Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts

Monday 6th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Harris of Richmond]

My Lords, I speak to Amendment 234ZZF in this group, which relates to the provisions about transfer schemes in Schedule 15. The Bill currently enables the Secretary of State to direct only a police authority to make a transfer scheme. My amendment would change this so that the Secretary of State could also direct a PCC or MOPC to make a transfer scheme. Effectively, therefore, this amendment would allow the creation of secondary transfer schemes after PCCs and MOPC are put in place. Let me explain why this is necessary.

This schedule currently expects a police authority to make a transfer scheme before it ceases to exist. In making that scheme, the police authority has to decide whether to transfer the assets and staff concerned to the PCC or the chief constable, or—in the case of London—to MOPC or the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. There is no second bite at this cherry in the Bill. If the authority does not get it right, the arrangements cannot be changed at a later date. The transfer of land should not be a problem. The Bill envisages that only the PCC may own land. The transfer of contracts may be slightly more complex, but generally the Bill envisages that these will be transferred to the PCC. Following the Minister’s assurances in the previous Committee session, it is likely that chief officers will be able to enter into contracts in their own right only in relation to employment.

The real nub of the problem is people. Given that the police authority currently employs all staff, whether they work for the authority or the force, to whom will the authority transfer these staff? The Bill clearly intends that the chief officer should be able to employ staff within the force. Whatever concerns we may have about the police reform proposals, or the proposals to give chief officers a status as corporations sole, it is in everyone’s interests that we get the transition arrangements right. This is especially important in our current climate of great upheaval and the various pressures on the whole of the police service. Which staff should chief officers be given? Perhaps they should be given those currently employed in the force, but, of course, it is not that simple; it never is. The reason for this is that many staff within the force are from time to time asked to prepare work to assist the police authority. This might be in relation to preparing reports on police performance or assisting the authority with an engagement exercise or a communications campaign. It might relate to providing information about force professional standards or risk assessment that sits behind the development of police plans.

Technically, under Section 15 of the Police Act, only police staff employed to support solely the force and not the police authority are under the direction and control of the chief officer. Perhaps we should transfer only those people under the direction and control of the chief officer, but again it is not that simple. Those employed to support the police authority, even if it is only a small part of their job, are technically under the control of the authority. Many of these people might be more appropriately transferred to the force, but in any event I suspect that few authorities have undertaken the complex exercise involved in working out which police staff are under their control and not the control of the chief officer. There has been little need to do so in the past and it is not likely to seem like a good use of time and resources to do so. Most authorities, therefore, will not have a readily available list of people to include in a transfer order to the PCC.

To demand that authorities undertake this exercise now and become involved in potentially long, intricate and fraught negotiations between the existing authorities and their forces over who gets what will place an unnecessary bureaucratic burden on authorities and forces. This is particularly so at a time when they must deal with other challenges brought about by reform, the financial situation and additional calls on police resources such as preparing for the Olympics. Nevertheless, a PCC will expect to have access to the sort of expertise among his own staff that until now authorities have borrowed from their forces. This puts police authorities in the invidious position of having to second-guess what staff a PCC would want to support him. Will he want to put a particular stress on media and communications, say? We have heard a lot about what high-profile and powerful people these PCCs will be, so that is quite likely. If so, how many staff in the force communications department should be transferred to the PCC’s office? Might he want to keep an eye on police performance in case this affects communities’ perception of how effective he is?

A pragmatic solution would be to enable secondary transfer orders to be put in place. This is what my amendment seeks to achieve. This would allow the police authority to transfer either all staff or those staff who have dual roles to the PCC or MOPC initially and then to let the commissioner make the decision about which of those staff they want to continue to employ directly and which should be transferred to the chief officer’s employment. It would also allow any mistakes in the initial transfer schemes to be corrected at a later date. I realise that this is a technical area but it is very important. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

My Lords, I fear that in the course of this Committee I have not always been entirely helpful to the Government, so on this group of amendments I will do my very best to be as supportive as possible. I echo the words of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, about the choice between the supplementary vote and the alternative vote. I will not get into the merits of different voting systems as this House has already spent many happy hours doing that and the country has spent rather fewer happy hours doing the same. However, I should say that if the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, were to be passed, a further anomaly would be created for London, because the Mayor of London is elected on the supplementary vote system, while the person fulfilling police accountability in London would be elected on a different system, the alternative vote, from that in the rest of the country. I offer that in the spirit of trying to assist government Ministers in refuting arguments about amendments.

My main reason for speaking on this group is to support the noble Baroness, Lady Harris of Richmond, in her Amendment 234ZZF. I suspect that this relates to something about which not a great deal of thought has been given in the drafting of the Bill, which ties the hands of an incoming MOPC in London, or an incoming policing and crime commissioner, commission or anything else outside the country. That is because the Government are saying that there is only one bite of the cherry and that the transfer of staff must take place before police authorities are abolished. That would be fine if we were talking about an extraordinarily long lead-in. It would perhaps allow time for much discussion and consultation. However, we are not talking about that.

