Parliament Square (Management) Bill [HL]

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Friday 1st July 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, I welcome the efforts of the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford. He and I came to the House at the same time, so we have a special bond of affection. For me, too, this is the fourth or fifth time that I have spoken on this subject. I welcome the Bill because it treats Parliament Square as a particular unit and addresses the current fragmentation of authorities that have bits and pieces of control over the square. The Bill suggests a committee that would co-ordinate what happens in the square.

It is very interesting that Clause 3(b) states that Parliament Square includes,

“the footways that immediately adjoin the central garden of Parliament Square”.

Currently it is the footways that people are occupying: they are not occupying Parliament Square. Finally we have got to a situation where there are restrictions on demonstrating around Parliament Square and where people who want to demonstrate—as they have a perfect right to do—have been pushed to this very scary paved edge of the square. Some of the tents erected are very small, and the variety of protests is quite fascinating. It is not just the old Brian Haw protest about Iraq; there is something about Freemasons murdering somebody and all sorts of interesting things.

Whatever we do to organise Parliament Square, we must foster and encourage people's right to protest. I very much think that we ought not to use these various pieces of legislation as restrictions on people's right to demonstrate. It is a great tribute to our democracy that right across from Parliament people can support causes that often have nothing to do with Parliament but which they feel strongly about and want to bring to Parliament’s attention.

[Lord Cormack]

The noble Lord will remember that only three weeks ago we had a debate on this subject and some of us tried to make the distinction between a place of legitimate protest and a squalid encampment permanently defacing the square. It seems that the elegant solution of my noble friend meets both the noble Lord's concerns and my own.

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, I am coming to that. My background is that of a demonstrator. I demonstrated in Grosvenor Square against the American war in Vietnam, I helped students occupy the LSE and I did various other things.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lawson of Blaby]

I speak in the gap very briefly. First, I warmly commend my noble friend Lord Marlesford for his persistence in bringing this to the attention of this House and for the elegance of the Bill that he has introduced.

This is an extraordinary business. One reason why I can speak briefly is that the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, said everything that needed to be said quite correctly. The only thing that was missing was that he did not at that moment volunteer to be chairman of the committee. We would have much more confidence in getting the right result if he were to be chairman of the committee—in fact, we probably would not need any other members.

This is extraordinary, because there is no disagreement among all sides on this matter. We all agree that there has to be peaceful protest. We all agree, however, that what is going on is a squalid eyesore and an embarrassment to all of us who come here everyday, an embarrassment in the eyes of everyone else—in the eyes of overseas visitors in particular. This is a very limited problem. People might ask, if Parliament cannot deal with a problem as limited and circumscribed as this one—where there is really no difference among us about what is right and what is wrong, what freedoms have to be preserved but what unplaisances, as I think Stephen Potter called them, need to be done away with—my goodness, what can we deal with? We have far bigger problems to deal with.

I hope that the Government, who are obviously doing their best on this topic with the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill, but equally obviously have failed, will take on board my noble friend’s Bill. The most elegant solution may be—I am sure that my noble friend will not mind being robbed of it—to have his Bill in place of the comparable clauses in the government Bill, as an amendment to the Bill. Then, at long last, after all these years, we may be able to get a solution to this problem which, as I said, is not merely a physical and visual embarrassment but a legislative embarrassment if we cannot deal with the issue.

[Lord Cormack]

I intervene very briefly not only to endorse the points just made by my noble friend but to refer to another point that came up during our debate three weeks ago on the measure proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Tyler. It is crucial that in tackling the problem of Parliament Square, we do not transfer that problem to Abingdon Green or to the green in front of the statue of George V—I was incorrectly interrupted by the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, and told that it is George VI, but it is, of course, George V—or any of the other adjacent areas. It is crucial that we tackle this problem properly, and I suggest that we tackle it in the clean and clinical way that the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, has suggested, which the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, underlined in his notable speech.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

My Lords, in my very short time in the House, I have never come across a debate in which we have had more people speaking in the gap than listed on the Order Paper; nor have we ever had the chance to have one or two excellent new points added during those gap speeches. I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, for giving us a chair for our putative committee. It was an inspired guess, and I think he was right to pick up something that I was rather surprised to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham: that in his view, a committee could in some sense be a commanding officer. I thought the Army stood for one thing; it does not believe in committees but believes that individuals have to take control. The noble Lord, Lord Lawson, kindly squared that circle for us.

