Police Service: New Governance Structure

Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts

Thursday 1st November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

My Lords, I declare my interest as chair of the All-Party Group on Policing, vice-president of the APA and adviser to various providers of services in the policing market. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, and to hear the powerful sentiments she expressed about listening to the voices from the community and victims. We are all grateful to my noble friend Lady Henig for giving us the opportunity to consider these matters today. The Motion focuses on the effects of the new governance landscape.

In my view, it is important to remember the scale of the other challenges facing the police service. Police numbers in England and Wales are now at their lowest level since 2003, with a fall of 5,000 in the past year alone. Overall policing budgets are being reduced by around 20% in the current CSR period with the expectation of more to follow. At the same time, the police’s partners in reducing crime—local authorities, youth services, probation and so on—are also facing substantial budget reductions. Last year’s riots demonstrated the thinness of the thin blue line.

Public respect for the police service has been damaged by the revelations in the Leveson inquiry and the report on Hillsborough. At the same time, many police officers are becoming increasingly despondent that Ministers hold them in contempt, which was all brought into sharp relief by the behaviour of the former Government Chief Whip at the gates of Downing Street. Let us not underestimate the deep disquiet felt by a large number of officers about the Winsor reforms to their pay and pensions.

Over the next few years, the pressures will become greater. We can only speculate what the impact of prolonged, slow growth will be on crime trends. We have the globalisation of crime and the burgeoning consequences of e-crime and cybercriminality, together with a speed of communication that can turn any police interaction with the public into a world-wide internet sensation in moments but can also facilitate flash mobs and the like. The consequence of this is that we face the very real prospect of a vicious cycle in our policing where fewer officers with less public support and less support from partners are facing increasing challenges. Amidst all that, the arrival of 41 newly minted, directly elected police and crime commissioners may seem like a bit of a distraction.

I strongly believe that police accountability is extremely important and that strong figures to lead this are needed. However, the flaws of the new system are significant. There are no proper checks and balances in the governance arrangements and there is a real risk of politicising aspects of operational policing that should not be politicised. I should like to illustrate that by looking at London where a variant of the new system has been operating for a while. It will not have escaped your Lordships’ attention that in London we have a directly elected mayor. Since October 2008, the Mayor of London has been able to appoint himself or another person to lead what was then the Metropolitan Police Authority. In January 2012, the authority was abolished and replaced by the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime.

London has already shown up some of the problems. The first is a lack of transparency. Information about the operation of the police service or about key financial decisions that was previously made available in published police authority committee papers is no longer available or is available only in very abbreviated form. The second is the lack of visible answerability of senior police officers. A few weeks ago, the new deputy mayor for policing and crime instructed Bernard Hogan-Howe, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, not to attend the London Assembly’s police and crime committee eight minutes before the meeting was due to begin.

The third problem is that the deputy mayor has to act on his or her own, as PCCs will have to do. As the current incumbent has commented to me, he does not have what he calls the “band width” to address all the topics that the public might expect him to pursue. It is simply impossible for one person to do so. When I chaired the police authority in London, I had 22 members to whom I could delegate matters. Those 22 members could also keep an eye on me, which meant that capricious decisions could not be taken. But the Government, in their wisdom, have declined to provide a standards framework in which PCCs or their equivalents in London should operate. The Government seem to believe that having police and crime panels will be a sufficient safeguard against misconduct.

However, the money being made available for the servicing of these panels outside London is to be just £53,000 per year, which is barely enough to cover the cost of one member of staff who has to co-ordinate the work of and support a disparate group of local councillors drawn from up to a dozen or more different local authorities. Even in London where the police and crime committee of the London Assembly has been better resourced and the 12 members all know and work with each other on a regular basis, it has struggled to get the answers that it wants. There is the potential for problems and inappropriate interventions in operational matters.

Will the Minister tell us whether he regards it as appropriate that an elected PCC should be regularly briefed about the course of a policing operation and should then, almost as a matter of routine, have contact with those who are subject to that operation, and, what is more, then fail to disclose that those contacts have taken place? Perhaps your Lordships will think that such a scenario is far fetched but I have to say that it is not. On 10 January last year, the Mayor of London was briefed by Assistant Commissioner Yates. The mayor later told the London Assembly that he could not remember the briefing in detail but acknowledged that it may well have been about Operation Weeting, the investigation into phone hacking at News International. Four days later he had lunch with Rebekah Brooks and 10 days after that he had dinner with Rupert Murdoch at his London home. Neither of those two meetings was disclosed in the published mayoral diary and they were omitted, initially at least, from the list of contacts with News International that was requested by the London Assembly. There were further briefings from John Yates on 21 April and 3 May. Remarkably, days later, the mayor had more initially undisclosed contacts with News International, including a telephone call with James Murdoch on 6 May and, five days later, with the News International lobbyist, Frederic Michel. I could go on. I have a long list of meetings and contacts.

At the same time, the mayor’s deputy was raising, in an ostensibly jocular way, concerns that too many detectives were involved in investigating phone hacking, so much so that assistant commissioner Dick had to remind him, as she disclosed to the Leveson inquiry, that operational policing decisions were a matter for senior police officers, not elected politicians. The Mayor of London has form for this sort of thing. In February 2009, an investigation was conducted by Jonathan Goolden, a solicitor, at the request of the monitoring officers of the GLA and the MPA—roles that will not exist as far as PCCs are concerned—into the behaviour of the Mayor of London in contacting Damian Green MP at the time of his arrest on suspicion of involvement in breaches of the Official Secrets Act. Mr Goolden found that the mayor’s action in contacting a potential suspect in a criminal investigation was “extraordinary and unwise”. These contacts followed briefings that the mayor had been given about the case.

The changes in the governance of policing that the Government have introduced are ill worked through. They provide no safeguards of any substance against a police commissioner who misbehaves or persistently behaves in an extraordinary and unwise fashion. They will do nothing for transparency and little to improve accountability and they are taking place against a background of profound challenges for policing in this country.