If the Government get their way, the elections of policing and crime commissioners in the 41 areas outside London will take place next May. That presupposes that in all those areas the detailed work that the noble Baroness, Lady Harris, has described will have been concluded on time and that the Minister’s officials within the Home Office will have done it in sufficient time to provide the guidance that is spelt out in the Bill. I have, of course, enormous faith in civil servants in the Home Office, but I am conscious of the workload involved in saying exactly how this is to be done. If, as is the intention or aspiration, the arrangements change in London earlier than May 2012, it would mean doing all this work on an even shorter timescale in the largest police force in England and Wales. I am sure that everyone would do their very best to achieve it, but I am not convinced that the work would necessarily be completed in time for an order to be passed by the outgoing Metropolitan Police Authority by 30 September or any later date, if it is to go earlier than May 2012.

Even if it were possible to do this in practice, I have to ask the Government whether this is really their intention in the legislation. My understanding is that these new individuals are being created—the MOPC in London and the police and crime commissioners, or whatever we end up with, outside London in the rest of England and Wales—and you are then going to say to them, “Actually, it’s tough because all the staff you might want have been transferred already to the control of the chief officer of police”. I suspect that there will be some robust discussions about all this. There is the question of what sort of offices will be put around the MOPC and the PCCs outside London. There will be discussions as to which functions are properly the responsibilities of the MOPC or the PCC, and which functions are the responsibilities of the chief officer of police. Here is an arrangement whereby all those decisions will have been made by the time the MOPC comes into force or the elections for policing and crime commissioners—if there are any elections—have taken place in the rest of the country. I suspect that that is not what the Government want, and that any person elected as a police and crime commissioner outside London would want to make an assessment of the most appropriate balance to be struck and how that is to be done. At the moment, there is no provision to allow that to happen.

This simple amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Harris, allows there to be, if necessary, a two-stage process. If in fact it is all terribly easy—if the difficulties I have identified do not exist, which I doubt, and it is obvious that all the differing candidates for police and crime commissioners in any locality are of the same mind as to exactly what office they want around them and it goes without saying that the Conservative Party candidate, the Labour Party candidate, and the Liberal Democrat candidate will have exactly the same vision of the shape of the office that they want to have around them in the PCC—it will be fine. In reality, I suspect that the Government are tying the hands of those in the new structures that they want to be so effective before they are even created.

That is why this simple amendment, which allows, if necessary, for a two-stage process or a staged process is extremely sensible.

[Baroness Henig]

I shall speak to Amendment 200A in this group, concerned with the Bill's proposal to grant the Secretary of State power to create criminal offences to regulate the conduct of elections for police and crime commissioners and any related irregularities. I have to observe that this is a diverse group. There seem to be a number of distinct issues contained in it. My amendment would, by removing the unfettered power of the Secretary of State to create new criminal offences, ensure that the power is exercised appropriately. By that, I mean by your Lordships' House and the other place. Although there may well be a need to create new criminal offences as a result of the Government’s proposed creation of a whole new set of elections and the novel introduction of direct rather than representative democracy as part of a reform package costing more than £100 million, such important steps should not be the preserve of statutes but should come before Parliament.

In this Session, we are following the lengthy debate on the Public Bodies Bill, perhaps in danger of exhausting the utility of the term “Henry VIII clause”, denoting the granting of open-ended powers to a Secretary of State in statute. With appropriate respect to His Majesty's memory, I fear that I must raise the not insubstantial spectre of that monarch before your Lordships yet again. Any proposal to grant the Secretary of State unfettered powers to create new criminal offences at whim in any area will strike many of your Lordships as, at the very least, inappropriate. However, when the power to create new offences is applied to procedures governing the people's exercise of their democratic mandate, such a new power might strike some of democracy’s most ardent defenders as a little chilling.

If new offences are to be created to regulate the brave new world of directly elected police and crime commissioners, surely those offences should be appropriately scrutinised and considered by Parliament.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

Before the Minister resumes her flow, I would like to follow on from the point that my noble friend Lady Farrington of Ribbleton has made. I was a member of your Lordships’ House while fulfilling the office of chair of the Metropolitan Police Authority. At the same time, I was also a member of the London Assembly, which is often regarded as a full-time post in its own right. Indeed, I chaired one of the political groups on the London Assembly during that period, and for two of those years I was a member of a London borough council in addition. I have to say that the amount of time I devoted to my London borough council duties was perhaps less than it had been hitherto, but I devoted it during the evenings, and I was still able to make a significant contribution to your Lordships’ House. If I recall correctly, during that period my voting record was at least 50 per cent, and I was able to participate on most days in the discussions in your Lordships’ House, so it is possible to make these contributions and to combine them. While I would not want to say how your Lordships regarded my contributions, when noble Lords were making comments in relation to policing, the immediate experience available from somebody who was chairing a police authority at that time was clearly valued and listened to accordingly.

It therefore seems anomalous that we are now in a position where we are saying that membership of this House is becoming incompatible with holding this sort of elected office. Why is this particular office being singled out in this way? Where is the parallel set of proposals that would preclude people holding other elected offices from sitting in your Lordships’ House? I think that the Government have got themselves into a little bit of a tangle, completely unnecessarily, on what is, after all, a fairly small point.

[Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton]

Would my noble friend allow me to point out to him that the contributions he made were always valuable, as were those of the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, who was a member of the London Assembly at the time, and the noble Lord, Lord Tope, who was on the Committee of the Regions? I think that the Government should welcome this plethora of experience. The noble Baroness, Lady Harris of Richmond, also learnt a great deal and informed the House a great deal. I am sure that the Minister will want to take this away in order to ensure that your Lordships' House has up-to-date information about what is happening in other bodies, particularly those that the Government seem so determined to establish in their own model.