Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts

Wednesday 29th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Henig]

I hear what the noble Lord says and I am sure that that is the case. The noble Lord, Lord Wasserman, has spoken up, as did the noble Baroness, but look at the record. As I say, if six Members on the government Benches—certainly, on the Conservative Benches—have spoken up in favour of the legislation, that is all and it is a very small number for a major change in policy.

It is not surprising to me that that is the case. How could the Benches opposite deny, for example, that party politics will play a much greater role in policing? That is so irrefutable that it cannot possibly be denied. How could they deny that chief constables are going to be subject to much greater pressure on policing issues, both operational and non-operational? No, they cannot refute that. People talk about a protocol but just consider some of the forceful Home Secretaries whom we have had in the past 10, 15 or 20 years. Now consider that some of those Home Secretaries might consider that being a commissioner would be a glorious end to a good parliamentary career. Just imagine some of them now as commissioners. I suggest to Members of this House that they are going to put their views to chief constables in a fairly forceful way.

We talk about “operational” and “non-operational” but, frankly, with that kind of expertise and forcefulness coming from those who could be commissioners in the next few years, chief constables will notice a great difference between the new regime and what they have been used to. They will be subject to greater pressures. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, has already said, thus far we have seen few checks and balances on the powers of commissioners. I am not expecting to see many more, let alone strict checks and balances, so the case for pilots is very strong.

There are even greater arguments in favour of pilots. First, there was no pre-legislative scrutiny, which, for a change of this magnitude, there should have been. It would have made a big difference and a lot of the arguments which we have been having in the past few weeks would have been resolved at that stage. With a constitutional change of this magnitude, to have no pre-legislative scrutiny was, I believe, a great omission. That is one argument. We also know that there was a consultation by the Home Office and that there were over 900 responses. We have never been told how many of those responses favoured what was being proposed and how many opposed it. We can draw from not being told that the great majority of people who responded to the Home Office consultation were opposed. I assure the House that had they not been we would have heard that a great majority were in favour. That, again, is worrying.

As we have gone through the Bill in detail, some very tricky issues have emerged. We have not yet reached the issue of corporations sole, although we soon shall. I know my noble friend Lord Harris will entertain the House with a riveting account of corporations sole and all the difficulties that they will raise. We do not know how they will work. We know that they will lead to problems and to staff issues. That is one area of uncertainty. We know that relations between the commissioners and the PCPs are embryonic at this point in time. We do not know how these bodies will work together. We do not know how the PCPs will be best equipped to undertake scrutiny, not just of the commissioners but of the policing that is delivered in their locality. There has been a great reluctance to give panels the sort of powers that would enable them to have a much more constructive role than the one they have at the moment.

We also know that in some areas we will go back 20 years. For example, we know that there will be no lay involvement in the appointment of deputy chief constables and assistant chief constables. I am long enough in the tooth to remember that when chief constables made these appointments themselves there were enormous difficulties. I for one am not happy to go back 20 years in that regard—at least, not without seeing how it would play out.

We are also being asked to agree to this legislation when the national policing landscape is not yet complete. We do not know how things will play out nationally. We do not know what will replace the senior appointments panel, so we do not know how future candidates for chief officer appointments will come forward. We know nothing about that; there is a complete lack of information at the moment. The framework around senior police appointments is not yet in place. We are being asked to take it on trust. We have not seen any of this. For all those reasons, pilots would make a lot of sense. They would enable the final legislation to iron out many of these issues and to work much more effectively.

What really bothers me is the inflexibility around this, which is driving this legislation. There is a sense that the Government are saying, “We must get this through. We can’t have any deviations or amendments. We mustn’t listen to this; it is all a plot to derail this great reform”. I am sorry but that is not true. There are many of us in this House who care about policing and want to make this work. The noble Lord, Lord Howard, might be surprised to hear this. If there are to be changes to policing, I want them to work. I can see some merit in what is being proposed. I do not reject it out of hand but it can be improved. That is why I support pilots. What bothers me is that I am prepared to be flexible but there is no reciprocal flexibility on the Government’s side. It worries me that the people who are driving this through want to do so with very little change. There has been some change; I see the Minister looking at me. There were changes yesterday. I welcome them and hope that there will be more. However, at the moment the message that has reached me is that there must be no deviation—that this must go through and there must be elections next year. There is a sense that this is being rushed through.

These changes are the most sweeping changes to policing that we have seen in modern times. I am not saying that they should not happen. However, it will be a recipe for disaster if we do not get them right. Policing is too important and sensitive an area to risk courting disaster. To have a pilot—perhaps lasting not four years but two or three—and at least to trial some of these things would do our duty to those who come after us. I am worried that we will introduce things that will irreversibly change the face of policing. Since I do not believe that policing is broken, I shall take a lot of convincing that these changes will be marvellous without at least testing them first. That is why I support pilots.

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Henig, conjures up a fascinating prospect of former Home Secretaries and Secretaries of State standing for election as police and crime commissioners. Given what the Minister has told us today with regard to the bar on Members of this House standing for such positions, we can look forward to the possibility of the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Lympne, becoming the elected police and crime commissioner for Kent.

