Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2011 Lords Chamber

We are making these decisions at a time of a massively increased national security threat and it is profoundly important that we do all we can to ensure the total impartiality of our policing; to give all sections of the community the right to be represented in the running of policing; and, perhaps most of all, to ensure that we do not in any way imperil the impartiality of our policing. Our police commissioners are required to be effective and efficient; they are not required, as our chief constables are, to be independent and impartial. This is an ill thought-out scheme which will not produce the level of policing that we have at the moment; and it will not maintain or sustain the level of community confidence in policing which exists at present.

[Lord Cormack]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, because when I had the great fortune to be chairman of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee I saw at first hand what she had achieved. She speaks with a quiet authority—as, indeed, do the noble Baronesses, Lady Harris and Lady Henig.

Like other noble Lords, I congratulate and welcome my noble friend Lady Browning. I served with her in the other place and I know her to be a woman of calm judgment and true determination. Above all—and I saw this when she had high office in the Conservative Party—she is someone who truly listens. I hope the House will give her the opportunity of its views today and I know that she will reflect upon what she hears in this Chamber. For that reason, I appeal at the outset to some of those who I believe are considering breaching a convention of this House and calling a vote today. I would beg them not to do so, out of courtesy to the new Minister. I have learned in my brief time in this House—although I observed it for 40 years from another place—that the hallmark of this place is courtesy.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

I wonder if the noble Lord would give way.

[Lord Cormack]

What I have learned in my time here is that the convention is that issues are thoroughly discussed in Committee and that when we come to Report, Ministers having had the chance to go away, think and come back with answers, we decide whether we will vote—as we did last night, when I found myself, for the first time in my time in this House, in the Content Lobby. I give way to the noble Lord.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

My Lords, the noble Lord comes to this House with great experience and we have all enjoyed his interventions. I would gently point out to him that there is no such convention. Votes do take place in Committee and any such vote would not be a matter of discourtesy to the Minister, whom we all welcome to her place today.

[Lord Cormack]

I am glad for that assurance but I still hope that there will be no vote today, because there will be proper opportunity both for my noble friend the Minister to reflect and for noble Lords in all parts of the House to put their points of view.

I have always been extremely sceptical about this policy. This is no new attitude; I remember having a vigorous discussion with Mr Dominic Grieve, when he was the shadow Home Secretary, telling him that I very much hoped that this would not form part of official Conservative policy. Although it has been rightly said that it is the official policy, many members of the Conservative Party are truly concerned about the implications, as I know well from my private conversations in this place and elsewhere. We are seeking to elect on a party ticket—it would be in almost any case on a party ticket—a man or a woman who we expect to have the pastoral wisdom of a bishop, while we give him or her the powers of a commissar. That is not a very good combination.

I speak as others speak, because we all talk from our own experience. For 40 years, I represented a Staffordshire constituency and have worked with six chief constables. I had the great benefit of a long discussion a couple of weeks ago with one of those, John Giffard, who said that I could mention his name in this House. I know that John Giffard was an exemplary chief constable, not at all afraid of accountability or of talking to a police authority and recognising its remit. Yet he is very wary of having an elected party politician as an immediate boss.

This policy is a very brave step indeed and if we are to take that step, we ought at the very least to have some pilot projects to see how it works and just how it reacts. There are other amendments on the Order Paper to this effect. I know that my noble friend Lady Browning will consider what is being said and I hope that she will discuss with the Home Secretary and others that to have pilot projects is in no sense to wreck the Bill. It is, rather, to make haste slowly, which is often the best way of moving forward.

If party politicians were elected, imagine a Derek Hatton being in charge of the police on Merseyside. One does not need to elaborate to realise that implicit in any election is a danger that that sort of thing can happen, particularly if it is a mid-term period when the Government of the day are excessively unpopular. We all know, from last week and other examples, that when people vote in elections other than a general election they are not always entirely motivated by the local issues. The noble Baroness, Lady Henig, talked—I think I remember the number right—about 23 constituencies in West Yorkshire.

[Noble Lords]

North Yorkshire.

[Lord Cormack]

I am sorry, North Yorkshire. In Staffordshire, including the city of Stoke-on-Trent, there are a dozen constituencies, but it is a fairly populated county, particularly in Stoke. The interests, concerns and priorities of those who live in that city are very different from those of the people who live in the rural area of the south of the county, which I represented, or in the Staffordshire moorlands. Is it really possible for one person adequately and properly to understand people’s conflicting priorities and interests in such a diverse area?

[Lord Blencathra]

If it is not possible for an elected police commissioner to know the different conflicting views and opinions throughout Staffordshire or North Yorkshire, how then can a chief constable manage to do it at the moment?

[Lord Cormack]

My noble friend, for whom I have real affection, as he knows, has been a champion of this policy, very honourably. He knows that I take a different view. We respect each other and will continue to do so.

In this case, the situations are different. An operational chief—after all, we are so keen on operational independence that it is written into the Bill—with a series of assistants and deputies under him, with this as his sole and absolute duty and having done it all his life, because a chief constable by definition is someone who has risen through the police service, is in a far better position to know this professionally. I cast no aspersions on those who would aspire to stand as a commissioner, of course, but for the most part they would be party politicians with party priorities, to a degree.

[Lord Hurd of Westwell]

My noble friend constantly reverts to the point that they would almost certainly be party nominees. Might it not turn out otherwise, as it quite often has in the elections for directly elected mayors? Does he not conceive it possible that in fact independents have a certain appeal, particularly in that position, and that they might put themselves forward quite successfully and that people might vote for them on an individual basis, as has been happening to some extent in the elections for directly elected mayors?

[Lord Cormack]

My noble friend moderated his own comment by saying “to some extent”, having said “very often” at the beginning of his intervention. The fact is that it does not happen very often that independents are elected. If there were a clause in the Bill to say that only those who were not affiliated to a political party were eligible to stand, many of my objections would be answered. However, I am concerned.

Because I know about Staffordshire, I would like to relate my remarks to my own county. In future, with Stoke included, it will be what is called a swing county; it will go Labour, then Conservative and then Labour again. This could have a very odd effect on the relationship between the commissioner and the chief constable. For four years you could have a Conservative commissioner. He appoints a chief constable. He begins an entirely proper but very constructive relationship for four years, and then he is out, replaced by someone from the other side who will not necessarily readily and immediately be able to establish a similar relationship.