Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill
Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts(13 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 257 to 267, which are remarkably similar to the Minister’s amendments except that they refer to PCCs and MOPC rather than to the “policing body”, which is perhaps a more elegant formulation.
I seek clarity as to the Government’s intentions for all this. The Government have brought quite a number of these problems on themselves. At the end of last week, I spoke to a senior lawyer employed by a police service who described the Bill as being “inherently contradictory” because of the confusion about what it is trying to achieve. While I welcome the Minister’s proposals in her amendments—which will allow for a two-stage transfer because it will require a two-stage transfer to sort out exactly what the details, the most sensible disposition of staff and the most appropriate way of doing it are going to be—this is a problem that the Government, policing bodies and the police service did not need to have. I cannot understand what is gained by chief officers of police employing all their staff. What extra ability does it give them, apart from a great deal of hassle and potential problems, over having direction and control of those staff? That is a point that the Minister will no doubt explain.
I want to understand exactly what the Government’s amendments do. I assume that the new amendments that the Minister is introducing are intended to maintain the status quo from the commencement of the Bill until the second transfer scheme is effective. I would be grateful if she could confirm that. There is an interesting anomaly if you have a two-stage process. During the first stage, before the second stage kicks into action, there is presumably the potential for the chief officer of police to employ new staff directly subsequent to the first transfer scheme, and this would then create two classes of police staff. I would be grateful if the Minister could tell us whether having two classes of police staff, because there is a two-stage transfer agreement, is intentional and whether she wishes to return to this at Third Reading. I am also not clear whether there is a deadline by which the second-stage transfer should take place. My own view is that the complexities of this mean that it may take a considerable period of negotiation to reach a mutual agreement for staff to be transferred to the chief officer of police, and it is better that those discussions take place at a leisurely pace to allow all the relevant interests to be consulted and involved.
I have one additional question. Will the Minister say whether the transfers under Schedule 15 are going to be legally effective under Scottish law as well as the law in England and Wales? As I understand it, a number of police authorities around the country hold land in Scotland, so these transfers are important.
My final point—again, I would be grateful for the Minister’s explanation—is that, as I understand it, her amendments to Clauses 19 and 20, which were agreed on the first day of Report, will mean that the police and crime commissioner or the MOPC in London will not be able to delegate either to the chief constable or to the Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis any of that body’s staff. They would not be able to delegate to the chief officer of police to arrange a function—the PCC or the MOPC will have to engage the chief officer formally to carry out some functions rather than simply delegate them.
I have seen a letter—rather, I have been provided with a letter; there is no question of it having been “seen” because it was leaked to me or anything like that—from the right honourable Nick Herbert, Minister of State for Policing and Criminal Justice, to the Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, a “Dear Paul and Tim” letter, which tries to set out the Government’s policy. However, it leaves me even more confused as a result. He says:
“On delegation, I have said from the outset that I want the office of the PCC/MOPC and the office of the Chief Officer to be clearly distinct so as to enable proper accountability and a clear division of responsibilities. Preventing the PCC/MOPC from delegating to the Chief Officer is an important part of this”.
Will the Minister tell us why that is so important, because delegation is a very clear statement?
Nick Herbert goes on to say:
“This means that should a PCC/MOPC want a Police Force to carry out some functions, he or she will have to formally engage the Chief Officer to do so, rather than simply delegate it. This will help clarify roles and responsibilities, which I do not believe is the case under the current system”.
I dispute that. Will the Minister explain to us very clearly the distinction between delegation and formal engagement? What is the process that underpins formal engagement? Is it a contract or a memorandum of understanding? What exactly is envisaged? I suspect that the Government are creating a new bureaucracy, further uncertainty and further duplication.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Browning)
My Lords, we do not disagree with the principle behind the amendments proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Harris, that the PCC or the MOPC should be able to make their own decisions about transfers. However, the government amendments will maintain the status quo—the noble Lord asked about that, and that is the intention—and provide stability in the transitional phase by providing that all staff and assets transfer from police authorities to PCCs or the MOPC initially. They then enable the PCCs and the MOPC to write transfer orders to transfer staff to the chief constable or commissioner.
Perhaps I could begin by addressing first the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt. Amendment 264A would mean that a police authority could transfer staff only to the police force; no member of the police authority staff could be transferred to the PCC or the MOPC. As a preliminary point, the Bill provides for the police staff to be employed by the chief officer of police, not the police force, which does not exist as a separate entity capable of employing staff. Noble Lords whose names have been put to these amendments might like to make the police force the employer rather than the chief officer, but no amendment has been tabled to achieve that. Obviously, I can answer only to amendments that have actually been tabled.
To clarify the separate roles of the PCC or the MOPC on the one hand and the chief officer on the other, and to ensure that each can carry out his or her functions independently, it is essential that each employs his or her own staff. As such, the Bill must allow for staff to be transferred to the PCC and to the MOPC; it does not direct that that happens, but it allows for the best decisions to be made locally.
Amendment 109A would give police and crime panels a role in reviewing PCCs’ human resources policy. This would already fall under the existing general powers of panels to scrutinise PCCs. I do not think that the way forward taken by these amendments would achieve the sort of protection needed, but I make a commitment to the House that I will consider the matter further. Perhaps this can be returned to in the other place, given the late stage of this Bill. I therefore ask that the amendments are not pressed to a vote.
I will now speak to the government amendments and answer some of the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Harris, who asked why delegation was necessary. It is exactly as the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice says; if the PCC wants to ask the chief constable to do something, he or she will need to commission it formally—they cannot just order the PCC to do it.
Lord Harris of Haringey
I am trying to understand how the process that is being described will differ from delegation, which is not the same as simply ordering—it is a process. How is that going to change when you do not have delegation but instead have this commissioning process?
Baroness Browning
I guarantee to write to the noble Lord about this, but the principle behind it is that it is very clear to the public who is responsible for what. The process that will be employed is more detailed than I have information for tonight, but I shall write to him specifically on the issue of process that he has raised.
The amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, would allow PCCs and the MOPC, as well as police authorities, to make transfer schemes to transfer staff and assets. I completely appreciate the position that the noble Lord is coming from. The Government have been working closely with police forces and authorities on how the transitional arrangements should operate.
Many are concerned about whether there is enough time in which to write transfer schemes ahead of the introduction of PCCs and the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime. They have also expressed concerns about trying to second-guess what staffing a PCC may want when they come into office. As such, it is eminently sensible, as the noble Lord, Lord Harris, suggests, to allow PCCs and the MOPC to write transfer schemes. However, government Amendments 256B to 267M in this group simplify matters even further. They simply maintain the status quo for a period, with all police authority staff and assets transferring initially to PCCs and the MOPC. This will enable transfer schemes to be written by PCCs and the MOPC in slower time. I hope that the noble Lord will look at my proposed amendments and agree that they achieve the same end, and I hope on that basis that he will agree to withdraw his amendment and support the government amendments.
The noble Lord also asked about Scotland. I understand why he asked that. Government Amendments 309ZB and 309ZD extend the territorial extent of Schedule 15, so that transfers under that schedule are legally effective under Scots law as well as in England and Wales.
Government Amendments 256A and 267P to 267Q enable the continued employment of chief officers of police. There has been a lot of discussion on this matter, but, finally, Amendment 267N ensures that accounting and audit arrangements can be put in place for police authorities and the PCC or the MOPC in respect of the financial year when the transition takes place. I realise from the interest that the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, has taken in this in particular that these are important matters. We want to get it right, and I will promise to write to him on matters of process and update him on where we are.
Baroness Browning
I was referring only to the chief executive protections for discussion in another place.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, I realise that we are stretching the rules of Report, but this is important. Presumably when the matter goes to the other place, we can receive back from them only amendments that relate to amendments passed by your Lordships' House. That will produce a very narrow range of areas. Areas on which there is no amendment from your Lordships' House will not be covered. I make this plea for the fourth time that it would be in the Government’s interests to postpone Third Reading on this Bill to 5 September. It would lose them only one parliamentary day, but it would enable the Home Office, the Minister’s officials and colleagues around the House to spend a little bit more time getting the details right. It would also give the Minister the opportunity to come back on some of these detailed points.
Baroness Henig
My Lords, I have suddenly realised that some days ago I moved an amendment, did I not, about statutory protection for chief executives, and withdrew it because the noble Baroness would not give me any assurances on this. Does this not rule out any changes? I am puzzled because I did move this amendment and, as I recall, it was rejected.
Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill
Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts(13 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, I shall also speak to Amendments 201 to 205. I share with the Government a desire to strengthen and improve police accountability. That is what I understood the Bill to be all about. I have to say that, during your Lordships’ consideration of the Bill, I have slowly realised that the Bill will weaken the accountability of the police to the public. In fact, some changes made in the Bill remove the levers that police authorities currently have to ensure that the police service in their area is accountable. There will be fewer powers and fewer levers for the police and crime commissioners and the MOPC in London as a result of this Bill.
Indeed, the diminution of police accountability in London is even worse than in the rest of the country. First, London will not have the benefit of an individual who is directly elected to be responsible for policing. We will not have the visible answerability of the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis and his senior officers to public forums. The police authority will disappear, as will the expectation that the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis will appear there. There will be a special meeting of members of the Metropolitan Police Authority on Thursday to question the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis about the latest issues and allegations concerning phone hacking and related matters. That public answerability of the police will disappear because all that the Government are substituting for that is the right to invite by the London Assembly, which is of course a current right. All that will disappear as a consequence of the Government’s Bill.
We are also now being told that in practice the Mayor of London and the MOPC will have no say in the selection of the most senior police officers in the London areas, which is why I have tabled this series of amendments. Certainly the Mayor of London and the MOPC will have less influence than they do at present. I find that extraordinary. This Government have told us that they want to strengthen police accountability. Why then have they diminished it, really very substantially as far as London is concerned? No senior officer, in fact no officer at all, of the Metropolitan Police will be appointed on the say-so or otherwise of the Mayor of London or the MOPC. That will simply not exist. The Minister is looking baffled, but that is the reality of the legislation that is being proposed.
The Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis will be appointed by Her Majesty the Queen on the advice of the Home Secretary, and the Home Secretary is required merely to “have regard” to the recommendations of the MOPC. That is not a very strong power, given that the whole basis of this Bill is supposed to be that the directly elected individual should be able to appoint the most senior police officer in their area. At present, because the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis is a royal appointment, there is a joint interview between the Home Secretary and the Mayor of London to determine the nature of the recommendation that is made. Fortunately, when this structure has been tested, the Mayor of London and the Home Secretary have agreed on that recommendation. It is not quite clear what would happen if they did not agree, but the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis must have the confidence of the Home Secretary and the Mayor of London or the MOPC in the future. This Bill does not provide for such a strength in that purpose. There is no expectation of a joint interview. There is no expectation that the Mayor of London and the MOPC will have any right other than to make recommendations to which the Home Secretary will have regard. That is a very weak involvement.
Thus begins a declining scale of involvement of the Mayor of London and the MOPC. For the Deputy Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis, the Home Secretary is required only “to consider” representations from the MOPC. That is not even “have regard” to; it is “to consider” representations. For assistant commissioners, deputy assistant commissioners and commanders, all chief officer ranks outside London, the most that is expected is a consultation process. That is why this Bill is so weak on accountability in the London area. That is why this Bill takes away from the Mayor of London even his current responsibilities in relation to senior police officers in the force.
I have therefore tabled a series of amendments that would mean that the Home Secretary’s recommendation had to be agreed with the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime in respect of the commissioner and deputy commissioner and that no person should be appointed as an assistant commissioner, a deputy assistant commissioner or a commander without the consent of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime. I know that the Government wish to put chief officers of police in the driving seat for this process. This series of amendments would not alter it—it says that the MOPC should have to give consent. That is a pretty minimalist requirement and expectation if you really believe the Government’s own rhetoric that this Bill is about strengthening accountability and empowering the directly elected representative of the people to have responsibility for the police service in their area. I find it bizarre that the Government, having made such a song and dance about how this Bill is all about strengthening police accountability, are going to leave London, and for that matter the rest of the country, with less influence over policing. I beg to move.
Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, is it in order to ask the Minister a question? The speakers list for today gives an estimated time of rising of 11 pm and it is now after 10.05 pm. However, it says that the target is to be confirmed. We have not had it confirmed. As Amendment 242 is tabled in my name, and we are now at Amendment 200, can the Minister enlighten me as to whether we intend to take it tonight?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Harris, offered a picture of a golden age of policing accountability in London that is about to disappear. I was under the impression that under current arrangements the Metropolitan Police Authority has no power to compel the commissioner to appear before it but has the right to invite the commissioner to appear before it, as its successor body will have under the Bill.
Lord Harris of Haringey
The Minister is confusing the Metropolitan Police Authority and the London Assembly, which at present has no power to compel; it has the power to invite, and that is all that the Government are offering the London Assembly and its policing panel. That was merely by way of an introduction to my more significant remarks. But I think that the Minister is confused.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
I still hold to my view that the noble Lord is exaggerating enormously the difference between where we are now and where we will be.
Lord Harris of Haringey
The Minister is misunderstanding the point. At present, the visible answerability of the Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis is to the Metropolitan Police Authority. Those meetings take place once a month. In the case of the current month, there will probably be an additional meeting in which the commissioner will answer questions in public to the body to which he is accountable on issues concerning the controversies of which we are all aware about phone hacking. That will disappear, and all that the Government are offering in its place is the right to invite by the London Assembly panel.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
I take the noble Lord’s point, but these amendments are primarily concerned with the question of appointment. The noble Lord’s amendments are concerned to shift the balance of authority in terms of appointments, with senior appointments between the Secretary of State and MOPC and for other appointments to strengthen the power of the MOPC. My understanding is that the mayor will be able to make recommendations to the Secretary of State, but the national and international responsibilities of the Metropolitan Police are such that the Bill proposes that the final decision should be taken by the Secretary of State on the appointment of the commissioner and the deputy commissioner. The mayor will have the right to make recommendations, which will of course be taken fully into account. That is the whole purpose of the phrase “to have regard”; we envisage a dialogue and a process, but not one that can lead to deadlock between the two authorities, because of the particular national and international responsibilities of the Metropolitan Police.
In terms of other appointments below that of deputy commissioner, the Bill as a whole clings to the idea of the operational independence of the police. It will be the right of the chief constable or of the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in this case to make other appointments. These of course will be made in consultation with the MOPC and there will also be external supervision, but the principle will be one of police independence; a clear line of responsibility from the commissioner and the deputy commissioner will then follow for other appointments within the force.
The noble Lord wishes to have the MOPC in the central position; we are putting the MOPC in the position of scrutiny and accountability and not in one of control. That is not dissimilar to the current position. He is asking for a much stronger position for the MOPC than has been the case in the past—
Lord Harris of Haringey
Can you tell me why it is stronger? What element have you strengthened in this Bill? Give me one example of an element in which you have strengthened the role of the MOPC compared with the existing police authority.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
The noble Lord misunderstands me. I said you are asking for a much stronger position for the MOPC than there was even under the previous regime. That is the point I am making.
Lord Harris of Haringey
At present the Metropolitan Police Authority appoints all officers between the ranks of assistant commissioner and commander. That disappears and the MOPC has no role other than to be consulted. The current position for the appointment of the commissioner and the deputy commissioner is that there are joint interviews; there is nothing in this Bill which allows that to continue.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
I stand corrected but I hold to the principle which runs through this Bill—that of the independence of the police in terms of command and senior appointment and the international and national role of the Metropolitan Police as an exception in this regard. This is why the Bill is written in this form. On that basis I invite the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, I have to say that I do not think the Minister has addressed the central problem. What he is actually doing for the most prominent directly elected individual in the country is reducing that individual’s responsibility for the police service in that area. The Bill removes from the mayor and the MOPC the powers that currently exist. That means that in future the Mayor of London will have less influence over the Metropolitan Police than he and the MPA currently have. That is an extraordinary reversal of what this Bill seems to be about.
I find it extraordinary that the Minister’s response has not addressed that central question. Of course, the Metropolitan Police has a national and international function, which is why, exceptionally, it should be a joint appointment rather than simply the appointment of the mayor’s office. That is the concession that ought to be made as far as the national and international functions are concerned. I fail to see why assistant commissioners, who rank as chief officers of police everywhere else in the country, are not part of the responsibility of the mayor’s office. The Government are diminishing the authority of the mayor in respect of policing in London, and that runs directly counter to the Government’s own rhetoric as to what this Bill is about.