[Lord Howard of Lympne]

I rather thought that the noble Baroness was inviting me to a contest.

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

I am sure that if the noble Lord were to move to Lancashire, that could be arranged. Although I think that that would be an interesting and enticing prospect, and no doubt incredibly scary for the chief constable of Kent, I wonder whether the damascene conversion that the noble Lord, Lord Howard, has described to us several times would not have been made easier had his original proposals for police authorities been subjected to a series of pilots. He could then perhaps have discovered at an earlier point that the model he initially favoured was flawed.

[Lord Wasserman]

My Lords, as a former professional social scientist I welcome the enthusiasm in this House for pilot studies. However, like so much else in life, there is a right place for pilots and a wrong place. I am afraid that the circumstances we are discussing are very much the wrong place for pilots. I hope that your Lordships will allow me to explain why I say this and to do so by reference to the findings of academic experts.

The use of pilots in political or social research is discussed at some length in a book which I commend to your Lordships which can be found in the Library entitled, Research Methods in Politics. The book begins by pointing out that,

“there are times when … a trial run or pilot has considerable advantages. In particular, to test the data collection instruments such as the questionnaire and the sample design”.

Indeed, the Home Secretary herself is a great believer in the use of pilots in the appropriate context. In a speech that she gave about two months ago—I am sure that some noble Lords will have seen it—she announced not one but two new pilots. The first was related to her wish to allow the police to charge more offences themselves. She said:

“We will pilot doubling the number of charges transferred to police officers”.

She added that if the pilot was successful and the scheme was rolled out fully, it could save up to,

“40,000 hours of police officer time”.

In the same speech she announced that the Home Office was working with ACPO to ensure that best practice on domestic abuse processes was effectively shared by all forces. She said that the next step was to pilot these new proposals, and that if the pilots were successful they would be rolled out across the country.

However, the circumstances we are discussing are nothing like those mentioned by the Home Secretary or the academic experts. They are classic examples of circumstances where pilots are not appropriate and lead only to a waste of time and money. According to the experts, the classic example of the inappropriate use of pilots in a political or social context—that is what we are talking about—is to compare jurisdictions over time and/or space, a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Howard. The experts state:

“There are a number of reasons why comparisons can turn out to be meaningless. Most famously, the condition known as ‘too many variables, not enough cases’. This is a reason why experimental control is rarely an option in political science. Additionally, comparative research is affected by two manifestations of the so-called travelling problem: that is, neither theoretical concepts nor empirical measurements are consistent across temporal and/or spatial settings. In other words, they do not ‘travel’. This diminishes the possibility of controlling for the effect of variables other than those of primary interest”.

Translating the jargon, what these experts are trying to say is that it is impossible to make meaningful comparisons between different times and places because there are simply too many factors in play. However, your Lordships do not need academic experts to tell you that the sort of governance arrangements such as those that we are discussing cannot be subject to scientific evaluation.

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[Lord Wasserman]

This is not about using a particular bit of legislation in particular areas and comparing them in an academic research environment. The examples that I am giving noble Lords are of real change achieved by real chiefs with real mayors in real cities.

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

The core of the noble Lord’s argument against pilots is that he is cautioning us against the spatial differences between different parts of this country and the temporal differences—because this is a different time. Now he is saying that you can draw from experience 3,000-plus miles away, which is quite a big spatial difference, under a different legal system and so on. The temporal difference is that the improvement under Mayor Giuliani happened a number of years ago. I am not quite sure where this argument is taking your Lordships.

[Lord Soley]

In a circle.

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Moved by

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

8: Schedule 2, page 108, line 25, leave out paragraph 2

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[Lord Harris of Haringey]

My Lords, first I must apologise to the House. This is an extremely complicated group of amendments and I am sure that the rapid rate at which your Lordships are leaving the Chamber is an indication of how much people are looking forward to this particular discussion. I also want to apologise for the fact that because it is so complicated I have got the groupings slightly wrong. In this group we should be debating Amendment 84, which is in the next group; Amendments 204 and 205 would more comfortably sit with Amendment 203 at some much later stage, because it is a really quite separate debate; and I am not going to speak to Amendment 25 because some of the other amendments more than cover that point.

Therefore, I am speaking to Amendments 8 to 13, 24 to 28, 30 to 32, 65, 84, 268 and 269, 274 to 290, 294 and 295. These all relate to creating corporation sole status for chief constables and the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis and deal with the implications arising from that. They would allow the local policing body to delegate functions to a chief officer, to enable the day-to-day management of police resources without having to create a separate legal identity for chief officers. The amendments also deal with audit implications, in that chief officers do not need to employ a separate statutory financial officer to undertake this function as all audit responsibilities will remain with the local policing body.

The other amendments confirm that chief officers will not be able to enter contracts, acquire or dispose of property and land or borrow money in their own right, but that they could do so under the terms of a delegation agreement from the local policing body. There are also amendments that would deal with the status quo in relation to police staff; they provide that although the employing body is the governing body, chief officers would have direction and control of all staff employed solely to assist the police force. Finally, there are amendments which deal with accounting and audit issues. Again, they reinstate the status quo and provide a simplified system of governance.

