Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Lord Elystan-Morgan Excerpts

Wednesday 27th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Elystan-Morgan]

My Lords, I will confine my remarks to Part 1 of the Bill. I declare a past interest: some 43 years ago I was appointed a Minister in the Home Office responsible on a day-to-day basis for policing. When I look back at that period, it seems almost a distant pre-incarnation.

The central reality that one should regard as a template for all matters that one considers in the context of the police is that the police service represents two things. In the first instance it represents a disciplined service with a disciplined hierarchy. In that regard, it has much in common with the armed services. However, unlike the armed services, the police force comes into daily contact with the citizens of this land. The idea of a disciplined force is central, because it raises the question of whether a civil commissar can overlook any part of the functions of a disciplined force. The second point, which is equally valid, concerns the force’s independence. The independence of the police is as crucial to the rule of law as the independence of the judiciary. Any tampering with those twin pillars—the disciplined hierarchy and the independence of the police—jeopardises the future of the police service. Whatever the temptation may be to pander to any whim, caprice or populist trend, it must be resisted.

The Government’s case has not been made in the slightest. Three cases have been put forward. The matter was debated in the other place on 13 December last year. I will not quote the exact words of the Home Secretary; they appear in col. 707 of Hansard. She gave as the main reason for the reforms the fact that the police had failed the public when it came to curbing crime. We heard nothing of that today—and understandably so. As the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, reminded us—the figures are slightly broader than those that he mentioned—from 1994 to the present, under successive Governments, the spectacular fact is that crime has fallen by almost 50 per cent. That is a huge diminution. Therefore, obviously, the main plank of the Home Secretary’s case disappears there and then.

Today we are told by the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Jones, that there has to be a transfer of authority from the Home Office—from Whitehall—to local bodies. Nothing of that is proposed in the Bill. Indeed, one could well argue that the police panels would be utterly without identity, as compared with the police authority. We heard from the former Home Secretary, the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Lympne, whose main case was that people do not know the name of the chairman of the police authority. I do not suppose that those people know the name of the Lord Chief Justice, the Master of the Rolls or the head of the Family Division, but one does not impose a civil commissar on them.

[Lord Howard of Lympne]

Is the noble Lord suggesting that the Lord Chief Justice or the Master of the Rolls exercises some local accountability on behalf of the community? That is the difference between the two. Surely that difference must be apparent to the noble Lord.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.