I urge the Government to consider this in the few remaining days that we have left for the consideration of this Bill. On the basis that I am sure they will wish to do so, and to receive further representations from the Mayor of London on this point, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, I support the amendment for a number of reasons. First, the Bill is amazingly silent on transitional arrangements. In the immediate aftermath of the vote on the first day in Committee, the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, raised with a degree of interruption and noises off—from me, I appreciate—the question of the transitional arrangements that should be in force before a new system is put in place. I would not go as far as those who reorganised London government in the 1960s where there was one year of shadow operation. But I note that there were several months of shadow operation when the new arrangements in London for the Assembly and the mayor took effect. All the Bill provides for in terms of a transition period is seven days—seven calendar days, one week—for transition from one system of governance to another. That seems strikingly short to me, under any set of circumstances. However, that is the smallest and most insignificant of reasons for supporting this amendment.
My admiration for the Home Secretary grows every day, because of the bravery she shows. In Sir Humphrey Appleby terms, the decisions she is taking on policing are extremely brave. Currently, in policing, there is a most extraordinary agenda of change. There are substantial budget reductions, starting with the current year, and moving through next year and the rest of the CSR period. Major changes are proposed for the terms and conditions of police officers, which will at least cause a degree of stress, uncertainty and confusion, if not downright anger from many police officers. Changes are proposed in the pensions of police officers, which are also causing a substantial degree of distress, concern and anger. That is all happening at the same time as other parts of the public sector are withdrawing various functions from their activities so that more will be expected of the police force.
At the same time, we have the challenge of the Olympics, which is probably the largest policing challenge that has ever been faced in this country, comparing a modern Olympiad with the last time that London hosted the Olympics, in 1948. There is the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Wedged in that very short interval between the Olympic Games and the Paralympic Games is the Notting Hill Carnival, Europe’s largest street festival, involving major policing resources. In the midst of all this, our brave Home Secretary is proposing that we change the governance arrangements for policing in London and the rest of the country.
In supporting this amendment I am not trying to frustrate the Government’s intention. I am simply trying to point out that there are major risks in doing this on that timetable, with one week’s transition. That is all that is envisaged for the rest of the country and it is very unclear when the transition in London might take place. All of that will occur, at a time when all of these other things are going on.
I know that our brave Home Secretary has taken the decision to reduce the security alert status, which is always a brave decision for any Home Secretary because that supposes that you know of everything that might be just around the corner. However, the security situation is that there is a very serious terrorist threat against the Olympic Games. There are enormous public order and security challenges. It is not just al-Qaeda and its affiliates that we should be concerned about. Because of the global interest in the Olympic Games—with an estimated several billion people watching the opening ceremony on television around the world—this is an opportunity for any organisation anywhere in the world, pursuing its local objectives, to get publicity on a global scale. The threat is enormous, and in the midst of it our brave Home Secretary plans to change the governance arrangements for policing.
The amendment is very modest. It does not frustrate the Government's objectives. It merely says, “At least get the Olympic and Paralympic Games out of the way before you make this change”. Is there any need for further distraction under the circumstances? Is there any need for that degree of disruption? Is it not better to wait for a few short months, which will have the added benefit of allowing a sensible period of transition to the new governance arrangements? I urge noble Lords to support the amendment.
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, my recollection of the transition/shadow period for the Greater London Authority was that it was very short and clearly not long enough, but that is not the point I will make tonight.
I sometimes think that, faced with a difficult decision, it is wise to ask oneself, “How will I feel, looking back in six months or a year, if I did or did not do something?”. In this situation, if the Government postpone the changes in London, they will be able to look back a year and a half from now and say, “Phew, that went okay. What damage did we do by not making the changes? Well, none really. What damage have we suffered? Maybe a little to our egos, but does that matter?”. How much better to be in that situation if there has been a problem, which may or may not be related to the changes in governance, than to be told by the noble Lord opposite or my noble friend behind me, “Well, we did warn you”, and for the world to say, “You were warned”.
I do not see a problem if the Government make what is hardly even a concession but more a slight shift in thinking. The balance is between very little on the one hand, and possibly nothing but possibly something catastrophic on the other.
Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill
Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts(13 years, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, I have Amendments 166, 167 and 179 in this group. The first two would allow the London Assembly to determine whether to discharge its functions under the Bill either through a committee or through the full Assembly. At the moment the Bill prescribes. In responding to a similar amendment at the previous stage, the Minister said:
“The first question to address here is why there should be a bespoke committee of the London Assembly called the police and crime panel rather than, as proposed by noble Lords, the functions being conferred on the London Assembly as a whole. The reason is one of practicality. Having a dedicated committee, representative of the wider London Assembly, will ensure that sufficient attention and scrutiny can be paid to delivering its policing responsibilities and would also allow for independent members to be brought on to the panel … This smaller group will be able to focus its attentions on the important business of scrutinising, in detail, the actions and decisions of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime”.—[Official Report, 24/5/11; col. 1800.]
I am not sure whether I can say this of the noble Baroness, but I thought, reading that, it was really rather paternalistic. The London Assembly is a grown-up body, with its current and past members and, I am sure, its future members, and ought to be able to take its own decisions as to the best way of organising itself.
I remember when we were debating the GLA Bill, which became the GLA Act 1999, it originally provided for the Government to deal with, I think, the standing orders of the Assembly. I remember the noble Baroness, Lady Farrington of Ribbleton, saying from the Government Front Bench, “This is ridiculous. It can sort itself out”. She was quite right then and I make the same point now. There seems to have been some confusion, in any event, on the Government side, because earlier the same day the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, said:
“We argue that it is for the London Assembly as a democratically elected body to decide for itself how the membership of the panel should be chosen”.—[Official Report, 24/5/11; col. 1751.]
I accept that this was a slightly different context and a slightly different point, but I argue that the London Assembly as a democratically elected body should be able to decide for itself how it carries out its functions.
Amendment 179 would provide for the Assembly to approve or reject the draft police and crime plan, or a variation, with the veto of a two-thirds majority—unco-ordinated, but the same point as that made by my noble friend. I feel that it is appropriate for the Assembly to be able to treat the plan in the same way as it does mayoral strategies. On this point, the Minister said at the previous stage that it would not be appropriate for the panel to have a power of veto because of the plan being statutory in nature. My short point here is that the strategies to which my noble friend has referred—she managed to say statutory strategies without tripping over the words—are statutory in nature. I do not see that there is any qualitative difference between the two.
Finally, I have two questions about government Amendment 172. I welcome the clarification of the position regarding co-options, but if the Assembly is to be able to fix the number of members of the panel—reverting to my earlier point—can the Assembly create a committee which consists of all 25 members as a result of this amendment?
The third subsection of the amendment states that the,
“panel functions must be exercised with a view to supporting the effective exercise of the functions of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime”.
That picks up today’s theme of the constructive, collaborative and supportive nature of the relationship. I am not quite sure whether the Government might have gone too far on that because, in exercising the functions, the panel or the Assembly might support the best outcome but oppose the way in which the mayor’s office chooses to exercise them.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, this is an important group of amendments on which a number of issues are raised. The amendments highlight how serious the Government are, or are not, about these scrutiny bodies—in London it is the London Assembly structure—in terms of what they can and cannot do. The amendments would enable some opportunities for the London Assembly to propose amendments and changes to the policing plan.
At the moment, the London Assembly is charged with consideration of a whole series of statutory plans; for example, the Spatial Development Strategy and the transport strategy. I think that there are about seven or eight of these strategies, but that figure may have increased since I was a member of the London Assembly. In addition, there is the biodiversity action plan, which is specifically referred to in the Greater London Authority Act. The Government, or one arm of them, are busy changing the statute so as to give the London Assembly the power for which I have often argued in the past; namely, the ability to amend those plans by a suitable majority. Why is that not part of the Government’s vision for policing? It is absent and I do not understand why. I could suggest that the Home Office does not talk to the Department for Communities and Local Government, which is unthinkable, or that there is a reason why the policing strategy is seen in a different light from the other plans and strategies that the mayor is required to put before the London Assembly.
I suppose I am pleased to see that the Government have responded to the concerns expressed by many Members of your Lordships’ House about the need to ensure that, in the case of the PCPs, the chief officer of police should be able to appear before them or, in the case of the London Assembly, that the London Assembly should be able to see the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis. But it is a very weak and watery power that the Government have put forward in the amendment. It is simply the power to invite, which does not need to be written into statute because it already exists. The Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis appears several times a year before the full London Assembly on the basis of the current implicit right to invite. Therefore, the Government have made no concession at all.