This is a brief summary but I want to explain why these are so critically important. We are in real danger here. Without these amendments I fear that we will create, frankly, little understood structures that will prove unworkable in practice. When we come to the review that the noble Baroness has just promised us in 2017—or rather, I fear, several years before that—we will realise that these arrangements are unworkable and we will have to revisit them. What is more, they will produce additional paralysing bureaucracy—something that I thought this Government did not think was a terribly good idea. It will produce unnecessary duplication—again, something I thought this Government did not agree with. What is worse, it will produce confusion about who is responsible and accountable for the £12 billion police budget.

I understand—at least I think I do—that the Government’s motivation in these proposals is to separate clearly the functions of the governing body from that of the force. I am not convinced that that will actually be the end result. On the contrary, I believe the proposals will result in a confused landscape rather than a simplified one. There is a great deal of concern, as demonstrated in Committee in this House, about the whole concept of corporations sole. I am sure that Ministers are looking forward to explaining it to us yet again in a few minutes. At the moment, the Bill, as amended, contains proposals that the governing body—the police commission or whatever it will be called—is a corporate body and only chief officers are corporations sole. But if, as many of us expect, the Bill should revert to PCCs being corporations sole once it returns to the other place, my comments about the principle of using a corporation sole would apply equally to PCCs.

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[Baroness Browning]

My Lords, the whole point is that this is transparent. These are not things done behind closed doors, which nobody else will know about. While the panel is there, doing its job, we expect it to act, if it identifies such a problem, as with any other problem between the chief constable and the PCC that causes operational difficulties on the ground. The panel should then call the PCC to account for an explanation and to resolve the matter.

I do not agree that there is no check or balance on the PCC in this matter if there is a good strong panel. In a way, this reflects what police authorities do today. I understand the point that the noble Lord is making: this is an individual elected person. However, this is not much different from the way in which the police authorities would step in if they perceived a problem in their force area at the moment. I shall move on from this but I am sure that we will come back to it.

The Government’s view is that there need to be clear lines of accountability for the public. That requires the public to know what the respective responsibilities of the PCC and the chief officer are. The current system of delegation does not allow for this. Inspection has shown that sometimes even police authorities are unclear as to where the divide is. HMIC has said in its report on inspections of police authorities:

“It is critical that police authorities maintain clear division between their governance responsibility and the chief constable’s responsibility to lead and manage the organisation”.

Establishing two corporations sole, and prohibiting delegation means that it will always be clear who has which responsibilities. This a positive move forward. However, chief constables should not have unfettered powers, and this is what we have sought to address. Therefore, I hope I can persuade the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment and to support government Amendments 14, 15, 33 and 34.

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

My Lords, I congratulate the Minister on how she has conducted herself in this, and on her mastery of the niceties of this issue. Having said that, I am afraid I do not entirely agree with her position. She said that I am being unfair—I am sure that is better than being naughty—in complaining that this is a medieval construct. However, it is a medieval construct: it is rooted in the system that sought to avoid priests acquiring property that properly belonged to the Church. I am delighted that the Government have not suggested that we should expand on this medieval construct by, for example, requiring that all chief constables or police and crime commissioners, when they have been elected, be celibate. It might be good in one or two instances but I am not sure that it would be entirely helpful.

The point is that this is still, despite the Minister having discovered that she is a corporation sole, rather a rare construct. The one example—that of the Children’s Commissioner, who has recently been created as a corporation sole—says that this is not a sensible way forward. I do not believe that there is any other circumstance in which you have two corporations sole, one responsible to the other, with two chief financial officers with statutory auditable responsibilities, existing together. I am sure the noble Baroness would tell us if there was such a case. I do not believe that there is a single other structure in the United Kingdom that does that. If I am wrong, I look forward to the noble Baroness interrupting me to tell me. When we have the meeting that she has promised on this matter, perhaps we will be able to go through that in more detail. I appreciate that the Government’s amendments are helpful but they do not solve all the problems.

I do not think that we can take this much further tonight. I was rather tempted to try noble Lords’ patience by dividing the House at this time of night. I am sure that the government Chief Whip would be thrilled if I were to do that as it would reward her troops who have stayed here for many happy hours. However, I do not propose to do so because I take very seriously the noble Baroness’s offer of further discussions. Given the amount of toing and froing between the government Front Bench and the officials’ Box during this brief debate, I rather suspect that the Front Bench is not entirely sure that we have the balance absolutely right. Under those circumstances, it may be necessary for us to return to this matter.

I keep saying that I think it is in the Government’s interest to postpone Third Reading until September to allow for more detailed consideration of some of these points. Otherwise, the danger is that they will store up enormous trouble on these issues. On the basis that the Minister has offered to meet us to discuss the details of this matter, and that we may have the opportunity to discuss it further at Third Reading, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 8 withdrawn.