will need to address further. For the moment, I beg leave to withdraw Amendment 51.