We also heard from the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, on the important question of whether the statue is George V or George VI. I am glad that that has been resolved. The noble Lord, Lord Reay, gave us the context for this discussion by reminding us of other points, such as Somalia, that give us a sense of proportion.

This Bill is one of three opportunities we have to come back to an issue that has been distressing the House for some time. In a debate a few weeks ago, I reflected that if you wanted to list what your Lordships' House is most interested in, you would look at the range of Questions, the topics put down for debate and at Private Members' Bills. Clearly the future of our House is the thing we spend most of our time worrying about. It comes top of all lists, but there would probably be a place for dangerous dogs, which keep repeating themselves, and for summer time saving, which we discussed earlier this morning. Room would have to be found for the future of the Barnett formula, because that seems to come up a lot, but Parliament Square would certainly be there because we come back to it and it obviously needs to be resolved.

In his introduction, the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, said that this is his first Private Member’s Bill. It is a feature of the way in which we operate in this House that when matters get serious between Back-Benchers and the Government, we get Bills that reflect that annoyance and concern. It is something that the Government need to take account of. When you get a rash of Bills of this nature, clearly you are in trouble.

The issues are very clear. We need some imaginative thinking about the relationship between Parliament, the abbey, the church, the public buildings and the public spaces around those buildings across the various dimensions that have been mentioned in this debate: security, access, traffic, tourism, history, heritage and, of course, demonstrations. The problem is that, as many noble Lords have said, these are not impossible issues to think about and discuss and to come up with proposals about, but we live in iconic buildings in a world heritage area with a world focus. It is something that people in our country want to regard as theirs and to use when they have issues that they wish to draw to our attention, and at the heart of this we are trying to balance rights on the one side and freedoms on the other, which is never easy.

That explains why this is all so difficult, but it does not really explain why it has taken so long. As a number of noble Lords have said, the good thing about this Bill, which was described as ingenious by a noble Lord, is that it has a laser-like focus on the key issues, which we welcome, and it allows, and indeed encourages, the main issues to become clear. We want to have vibrant and responsible demonstrations, but we do not want the square to be left in an impossible condition for people to use and enjoy for whatever purposes.

In a very positive contribution, the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, tried to add some points of detail to the proposals in the Bill, which most people would accept. It is admirable that it is very narrow in its focus, but it perhaps lacks some of the definition and additional points that will be required if it goes further. Those comments were very helpful because they give us an additional thought about that. The noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, also pointed out the contrast between this Bill and the other two Bills that we are also considering: the Bill from the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, which simply eliminates the current proposals from existing legislation, and the police Bill, which is, as he described it, extremely negative. It says what you cannot do in the square, but it does not try to build up what we want the square to be used for in all the dimensions that I have mentioned.

There are some questions about why we think a committee will be the right solution for what we are doing. A committee may well be the way in which processes need to operate, but we need to know a little bit more about ownership, the rights of those who have an interest in the square, how that is to be resolved, who is going to fund all this work and how it is going to be arranged. Although the Bill’s aspirations are good, we do not really have detail about how it will deliver to the standards that we all somehow understand we want out of this.

There are other contributions I want to mention. My noble friend Lord Desai indicated that he has form on this issue and mentioned that he had spoken on it four or five times. He also admitted quite freely that he has demonstrated in other places, including Grosvenor Square. On the intervention of the noble Lord, Lord Richard, those who were at Grosvenor Square—I think I was one—might not, of course, be able to remember whether they slept there because it was the 1960s and things were different then, but the point was well made.