By the abolition of police authorities, the Government are removing the place where the public know there will be visible answerability by senior police officers. The right to invite is not a significant new right. Under most circumstances, any sensible chief officer of police and any Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis will accept such an invitation. When there are difficult circumstances, it is important to the public that senior police officers are seen to be required to appear before a public body in that way. I have spoken in this Chamber previously—I will not repeat all the points I have made—about the value of visible answerability and the important opportunities that that gives for the public to see that the police are being held accountable.
It is no substitute that under the new arrangements London will have the deputy MOPC who will not, unfortunately, have the benefit of being directly elected but will hold the commissioner of police to account, while outside London the PCC will hold the chief officer of police to account. That process inevitably will happen in private. A one-to-one meeting cannot be held in public. That will not be a system of visible answerability, so there has to be that visible answerability somewhere else—in the case of London, that should be the London Assembly. The right to invite is not sufficient. On limited occasions, there must be the right for the London Assembly to summons. It is very sad that that has not been the case. In passing, the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, asked whether the London Assembly could decide that all 25 members should sit and carry out this scrutiny function. At present, the full London Assembly on occasions meets as a whole to ask questions about policing. Will that now be precluded by the Bill and the way in which it has been structured? That is the implication. You end up with less visible answerability and less visible accountability, and the arrangements that already exist are diminishing. Surely, that is not the Government’s intention, which is why this group of amendments is so important.
Baroness Browning
My Lords, I assure the House that there is absolutely no question that the Home Office is not part of the Government. I am shocked to the quick that the noble Lord should suggest such a thing. There is a difference between the Mayor of London and the mayor’s election but, unlike mayoral strategies on which the mayor goes to the electorate, within the Bill there is a lot of detail which is already in statute that relates to policing, structure and the mayor’s function in London policing. This is therefore different from other matters which the mayor may go to the electorate on as part of a broader manifesto. I see the noble Lord, Lord Harris, about to rise.
Lord Harris of Haringey
I am grateful to the Minister. I hope that she is not relying on a brief from the Home Office which suggests that somehow the policing and crime plan is intrinsically different from the other mayoral strategies. There is the most extraordinary volume of legislation about what the Mayor of London can do on development issues in London. There is an extraordinary volume of legislation about what the Mayor of London can do with transport. The legislation specifies very complicated arrangements for consultation with the public of London before the mayor can frame the spatial development strategy and the transport strategy. To suggest that there is anything special here regarding policing compared with those other pieces of legislation is, I am afraid, nonsense.
To save me getting up again, if the Government are concerned that this sets a precedent for the rest of the country then why on earth are they having a different system of governance in London than in the rest of the country? Once you have accepted a different system of governance in London, then what you do in terms of how London operates does not set a precedent.
Baroness Browning
My Lords, we have been round this circuit quite a few times. The difference is that the mayor, unlike PCCs, covers a distinct police force area. The election of the mayor has already taken place; we are familiar with the structure. I know that the noble Lord is going to jump up and talk about the City of London police, and I accept the point. He has made the point and I think that I have fully understood it.
The structure in London is different from that in the rest of the country. In this uniformity across the country, however, we have tried to identify where there are differences in London—and there are differences—and draft the Bill accordingly. This may come as a surprise to the noble Lord because I have just said that we already have detail in statute on this matter, which we have, but at all levels, whether it is London or elsewhere, we have tried to introduce checks and balances throughout the Bill at the same time as keeping a light touch. We want to give PCCs and the MOPC the opportunity to be flexible and to make their plans according to their local priorities and demands. There is a structure within the Bill that will affect all of the country, including London—and there are differences that affect London because of the precedent of already having an elected mayor—but we want this to be something that is not top-heavy and not prescriptive from the centre, that allows local accountability for local decision-making that is a local priority and not something set down by Whitehall.
I would also like to put this on the record. Some noble Lords were not here on Friday when it was suggested that there is a difference between me and the Home Office. I have heard what has been said about the Home Office. This is not the first time in my career that I have been a Minister. It has never been my practice as a Minister to separate myself either from the department that I represent or from the Government whom I represent. There is hardly a cigarette paper’s width—if that is not being terribly politically incorrect—between us. I take full responsibility for the Home Office in your Lordships’ House. I hope it is meant kindly, but it does not always sound that way. I suggest to noble Lords that if there is criticism of the Home Office in your Lordships’ House, it rests on my desk. I take full responsibility for that. If people have complaints about the Home Office, I would ask that, as with all other complaints, they put it in writing, and I will respond accordingly.
Baroness Browning
I take seriously what the noble Baroness says about chief officers. I appreciate the seriousness of the point that she is making. I hope that the Bill has taken account of that, not least in the protocol that has been discussed with colleagues in this House across all parties. I said on Report last week that we are still considering whether or not to put the protocol or the principle of a protocol in the Bill. That protocol has been developed with ACPO and others to try and get this balance right. It is very much in the interests of chief officers. I am not able to say today what the outcomes are of that decision-making, but I assure the House that we are seriously looking at whether or not to put the principle into the Bill. Did the noble Lord, Lord Harris, want me to give way?
Lord Harris of Haringey
The Minister may have misunderstood what I was saying on a point that I made earlier on. It is not that the ability of the Assembly to vary local plans runs across the thrust of government policy. I understand that the thrust of government policy is to release local energies to determine what the priorities are. If that is the case and you then say that the London Assembly cannot vary what is being determined locally, does that not cut across the sort of localism that the Government say they want? This is not about the problems of the Assembly interfering with national strategies or requirements; it is about the ability of the Assembly to say, “These are the local priorities”. Where there is a clear two-thirds margin—a pretty high target—that is something that the MOPC would have to take on board.
I cannot understand why the Government are saying that policing is different from spatial development strategy—say, the size of strategic tall buildings, the size of the congestion zone area or any of those other issues. These are not laid down nationally; they are determined locally. Of course the Mayor of London has been elected with a manifesto but the London Assembly, representing all parts of London, may well say, by a two-thirds majority, “We think that you should take this back and review it”. That is what the Government are saying could happen in those other areas—why are they not saying that it can happen with regard to policing?
Baroness Browning
We have a situation in London where, although I said earlier that there is a difference between London and the other areas, there will be an opportunity to scrutinise the plan. I do not want this to sound as if it is an isolated case. We have had these discussions now. We have tried to strengthen in the Bill the fact that there is a need not just to scrutinise and challenge but also to support. Where the plan is being drawn up, it is not just something that happens overnight. I would expect it to be subject to a series of consultations so there would be ample opportunity, if there were reservations, for the plan to be amended to take account of different points of view that had been put forward. It is not just an isolated thing.
Perhaps this is my fault but I have a feeling that in the earlier stages of the Bill, when we were talking about the plan, I did not spell out this aspect in more detail. It is not the case that one day somehow a plan is suddenly produced and presented for consultation and people sitting in committee then make their views known. We want them to have time to look at the plan in some detail; I raised this in an earlier amendment. There will need to be that period of time. The plan will not be put together overnight. There will be plenty of opportunities for views to be brought forward and for real consultation to take place.
Lord Harris of Haringey
I do not want to prolong this, but that is exactly the situation that already exists regarding the transport strategy. There is a requirement, which if I remember correctly seems almost unduly onerous, for any amendment to the transport strategy to require two separate consultation processes. I look across the Chamber at those current Members of the London Assembly. So the transport strategy is not something that happens suddenly; it happens after a great deal of discussion and process. Yet the Government are saying that the transport strategy can be amended by a two-thirds majority of the London Assembly. I put this question again to your Lordships: why is policing different from transport?
Baroness Browning
I realise that the mayor will have said things about transport, I appreciate that, but the mandate that the mayor will have been elected on will have outlined how he sees the reduction of crime in London. It is important that that is not fettered by a veto, which it could be.
Lord Harris of Haringey
You could say exactly the same about congestion in London. The mayor has stood on a manifesto that says he is going to reduce congestion in London by various methods, yet the Government are giving the power to the London Assembly to amend the strategy by a two-thirds majority after two separate consultation exercises before the strategy is finalised and those decisions are taken.
I am not trying to be difficult here. Well, I am trying to be difficult because I think that these are important issues, but I am afraid that the Government are being totally illogical when they say that policing is different from those other strategies.
Baroness Browning
My Lords, I have to remain illogical to the noble Lord. I can think of nothing else to say to him now that we have not already taken around this circuit, not just in today’s debate but in Committee.
