Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Wednesday 27th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Elystan-Morgan]

I see no difference whatever between an ignorance that is shared by a small community in relation to a local matter and an ignorance that is shared by a large community in relation to exactly the same issue. That is my argument.

[Lord Cormack]

How many local people know the names of those who sit on the Bench?

[Lord Elystan-Morgan]

That is the case and it illustrates how completely the Government’s case is shattered. The problem is not what has been identified but the solutions that are now proposed. They are disastrous. The idea of introducing a civil commissar, for that is what it will be, into this situation will jeopardise the future of the police service—the best police service in the world. It is a police service whose development we have been very proud of over the last 175 years.

I have no doubt that police commissioners will come in every size and shape, but they will have one thing in common: they will nearly all have been espoused by political parties. The election of an independent will be rather exceptional, yet in all those cases they will have one thing in common. There will be no need for any of them to have the slightest qualification or the slightest knowledge of policing—no more than the man in the moon. How can that bring about a diminution in crime? How can it bring about greater accountability? Anyone would think that our police officers were not accountable, but they are not a gendarmerie or a corps d’élite. Every police officer from the lowest in the land up to the chief constable is answerable to criminal law. Since 1964, every chief constable has been answerable for the actions of his or her officers.

There are massive dangers here. There can be no question of honouring the boundary that separates operational from non-operational matters. It is a shadowy boundary at best and in practice it is impossibly difficult. Imagine a commissioner saying to the chief constable, “I believe we are spending too much money on covert operations—on surveillance—and I want to know what they are”, and the chief constable says, “I can’t possibly tell you”. How then can the commissioner evaluate the division between some areas of expenditure and others?

I shall finish by saying that I believe that the Home Office has served the police badly over the past 12 months in failing to preserve the police budget. Of course, there is a case for an across-the-board sacrifice, but it was rightly decided by the Government that that sacrifice should not apply to hospitals or schools and that in relation to the armed services it should be reduced to 8 per cent. In the case of the police service, the Inspectorate of Constabulary made it clear that the diminution limited to 12 per cent would mean that no front-line cuts would be necessary. But that is not what was agreed. The diminution was set at 20 per cent and top-loaded to apply in the main in the first two years. That is a double jeopardy to which the police have been exposed: first, in the failure to preserve their minimum budget for efficiency; and, secondly, in the proposal for this utterly madcap scheme.