We approach this from slightly different directions. The noble Lord, Lord Lawson, said that we do not disagree about the issues, and I think that is probably right, but there is a different hierarchy of concerns. When he was speaking, the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, mentioned “Groundhog Day” as a film that he thought has resonance for this, but I think it is more like “Rashomon”; we all see slightly different things when we look at that square and we have a different order of priorities. When she responds, it will be important for the Minister to give us some sense of how she sees this hierarchy of need and of how the Government’s proposals fit with the views expressed today.

As the noble Lord, Lord Wills, said, and indeed said in earlier debates, this is something that the previous Labour Government grappled with. We would happily admit that we got it wrong in 2005 and we were sad that our proposals in the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill in 2010 could not be delivered because they fell in the wash-up period.

The sense that I take from our debate, and I leave it with the noble Baroness to respond, is that we all seem to want this to be resolved within legislation that will be effective in delivering the aims. The vehicle could be the police Bill because there are sufficient provisions in it to do that, but we are hearing from the noble Lord who proposed the Bill, and others, that the measures in it may not be sufficient to achieve the aspirations that are rightly high for this wonderful space. I therefore think that it falls to the Minister to take us forward on this matter and to explain how she will resolve the two different strands that are running here. She has clearly compromised because she has a Bill that she wants to get through and I hope that in the spirit that she has previously shown in debates on the Bill in Committee and now on Report she will consider taking further steps to bring into play what is now before her.

Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Tuesday 24th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack]

My Lords, as my name is attached to Amendment 26, I should like to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, for the manner in which she introduced it. It is very much a probing amendment. I do not want to repeat my concerns about the election of police commissioners—my noble friend the Minister is well aware of those and has been most gracious in her recognition of them. She has already shown that she is indeed a listening Minister. We are in a slightly peculiar position, having passed the amendment that we passed a couple of weeks ago. I did not vote for that; I voted with my noble friend the Minister, because I felt that it was consistent with the role and responsibility of this House that we should accept the general principle from the House of Commons and then seek to improve what it had sent to us. It seemed to me that the most constructive way of seeking to improve it was to sanction pilot schemes.

This is in no sense a wrecking tactic; it merely says, “Make haste slowly. Make sure you’ve got it right and be aware that there are very real problems that Members in all parts of the House have already touched on”. I am concerned about the possible impact on national issues of the election of essentially local commissioners. I am very concerned about the party-political nature of the commissioners. It is almost beyond any doubt that unless we include in the Bill a provision specifically to say that those affiliated to a political party cannot stand, most commissioners will be affiliated to a political party. I am saying not that they cannot do their job but that I have real concerns about it, as does the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee. I think that many Members in all parts of the Committee would urge the Minister to discuss the strength of feeling with the Home Secretary and her other ministerial colleagues to see whether the pilot scheme cannot be accepted and adopted, or to come up with an alternative that meets some of the legitimate concerns and objections that have featured in debates so far.

I do not wish to detain the Committee further, but I think that, far from being a wrecking tactic, this is a constructive suggestion. I hope my noble friend Lady Browning will recognise that when she comes to reply.

[Lord Condon]

My Lords, I sympathise with the motivation behind the amendment. Although I realise that it is a probing amendment, I cannot support it. The perfect storm of change that understandably surrounds policing needs to be resolved in the quickest and best way possible. However, pilots might be an unnecessary delay for a number of reasons. A small number of pilots might tell you a great deal about the relationship between some individual police and crime commissioners and some individual chief constables in localised areas, but I am not sure that we would learn great lessons that could be extrapolated to the whole of the country in all circumstances over 40 police forces. Although I acknowledge that this is a probing amendment that seeks a way to test, explore and challenge some of the rationale behind elected police and crime commissioners, I am not sympathetic to pilot schemes. Having discussed them with serving chief constables, I know that not many of them are supportive either.

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.

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.