I wonder whether I might start to address some of the amendments that have been raised in this debate, beginning with the veto in Amendment 179 tabled by my noble friends Lady Hamwee and Lord Shipley. I am sure it will come as no surprise to them when I say that I cannot accept it, probably for the most of the reasons that have been exchanged not with them but across the Floor of the House in the past 10 minutes. I can also not accept Amendment 178, tabled by my noble friend Lady Doocey. The amendment would give the London Assembly the power to reject the MOPC’s draft plan by a two-thirds majority and have the Assembly’s comments reflected in the plan. Amendments 39, 168, 173, 175, 176 and 177 are consequential to my noble friend’s amendment and can be considered with it.
The House will be aware that the Government have made a concession in relation to police and crime panel vetoes. We listened to the concerns of the House and have introduced amendments creating a new power of veto for the London Assembly police and crime panel in relation to the appointment of a non-Assembly member as the deputy mayor for policing and crime. We are also reducing the majority required for all the various panel vetoes from three-quarters to two-thirds. I understand that that is not as low as noble Lords would have liked. Points have been raised again on Report, as they were in Committee. But it is a concession. It was at three-quarters, so we have listened by reducing it to two-thirds. Noble Lords have said that it would be quite hard to get two-thirds of people there if such a vote were to take place. I have to say that such is my experience of democracy that wherever you set the threshold you are often disappointed that people do not feel that it is as important a matter as you do for them to turn out and vote. The right of veto is in the Bill. If such a matter occurred and people on the panel felt it was very important, they would almost certainly try to make the case to ensure that their points of view were known to those who were eligible to use the veto.
However, I am clear that setting the strategy for the force must be an unfettered decision for the PCC or the MOPC. This is precisely where its electoral mandate will come into play and where the public will most visibly see their views and opinions reflected. I realise that that is not the view of all your Lordships in the Chamber tonight, but it would be against the spirit of our reforms to allow that electoral mandate to be overridden by the panel. There is provision in the Bill for the panel to provide recommendations on the plan. It is a robust, transparent mechanism that ensures that views are heard and debated. However, the final decision on the plan must rest with the PCC or, in the case of London, the MOPC, and not the panel. For those reasons, I ask that the amendment be withdrawn.
Amendments 166 and 167, again from my noble friends Lady Hamwee and Lord Shipley, would allow the London Assembly to choose whether its functions in relation to the scrutiny of the MOPC should be discharged by the Assembly as a whole or by a committee—the police and crime panel. We have been clear that having a dedicated police and crime panel perform these functions will ensure that sufficient attention and scrutiny can be given to policing and crime matters. It would also allow for independent members to be brought into the panel to ensure diversity and the right mix of skills. The Government have tabled Amendment 172 to make that clear, having listened very carefully to representations that were made at discussions outside the Chamber and also in the Chamber in Committee. This smaller group will be able to focus its attentions on the important business of scrutinising in detail the actions and decisions of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, particularly in respect of the police and crime plan. In addition to the provisions in the Bill, I would highlight that the government amendment in this group provides for the London Assembly to have an important and extensive say on the membership of its police and crime panel committee. I note that it is common for the London Assembly to operate in committees, one example being the transport committee. I hope that the Home Office has got that right.
Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill
Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts(13 years, 4 months ago)
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The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (Lord Strathclyde)
My Lords, before the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, has the opportunity to move his manuscript Amendment 15A, I need to give the House some procedural advice as Leader of the House—it is a very rare occurrence but one that I need to do. I have to inform the House that the Clerk of Public Bills has written to advise me that this amendment is inadmissible and that the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, has tabled it against the advice of the clerks. Paragraph 8.56 of the Companion provides that in such rare circumstances it is for me to ask the House to endorse the opinion of the Public Bill Office, and I readily do so.
I suspect that most Members of the House will not have had an opportunity to consider the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Harris. It reads:
“Page 3, line 14, at beginning insert ‘Subject to section 159(2A)’”.
The Public Bill Office advises me and the House that the amendment is about commencement, not the subject of the clause itself—namely, the Mayor of London’s Office for Policing and Crime. The reason the noble Lord, Lord Harris, may have been tempted to attempt this procedural manoeuvre is clear: he is seeking to advance a vote on the commencement of the London provisions of this Bill. That is a matter of political tactics, but tactics, or the policy, are not why I rise to address the House this afternoon. I wish only to deal with a matter of procedure.
The clerks have advised that this amendment is inadmissible under the Companion and I invite the House not to allow the noble Lord, Lord Harris, to move his manuscript Amendment 15A. The difficulty is of course compounded because the amendment is a manuscript amendment. The Companion also provides that,
“the disadvantages and inconvenience attaching to the moving of manuscript amendments on Report are even greater than at Committee stage”.
I have to agree that this is not how we should go about our business. In short, the PBO has advised the House that this first amendment is inadmissible and I invite the House to agree. However, I reassure the House and the noble Lord that he will have every opportunity to speak to the issue he wishes to raise in the proper place when Clause 159 is debated. I therefore invite the noble Lord, Lord Harris, not to move his amendment. If he chooses to do so, and the Companion does not prevent him doing so, the amendment is in the hands of the House.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, if it is in order, I would like to respond to what the Leader of the House has said. It is very difficult sometimes to determine why particular amendments are moved in a particular way and at a particular time. There were a number of reasons for my seeking the indulgence of the House to put forward this manuscript amendment at this time. The first is the question of relevance. There is a specific proposal at the moment that the implementation and creation of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime should proceed in advance of that for the rest of the country and should take place in October 2011, rather than October 2012. Therefore, my manuscript amendment is designed to make clear that preparations, some of which will be costly, should not go forward at this time.
The second reason I felt it necessary to bring forward the amendment in this way was that I had anticipated that there would be an amendment, either from the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, who moved such an amendment in Committee, or from the Government, about the transitional arrangements for the introduction of the Mayor’s Office, and, indeed, of the offices for policing and crime commissioners. A detailed look over the weekend made it clear that such transitional details were not being put before the House and therefore I thought that it was important that we have this opportunity.
The final reason for putting it before the House is that there are, of course, important security issues associated with this. I am slightly bemused about where we are today because I also tabled an amendment on Friday which does not appear either in the list that we received this morning of amendments supplementary to the Second Marshalled List, nor as a manuscript amendment. It seems to have gone into some void in the Public Bill Office, but it, too, was relevant to this point and might have assisted the House had we had it before us. It was also clear from my manuscript amendment that this related to an amendment later on the agenda in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey. That, I know—and, of course, she will speak for herself should we get to the point of debating this amendment—is about security of this country during the Olympics period and whether or not the disruption that will be caused in administrative arrangements is sensible at that time.
Those are my reasons for putting forward this amendment and I hope that the House will agree that they are valid reasons, notwithstanding the inconvenience that I am sure it puts the House to. No doubt the noble Lord will wish to respond and I hope that I will then be able to move my amendment.
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, I do not think that there is any quarrel about whether or not these issues can be debated. The decision of the clerks is about where the debate should take place. Perhaps I may read out the advice about the grounds of inadmissibility, which is very clear and simple. In the view of the Public Bill Office the manuscript amendment is not admissible on the grounds that it is not relevant to the clause to which it is tabled. That is the first rule under paragraph 8.59 on page 132 of the Companion.
The manuscript amendment would make Clause 4,
“Subject to section 159(2A)”,
as set out in Amendment 310 to Clause 159, which would affect the commencement of Chapters 1 to 6 of Part 1. In the view of the clerks, this amendment is not relevant to Clause 4 as it affects commencement, which is the subject of Clause 159. In addition, Amendment 310 covers Clauses 1 to 79, several of which have already been debated.
My purpose is simply to bring to the attention of the House the strongest possible and clearest advice of the clerks, which is that this is inadmissible. In parenthesis, I can also tell the noble Lord that a transitional government amendment will be tabled today relating to Schedule 15. It will be debated in its proper place next week. It is up to the House and the noble Lord to decide what he wishes to do with his amendment but the advice from the clerks, and therefore the advice that I give as Leader of the House, is completely clear.
Lord Harris of Haringey
I am grateful to the noble Lord the Leader of the House for that further clarification. I am grateful also to hear that an amendment on transition is being tabled today. I say, in parenthesis, as was the noble Lord’s point, that this demonstrates the problems we have had with this Bill; that is, the late tabling of government amendments and the problems that we have in terms of determining exactly the intention of the Government in terms of various clauses, which is one of the problems that we all face. No doubt we will hear again an apology from the noble Baroness, Lady Browning, about the problems that the Home Office have faced and we will accept it with the usual good grace.
