Crime and Courts Bill [HL]

Lord Condon Excerpts

Monday 18th June 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Condon]

My Lords, I would not seek to challenge the architecture in the Bill for control and accountability, but it is not a question of all or nothing—there can remain clear direction and control by the director-general and clear accountability to the Home Secretary and onwards to Parliament. Nevertheless, I hope that the Minister will find ways to reassure your Lordships’ House and the wider public that in this day and age notions of good governance demand that there should be something more than just that naked architecture of the DG in control and the Home Secretary being accountable. It would be good to have reassurance around the notion of a management board, a supervisory board, an advisory board or some board mechanism that allows both stakeholder interest and independent voices to contribute to the health and well-being in the future of the NCA so that issues such as value for money, good governance, priorities and so on could somehow be part of a wider debate within that family than just between the DG and the Home Secretary. I understand that the Bill and this agency will deal with some of the most challenging criminal matters facing the country. Should terrorism subsequently also be transferred as a responsibility to the NCA, I understand that there must be very clear direction, control and accountability, but a committee-type model does not fit well with those demands. Nevertheless, there is ample scope for reassurance around the notion of a management board that involves stakeholders from the police service, the emerging police and crime commissioners, the wider local authority family and the business community. I hope that the Minister, today or subsequently, will be able to give us some reassurance that the Bill will be able to move us in that direction.

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

My Lords, I certainly do not want to fall into the trap of automatically accepting the Government’s architecture for these proposals. However, the amendment put forward by my noble friend does not necessarily undermine that architecture. The key point of this part of the proposed legislation is the creation of a new National Crime Agency. That is the key concept, and in this group of amendments we are dealing with some of the accountability mechanisms and the arrangements that will be put around the agency to ensure that its governance is of an appropriate and effective standard.

Let us be clear why this is important. The National Crime Agency, as proposed, will be a tremendously significant organisation. It will be responsible for ensuring that as a country we deal effectively with the most serious types of crime. In due course, it may be responsible for dealing with terrorism. This is not some minor government body; it is an extremely important part of the arrangements that we put in place to ensure that our citizens are properly protected against serious crime.

The other fundamental part of the architecture of the Bill, if you are wedded to that architecture, as no doubt the Minister is—no doubt we will come onto this in due course—are the provisions within the legislation that enable the director-general to require from police services around the country various things to happen. There is a potential power of direction—and certainly the expectation in terms of individual operations—that local police forces will work with the National Crime Agency to ensure that certain operations proceed. The relationship between the director-general and individual chief officers of police will be a fundamental one. That is precisely why, when we look at the governance structures and the arrangements that will be put around the director-general, we need to ensure that there are appropriate mechanisms for chief officers of police and those responsible for their governance, in terms of police and crime commissions, to be adequately represented within them.

The Government have to put forward a clear justification as to why this very lean approach to governance has been included in the Bill. As a number of your Lordships have already indicated in Committee, there is a virtue in having a proper governance structure, a group of non-executives and a group of individuals to whom the director-general must report or explain or expand on his or her proposals on how the agency goes forward. That is not to decry the direct accountability to the Home Secretary because it will be the Home Secretary who will, whatever is written into the Bill, have to answer to Parliament as to whether this new structure works. It supports that function and gives the Home Secretary reassurance that all the processes and procedures that any sensible Home Secretary would expect to be around the director-general are in place.

I am not suggesting that the Home Secretary is incapable of providing adequate supervision of the agency. I am simply saying that it is not necessarily the most effective or efficient way of doing it and that some board structure supporting that process is better and more likely to be successful. I have looked for precedents for this sort of one-to-one relationship between the Home Secretary and significant agencies. For 175 years the Home Secretary was the police authority for London and at the end of those 175 years the Metropolitan Police was so well governed, despite the excellent leadership at that stage provided by the noble Lord, Lord Condon, that it did not have a system in place—it was a £2 billion business at the time—for telling whether it had paid a bill more than once. I rather suspect that had the Home Office—I absolve previous Home Secretaries from day-to-day responsibility for this—been doing its job properly proper accountancy systems would have been installed within the organisation. However, the supervision of the Home Office and the Home Secretary was quite properly on the main policing issues, which would have been advised by the noble Lord, Lord Condon, and his predecessors as Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis. This was not about the way in which the organisation was run, administered or governed. That is the natural tendency. Home Secretaries are busy people. They have broad responsibilities. They are not going to be involved in day-to-day issues about the robustness or otherwise of governance structures. The history of the Metropolitan Police is not a sound precedent.