However, the noble Lord has said that this amendment, in the view of the clerks, is irrelevant to where it is placed. It is placed after the line, which states:
“There is to be a body with the name ‘The Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime’ for the metropolitan police district”.
The amendment would insert,
“Subject to section 159(2A)”.
The amendment is tabled there because currently detailed work is going on about the early implementation and the introduction of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime in the London area. This is in advance of the Bill receiving Royal Assent, with a view to trying to get the implementation from October or shortly thereafter. That is why it is relevant to the place it is in and why I moved it in respect of this line in Chapter 2. It is not irrelevant to that point, which is why I moved it. The clerks may not see the relevance. Perhaps because of the hurried telephone calls that I had while inspecting security arrangements at Heathrow airport this morning, we did not have an opportunity to discuss it in detail. The amendment is about ensuring that we do not press ahead in advance of legislative authority.
May I move the amendment?
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, the proper advice I would give the noble Baroness, who I know is a stickler for such things, is to advise her noble friend not to move the amendment this afternoon, given the very clear advice of the clerks, and to speak to his amendment when it comes up in the proper place later on Report.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, I hope I have been of service to the House in identifying a lacuna in the Standing Orders. I hope therefore that this will be an opportunity for us to look in detail at some of these difficult procedures. All I was trying to do was to avoid unnecessary duplicate expenditure in advance of legislative authority and to enable the House to debate the security of the nation. However, the Leader of the House has three times at least reiterated the firm advice of the clerks on this point, and I would be foolish to persist beyond that. I assume, however, if I wished to bring forward this self-same amendment at Third Reading there would now be no objection to me so doing.
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, I would have no objection so long as the amendment at Third Reading were written according to the rules.
“(3) There is to be a Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime for the metropolitan police district.
(4) The Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime is to be elected, and hold office, in accordance with Chapter 6.
(4A) The person who has been given the title of deputy mayor and particular responsibility for policing and crime by the Mayor of London at the time this section is brought into effect is to be the occupant for the time being of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime.”
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, fractionally earlier than I had anticipated, I move Amendment 16, which is in my name. It is a series of amendments—I apologise to the House for their complexity but I have done my best to try to make them as clear as possible—that would enable the people of London at the same time as they elect—
Baroness Anelay of St Johns
My Lords, please leave the Chamber quietly. The noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, has waited a long time for this moment. I know we want to listen to him.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, I waited a long time to move the previous amendment rather than this one. I had anticipated an opportunity during the debate to prepare myself more thoroughly for Amendment 16.
The purpose of this amendment is to enable Londoners to vote, on the same day on which they would elect the Mayor of London, to elect the deputy mayor for policing and crime. The Government have told us that the Bill is about the importance of transparency and more effective clarity about who is responsible for policing. They have said, for everywhere outside London, that there is an advantage to there being direct elections for the person who has responsibility for the governance and oversight of policing. For London, though, they have proposed a completely different construction. There would be no direct election; the Mayor of London would choose an individual to become the deputy mayor, who would have responsibility for policing and crime.
The Government have helpfully tabled some amendments that indicate that in the event of that person not being an elected Member of the London Assembly, there would be a confirmation hearing and the Assembly could veto that appointment by a two-thirds majority. In the event of that person being a Member of the Assembly, the Assembly would have the right to hold a confirmatory hearing but would have no power of veto.
A confirmatory hearing is not the same as direct election, and the only circumstances in which there would be a veto by the democratically elected representatives of all London would be where the mayor of London had appointed an individual who did not hold a democratic mandate in the London Assembly. We are therefore talking about the Mayor of London being able to appoint his poodle or his Rottweiler, whichever model you care to take, to have responsibility for the oversight of policing in the London area.
London has the largest police force in the country with some of the heaviest responsibilities, particularly for counterterrorism and security. However, the Government are saying that, despite it being their objective everywhere else in the country that there is proper governance and clarity, and despite the benefits of direct election of the person with that responsibility, that will not apply in London.
My understanding is that the Government are suggesting this because the responsibility will rest with the Mayor of London. However, the current Mayor of London has discovered that it is not possible to combine the role of being mayor with having personal direct responsibility for the oversight of the Metropolitan Police. That is why, having given a manifesto commitment—I know that the current Mayor of London does not cast aside manifesto commitments lightly—he decided after just a few months that in fact he would not continue to chair the Metropolitan Police Authority and have that personal day-to-day oversight role but would ask one of his London Assembly colleagues to do so.
In circumstances in which the present incumbent is saying, “I cannot combine these duties effectively”, why are the Government saying, “That’s the model that we want to see in the London area”? Why are they saying that it is not necessary in London to have the benefits that we are assured that direct election will bring? That is why I have put forward this group of amendments.
I have also sought to resolve some of the other questions that arise. I have proposed how the electoral system would operate and how, in the event of the deputy mayor being incapacitated and unable to continue his functions, the Mayor of London would act. The simple principle that is most important in these circumstances, though, is that there be direct election, and my understanding was that that was what the Government wanted, and that they believed in the principle of direct election. If it is right for the rest of the country—we are told that the Government are going to reinstate this when the Bill returns to another place—why is it not right for London? What have the Government got against the people of London that they do not believe those people should have the right to elect the person who has responsibility to oversee and be responsible for the governance of policing in the London area? I beg to move.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Browning)
My Lords, the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, would prevent the mayor from holding the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime and would instead create an elected deputy mayor for policing and crime to hold that office. Consequential amendments would apply to the deputy mayor similar provisions to those for PCCs in respect of elections and suspensions. While I understand the approach taken by the noble Lord, Lord Harris, I set out in Committee the reasons why I do not agree with these amendments.
While it is the Government’s policy to introduce a directly elected police and crime commissioner into every force area in England and Wales outside London, the Government do not intend to introduce a new, elected person to hold the police to account in London for the very simple reason that the whole of London already elects a single person to take responsibility for strategic issues such as policing—the Mayor of London.
While I hear what the noble Lord says, the mayor is in the unique position of having responsibility for a whole force area and, as such, it seems sensible for him to have the overall responsibility for holding the police to account. Under the amendment, both the mayor and the deputy mayor have a direct democratic mandate across a whole force area, although in practice of course they could have different ideas about what should happen. That cannot work and would cause a lot of conflict. It is right and fitting that the mayor takes on the formal responsibility for holding the Metropolitan Police to account, and should in turn be accountable directly to the public for how this is done. However the mayor delegates in this area, the mayor, as with PCCs, is still responsible for the decisions that are taken and, as such, is answerable to the public as an elected representative.
I know that in Committee the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, was concerned about the dilution of the democratic principle, but I stress that this can come only through the mayor himself or herself. The mayor is elected by all Londoners, and he or she alone may hold the mayor’s office under this Bill. As such, the democratic principle is clear in the Bill. On that basis, I hope the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw these amendments, although I know that he believes in them passionately, and support the government amendments that we shall discuss later. I will not go into great detail as we shall come to them later in our deliberations, but I remind the House that the government amendments require confirmation hearings for the position of deputy mayor to be binding where the candidate is not an Assembly Member, in that the Assembly would have the power to veto the appointment by a two-thirds majority.
Any Assembly Member whom the mayor wished to appoint would be subject to a non-binding confirmation, as already set out in the Bill. I hope, therefore, that on reflection the noble Lord will withdraw the amendment.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for the way in which she has responded and for reiterating the Government’s position on these points. As I said in my opening remarks, I am grateful for the amendments that have been put forward on confirmation hearings and the deputy mayor’s role. However, a veto power of a two-thirds majority of the London Assembly is not a very powerful mechanism. My experience in four years on the London Assembly—I believe that it was the case for the subsequent seven years—is that the two-thirds majority threshold has never been achieved in matters to do with the budget. It is difficult to see how that would not be the case in these circumstances, where it is likely that the elected Mayor of London will have a sizeable block of members supporting his or her position on most issues. Therefore, although confirmatory hearings are helpful, they are not the same as direct election.
The noble Baroness also argued that the mayor is elected for the whole force area, but one of the problems is that the Mayor of London’s writ is not the same as that of the Metropolitan Police. The noble Lord, Lord Brooke, confronted me at a previous stage as he was deeply concerned that I might be trying to undermine the position of the City of London Police. The fact is that the Mayor of London has responsibility for two force areas and is elected not just by the electorate who are served by the Metropolitan Police but by the electorate who are served by the City of London Police. Therefore, the noble Baroness’s arguments do not stand up.
Baroness Browning
My Lords, when we discussed this in Committee, we established that the City of London and the force area that covers it represents a very small percentage of the electorate living within its parameters.
Lord Harris of Haringey
That indeed is the case. That is why I was almost incredulous that the Government believed that it was sensible that the City of London should have its own separate police force.
I appreciate that the Corporation of London has enormous antiquity and I know about the noble Baroness’s passion for medieval constructs, as we discussed the other evening, and the question of corporation sole. So, given that the Corporation of London is a construct even older than corporation sole, I shall not press that point.
However, on the issue of boundaries, the Government have to be clear about what the situation will be outside London. If the Localism Bill runs its course and the referenda locally produce it, you will have some very powerful directly elected mayors in major cities outside London. I do not believe that the directly elected mayors of the great cities of Manchester and Birmingham will not feel that they should have significant influence on the arrangements for policing in their areas. Of course they will not cover the entire police area, but I do not think that the Government’s proposal simply to have them sitting on the police and crime panel will be sufficient. The Government cannot get away from the fact that you will have conflicts between directly elected mayors and the people responsible for governance. In those circumstances, if that is going to happen outside London, the Government should have the courage of their convictions about the importance of direct elections and allow that to happen in London.
As I understand it, the Government’s vision is that there should be direct elections for these important positions everywhere in the country, but London is missing out. That is unfortunate and extremely unhelpful. I am disappointed that the Government are not prepared to consider and accept the amendment. However, I shall consider carefully what the noble Baroness has said today. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill
Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts(13 years, 4 months ago)
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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.
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 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.
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.
Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill
Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts(13 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Harris of Haringey
I thank the noble Lord for giving way. Is it not the case that while his additional proposals were deeply controversial—I think he had some master plan for lord lieutenants of counties assisting in the process of appointing independent members—it was when they had been improved by your Lordships' House that we reached the eventual outcome that we are all so in favour of?
Lord Howard of Lympne
Convenient though that rewriting of history is for the noble Lord’s arguments, it is very far from the case. He need look no further than the recently published memoirs of my noble friend Lord Ferrers to see that your Lordships remained obdurate, even when I was prepared to amend my original proposals. If my recollection is correct, it was only after a protracted game of ping-pong that I was eventually able to get my proposals on to the statute book in the face of persistent and continued opposition from your Lordships' House. But that is ancient history. I wanted to put the record straight.
The fact is that when those proposals found their way on to the statute book I was very hopeful that they would provide the basis for strong police authorities who would carry out the functions, which I am sure we would all want them to carry out, and who would be recognised in the areas that they served as the voice of the public in relation to policing. Alas, despite the splendid efforts of many of those who have served with distinction on police authorities during the nearly two decades that have passed since those proposals became law, my expectations have been disappointed. The proposals that have been put in place have not led to the kind of police authorities that I hoped they would. It is because of that that I am an enthusiastic supporter of these proposals. Indeed, I do not want to embarrass my noble friend on the Front Bench, but I think that in some ways I can claim to be their author, although it will not do me much good in the eyes of your Lordships, and I remain an enthusiastic supporter of them.
As to this particular amendment and the proposal put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, there is no difference between the term “direction and control” used in the protocol and the term used in existing legislation. That is the answer to the point made a few moments ago by the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan. The question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, is whether the protocol should become statutory. We know that ACPO has said—I think absolutely rightly—that it would be wrong to seek to define operational independence in the statute. If you gave the protocol statutory force, you would in effect arrive at a statutory definition of operational control. That would be a mistake for the reasons given by ACPO. It is for that reason that I oppose the amendment proposed by the noble Lord.
Lord Shipley
My Lords, I shall make two comments on quite a fundamental matter. First, I am clear that there needs to be a memorandum of understanding. I am less clear about whether it needs to have statutory force. However, the public will expect to understand what the powers of a chief constable and a commissioner are when they are being asked to vote for a police and crime commissioner. That seems a basic point; the public must have a clear understanding of the two roles. Unless this is written down in the form of a memorandum of understanding, it will be difficult for them to do so.
Secondly, there is also an operational aspect to this. Amendment 4A asks in particular,
“how the operational independence of chief constables and police forces will be protected”.
This relates to the joining point between the operational independence of the chief constable and the power of the police and crime commissioner over both the budget and the annual plan. In other words, the chief constable is to be required to undertake, with operational independence, the work in a plan that was agreed by the police and crime commissioner. The budget for that plan will be agreed by the commissioner and supplied to the chief constable. There is a clear joining point that must be bridged here. There is a grave danger that there will be operational interference by the police and crime commissioner when that commissioner feels that the budget and plan that he or she created is not being implemented. Unless this is clearly written down in the form of a memorandum of understanding, that operational independence will not be clear to anyone and trouble will ensue.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, we should not get too carried away over what this memorandum will do. My noble friend Lord Hunt quoted some remarks that I made when I said that if the memorandum is referred to more than twice in any interaction between a commissioner and a chief officer of police, it will look as though the relationship between the two has irredeemably broken down. It will be too late by that stage. The draft of the memorandum that has finally emerged from the Home Office is helpful in setting these things out. Its value lies in striking a balance between the legitimate role—to question, challenge, set an overall strategy and direction and so on—of those who hold the police to account and the operational professional decision-making that chief officers of police must exercise all the time. It is helpful to have that in the background to avoid the mavericks and to put constraints on those who might press a matter far beyond where any of us in your Lordships’ House, or any other sensible people, might see this balance being struck.
However, we should not see this as some magic wand that will solve all the problems and issues that might arise from these new systems of governance. Therefore, it is helpful to have the memorandum. It would be helpful, as my noble friend suggests, for there to be reference to it in the Bill. However, we should not believe that it is a magic wand. It will not prevent circumstances in which chief officers of police find that they have lost the confidence of those who are responsible for their governance. Those individuals, when they have lost that confidence, will in effect be unable to continue. This measure does not prevent that, but it draws some lines in the sand for what are or are not acceptable areas in which those responsible for oversight and governance should get involved.
In Committee, I think I mentioned my experience of being told firmly that the policing of the Notting Hill carnival was entirely an operational matter in which it was inappropriate for the police authority, as it then was, to be involved. I do not accept that advice and did not at the time because this is a major policing decision that impacts fundamentally on the relationship between the police and the community and involves substantial expenditure of resources. However, that was not the same as a chair of a police authority in this case—it could be an elected police and crime commissioner—saying, “I am quite clear that you should close such and such a road”. However, I can see that it is helpful to have set down somewhere something that reminds people that there are lines that you should not cross and that it is not appropriate, when you are responsible for oversight and governance, to say, “In this investigation you should arrest this person or not arrest that person”. We all accept that, but perhaps, just occasionally, some people will need to be reminded of that.
Baroness Browning
My Lords, I am very grateful for the contributions made to the debate. The amendments tabled by the noble Lords, Lord Hunt, Lord Rosser and Lord Stevenson, reflect those that were laid in Committee and seek to protect the operational independence of chief police officers by placing a specific duty on the face of the Bill for each police and crime commissioner to exercise their functions in accordance with a memorandum of understanding issued by the Secretary of State.
During the Committee I undertook to invite noble Lords from all sides of the House to discuss the Government's draft protocol, which I had placed in your Lordships’ Library prior to commencing our Committee debate. I am very grateful to noble Lords for their attendance at that meeting and for the contribution which they made, which was extremely constructive. The meeting took place on 21 June. I take this opportunity to report back to the House on what was discussed with the sole intention of making clear that the Government remain very much in listening mode as we continue to work with ACPO, the APA and the Association of Police Authority Chief Executives on the draft of that document. As has already been pointed out, this is still a document in draft.
I must make it clear at the outset that until the Government finalise their consultation on the draft document, we are still open to considering the merits of placing the document on a legal footing. I have taken note of the views expressed across the House today. Some noble Lords are not quite decided, some have clearly taken a certain position and others have moved from one position to another. That signifies very clearly the complexity of this matter and, most importantly, the need to get it absolutely right. I hope that the House, particularly the noble Lords who have tabled these amendments, will understand that it is something that we are particularly keen not to rush and that we are still in listening mode on this.