More recently we have the precedent of the border agency. Here, the opposite problem seems to have occurred. You seem to have a Home Secretary—perhaps successive Home Office Ministers would be a fairer way of putting it—who wanted certain things to happen and applied pressure on the border agency to do so. You then end up in arguments about what was said to whom by whom because of that one-to-one relationship. In all the fuss that there was a few months ago about whether certain expectations were being bypassed to let people into the country and remove queues, would it not have been better for there to have been a supervisory board between the Home Secretary and the chief executive of the border agency where there would have been a record, minutes, and perhaps an opportunity for dissent to be expressed? All that would be missing in the arrangements for the National Crime Agency, which raises the question of whether we are not in danger of creating a structure where the Home Secretary has too much of a role in respect of a policing body.

In this country, we have always expressed real concern about politicians having direct operational control of policing. That is part of the reason why there was a little bit of debate about the creation of police and crime commissioners, but that debate has moved on and we are now well into the process with the Labour Party having today announced a selection of candidates for those positions that includes my noble friend Lord Prescott. The Labour Party will clearly have an excellent set of candidates and we wait to see whether the Conservative list will be quite as exciting or interesting. The reason that there was some concern about that and there is even more concern about a national agency directly under the control of a single politician is the danger that that power is abused. I am certainly not accusing the present Home Secretary of having any desire to abuse that power. I am simply saying that we are creating a structure where such an abuse is possible and that it might happen in future.

Imagine occasions when there is a considerable threat from some organised crime group or a terrorist organisation, if that is the direction that the new agency goes in, and it is the responsibility of the Home Secretary to direct what the agency should do. The guarantees in the Bill for operational independence do not amount to very much in those circumstances. There is no place for control freakery here. This has to be about a proper system of governance. In a few years’ time, I would not want people to be making all sorts of sinister connections between policing operations that happen under the auspices of the National Crime Agency and saying that there are sinister implications that they have been personally directed or required by the Home Secretary, but that is the danger of the governance model that the Government have created.

My final point returns to what I mentioned in passing earlier. A critical part of this new agency will be the ability of the National Crime Agency to say that it wants local police forces to carry out or collaborate on particular operations. The danger of having a National Crime Agency that is divorced from the rest of the police structure is very real. I recall the discussions that took place over several years to try to get a system that worked on counterterrorism with primacy for one force and the ability to make operations happen across the country. It was not an easy process. The Government are making it more difficult for the director-general of the National Crime Agency if there are not police and crime commissioners or chief officers of police playing an active part in the governance of this new organisation. If they are there, if they are around the table and able to say, “This is a better way of doing that”, or to encourage the director-general to do things in a way that ensures their collaboration, that is surely going to mean that it is more likely that this new agency will succeed.

My noble friend’s amendments, which address precisely those points, are very welcome. There is a slight drafting error in that they make no reference to London, but I am sure that could be adjusted when we return to this at a later stage. The key issue that the Minister has to explain today is why this particular governance model has been put forward and why it is genuinely an improvement on a supervisory board which involves, for example, chief officers of police and police and crime commissioners.

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[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I apologise to the noble Lords, Lord Rooker and Lord Smith. The noble Lord, Lord Harris, is absolutely right to say that it is the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, who chairs it. I was just giving it as an example of one of those boards that is slightly different in the way in which it reports to Ministers.

The noble Lord is also right about the importance of when we will be publishing the framework document. We want to share an outline of that document with Parliament in due course and I hope that we can do that before we get to the Report stage of the Bill. I remind noble Lords that the Bill started in this House so we have quite a time before it goes through both Houses. As the noble Lord will be well aware, in terms of the timetable, we will not even finish Committee stage until we return in the autumn, when I think we will have one day of Committee to deal with some matters. I believe it coincides with the Conservative Party conference, which, sadly, I will have to miss, but one often has to make enormous sacrifices in the course of duty and I will be deeply upset to make that sacrifice. However, I will try to ensure that the noble Lord gets the framework document in due course.

I also note exactly what my noble friend said about the importance of making sure that we distinguish between administration and governance. I think that she is right to stress those two points. I hope that noble Lords will bear with me and be prepared to wait for the framework document, which I hope we will get in due course.

[Lord Condon]

Can the Minister confirm that he is not excluding the notion of key stakeholders being drawn into a formalised relationship with the new NCA, even if it is not a supervisory board or a strategic board? He is acknowledging that the framework document may well create a role for key stakeholders to have a formalised relationship with the new NCA, something more than just being a vague consultee, who receives a letter saying, “What do you think of … ?”.

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, as the Bill makes clear, it is quite obvious that we want those key stakeholders to be involved. How formalised that should be is another matter. I would hope that the noble Lord would be prepared to wait for the framework document and how we consider it. It will be for all of us to decide how formal, formalised or informal that is, and what is the right balance—again I use that great Home Office word. It is getting the balance right.

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There will be later amendments about payments and exchange, but one of our worries is that if the National Crime Agency finds its budget rather tight and the Home Secretary is in charge of its budget, there is a danger that the costs of, for example, sharing services or using police facilities could be pushed on to individual police authorities and police forces that have already taken quite a hit financially with 20% cuts in their budgets. In essence, I am asking the Minister for an assurance that the budget will be adequate for the work that the Government want the agency to do. It should be very clear that the Secretary of State has a duty to ensure that the funding is adequate for the task that the NCA will have to undertake. I beg to move.

[Lord Condon]

My Lords, at Second Reading I raised concerns about the resourcing of the NCA, not in the sense of special pleading for the police service in general or for the NCA in particular, but having now been around policing for just over 45 years, I have never encountered a time when individual police forces were under such rigorous challenge as regards their resources and their budgets. I totally accept that, as part of the wider challenge that we face economically as a country, there is no element of special pleading in what I am saying, and I am most grateful to the Minister, who very kindly agreed to a meeting last week, at which the new director-general of the NCA and officials were also present. I was reassured, as I knew I would be, by the energy, intelligence and commitment of all those present to give the NCA the best possible start, but having spent over 35 years in and around policing as a serving officer and then over the past 10 or more years as a very interested spectator, I am still left with concerns that the remit for the NCA is going to be tough to deliver against its budget.

Although the Minister may not feel able to concede much on this amendment or be able to put anything similar in the Bill, there is a pragmatic challenge about how the new NCA, with all its co-ordinating tasks, new tasks and the demands put on it, will be able to deliver against the background of its budget. It will work smarter and do more for less, but my experience in both the public and the private sectors is that sometimes you have to spend to save, to get economies of scale, to get new, smarter ways of working and to get synergies. There are start-up costs, and I would like to think that there will be some flexibility around the budget, even if this amendment is not accepted. Like others in this House, I want the NCA to get off to a very good start, and I would not want anxiety around some, relatively speaking, small resource issues to undermine the potential for it to be such a force for good.

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I quite understand the concerns expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Condon, and we understand that very difficult decisions have been made by different police forces up and down the country about where they are going to rein in expenditure, just as all agencies of the Government of one form or another are having to make very difficult decisions, but we believe that the cuts that they face are manageable. We also believe, and I think this is something to get over, that merely throwing money at a problem does not necessarily, as we discovered before 2010, solve problems, and increasing budgets does not always bring improvements in the service that the public have a right to expect from all services that the Government and taxpayers provide in one form or another.

It will, no doubt, be difficult for the NCA, which, like SOCA, will have to live within its budget and the review settlement. The NCA’s budget will be based on the budgets of the precursor organisations. It will have to deliver that wider remit through enhanced intelligence, tasking and co-ordination arrangements that I hope will make more effective use of its resources—its own assets and those of others. Creating the agency will also provide opportunities to rationalise some functions, remove duplication in others and generate efficiencies.

Turning to the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, and her question, in effect, about the responsibility of the Home Secretary, the important point is that the Home Secretary is ultimately accountable to Parliament for public protection. She has a vested interest in ensuring that the National Crime Agency has sufficient resources to deliver the priorities set for it. The Home Secretary will want to make sure that sufficient resources are therefore provided for the important work of the NCA when she negotiates with colleagues in the Treasury. The noble Baroness knows exactly what this is like and I look at other Ministers who have negotiated these things in the past. Sometimes those negotiations can be difficult, but it is something that the Home Secretary will have to address after the next spending review.

Importantly, she will remain responsible and answerable to Parliament after those decisions have been taken for making and setting the strategic priorities for the NCA. Again, the Home Secretary will consult others, whether it is the director-general of the NCA or whomsoever. The director-general will be able to provide that operational understanding of the resources required to deliver in this area. He will also need to ensure that the resources are allocated in the most effective and efficient manner. The important work of the NCA will need to be delivered within the budgets of its precursor bodies in those first years of operation. The budget constraints for the remainder of this Parliament will obviously continue to remain challenging. That means that the NCA, like many other bodies, will look closely at identifying duplication of effort and maximising opportunities for savings. I believe it will be able to ensure greater efficiencies by more effective prioritisation and smarter use of its own assets and those of others.

It is in the interests of the Home Secretary to work with the director-general to ensure that there are adequate resources for the National Crime Agency. The fact that my right honourable friend is answerable to Parliament means that the amendment is unnecessary and I hope that the noble Baroness will feel able on this occasion to withdraw it.