I would also like to make clear that it became rapidly apparent to me during our discussion that we must stop viewing the new PCC policing governance model through the eyes of the existing arrangements, especially when discussing financial matters and budget responsibilities. During the meeting, a wide-ranging discussion was held as to whether the protocol should be placed on a statutory footing in secondary legislation or in the Bill. Those are the two options, and although secondary legislation has not been mentioned during today’s debate, it is clearly an option. I am particularly grateful for the professional insight that the noble Lords, Lord Condon and Lord Stevens, contributed and offered to the group. There is much further consideration to be given as to the level of detail required in the draft document. I have taken away their views and relayed them to my officials, who, I can assure this House, intend to feed back those views to the protocol working group when it meets later this month.
However, to place in the Bill the entire document as currently drafted will be a step too far. I hope that that will reassure particularly my noble friend Lord Howard of Lympne and other noble friends who said that they would be concerned if that were to be the case, and that it may undermine previous case law and common law. Those facts also have to be taken into account.
I know that ACPO has told the Government that it does not want any definition of operational independence to be placed in the Bill, for reasons that I am sure will be obvious to everyone. However, ACPO has said that it would like the protocol to be given some sort of legislative footing, and the Government remain open to this suggestion. I realise that we are at Report stage but work remains to be done on this issue. It is essential that we get the balance exactly right, as noble Lords have indicated. There is still time within the proceedings on the Bill in this House to make that judgment in time.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My understanding is that the noble Baroness is saying that we should return to this at Third Reading, and that that is likely to be less than three weeks away. However, as currently planned, it will not be possible to achieve Royal Assent before the Summer Recess. Under those circumstances—and the Government might wish to take this away—perhaps Third Reading could take place in September. That will not delay the overall timetable more than it is already delayed, but it would allow more time for consideration of this matter and some other matters that probably require a lot more work before the Bill finally receives Royal Assent.
Baroness Browning
I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Harris. I am not one of the business managers in this House. I sometimes wish that I had more say in these matters, as I am sure most Front-Benchers do from time to time, but I shall have to leave with the business managers the timing of the various stages of finalising the Bill. However, I hope that the House will be reassured—particularly noble Lords who tabled these amendments—that this is a working document. We are still considering the most appropriate way in which to involve the protocol in the Bill, but I hope that I have provided assurances to those who think we might make a hasty decision that would undermine the way in which the independence of policing has been seen hitherto. On that basis, I ask the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.
“( ) Each police and crime commissioner shall appoint a non-executive board of between four and seven members.
( ) Such non-executive boards shall work with the police and crime commissioners to ensure good governance of—
(a) financial;(b) staff; and(c) equality;matters and to support police and crime commissioners in respect of their functions.( ) Police and crime commissioners may make such arrangements as they see necessary to remunerate and reimburse expenses incurred by members of such non-executive boards.
( ) Appointments to and remuneration and expenses arrangements for such non-executive boards shall be subject to approval by the relevant police and crime panel.”
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 20. There has been considerable concern about the central principle of the Bill, the idea of a single, directly elected individual who is to be responsible for the oversight and control of the police service. That is why I have tabled Amendment 3. Amendment 20 applies similar provisions to the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime.
At Second Reading and in Committee, there were widely held concerns about the concept of a single individual with this very strong responsibility for policing matters. The vote in Committee essentially removed from the Bill the principle of police and crime commissioners. The Committee voted in that way because of the fear of having a single individual with responsibility for such an important area of public life, an area where the police have such powerful responsibilities over the liberty of the citizens of this country and over the way in which the citizens of this country operate. That is the core of the concerns that have been expressed from many corners of your Lordships' House.
You could argue that we have solved the problem. By the amendment proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Harris of Richmond, and agreed in Committee, there will not be a single directly elected individual. However, I am mindful of what the Minister said repeatedly in Committee—that the Government are determined to reinstate that principle. If the Minister wants to stand up and tell me that the Government have changed their mind and have suddenly realised that the House of Lords was right on this point, I might consider withdrawing this amendment, but if, as seems likely, the Government intend to reverse the House of Lords position on this and bring back to this House proposals for a single individual with those extraordinary powers over policing and with the police having such extraordinary powers over the citizen, we need something that looks at these matters. In fact, I submit that even if the Government were to accept the position taken by the House of Lords in Committee, there would still be value in having non-executive members around the police and crime commission to bring to the deliberations of the commission expertise and independent-minded judgment. However, given that the Government intend to reverse that position, this amendment is essential.
Amendment 20 relates to the position in London. There are no changes, so far, to the position in London. We will have a single elected individual—the Mayor of London—who will delegate some of his functions to the deputy mayor for policing and crime.
In the circumstances in which we are to have single individuals with these responsibilities, there has to be a governance structure around them. I think there is consensus among your Lordships about the value of a collegiate approach and robust and strong governance. The amendment is not about going back to police authorities. It is not about creating some new bureaucratic structure. It is not even about going to the appointed boards that the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, coruscated earlier in our discussions today. It is about good governance. It is about making sure that decisions are taken properly and transparently so that these single individuals cannot be subjected to criticism that they have acted in a wilful or inappropriate way. It says that on key financial matters, key personnel matters and on matters perhaps relating to equalities, they must act with the support of a group of non-executives who would be appointed for this purpose.
Non-executives appointed in the way that I have suggested in my amendment would provide the public with an assurance that good governance was being followed. It would provide a mechanism by which you could make sure that those decisions were taken in a sound and proper way. It would also deal with what I suspect will be one of the issues. If you look forward to May 2012, when the Government hope that the first directly elected police commissioners will be elected, you will have elected individuals with an enormous personal mandate. The only person in the country with a larger personal mandate—I do not want to get into double entendres here—will be the Mayor of London. They will be the biggest political beasts in their regions. The elected police and crime commissioner for the West Midlands will be chosen by an electorate of more than 2 million people and will have a bigger mandate than a directly elected mayor of Birmingham, should such a creature come to exist following the passage of the Localism Bill. Those individuals may think that they can walk on water, I do not know. I hesitate to make such a remark in the presence of the Bishops’ Bench. However, we are back to the principle of being reminded that you are human, the way that Roman emperors had to have someone around them just to remind them of their human responsibilities.
Lord Howard of Lympne
My Lords, first, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Harris, on the sense of realism which infused his contribution to your Lordships’ debate. He recognised that we are likely to see elected police commissioners in place next year and that the Government are likely to reverse the amendment put forward by my noble friend Lady Harris. I rise with a degree of reluctance to oppose this amendment, not only because it is proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Harris, with whom I had many enjoyable disputes many years ago, even long before I was Home Secretary. It was always a great pleasure to see him across the table when we were negotiating.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, I remember attending the shortest ministerial meeting I had with the noble Lord when we were allowed just seven minutes to consider the matter.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, we all recognise the importance of quality of governance for any new arrangements to oversee policing. Quality of governance is very much at the heart of all that we are concerned about. Part of what we are discussing is what we mean by the continuing process of scrutiny and the extent to which an overall package provides us with checks and balances that those responsible for holding the police to account are aware of every day. I respectfully suggest that noble Lords opposite underestimate how far the Government have shifted on the role of police and crime panels. That is the direction of travel in which we are increasing responsibility.
We recognise that police and crime panels will work with, as well as check, police and crime commissioners, and that police and crime commissioners will have to work with their panels. That is the model. Nothing in the Bill prevents a police and crime commissioner or MOPC forming a non-executive board. We see the PCC and the Mayor of London appointing a chief executive and a chief finance officer who will, first, have professional qualifications and backgrounds; secondly, be governed by the Nolan principles; and thirdly, themselves be subject to confirmation hearings by the PCP. That is the direction in which we have shifted. It will be open for a police and crime commissioner to consult more widely for professional advice. The question is: how much detail do we want in the Bill about what sort of professional advice he or she should consult?
We have moved away from what the noble Lord, Lord Condon, described as “a doctrinaire position” of individual election and personal accountability and responsibility. The direction in which we have moved is towards stronger PCPs and a relationship between the PCP and the PCC that will have to be a continuing one of mutual confidence. We hesitate to insist on to some extent duplicating that relationship by writing into the Bill the necessity of having, in addition to this, a non-executive board.
We all recognise that we are talking about the risk of mavericks or irresponsible populists being elected. I know and respect the Mayor of Watford, who is an excellent elected mayor. There are several such mayors. However, I travel past Doncaster twice a week and am well aware of the issues that are at the back of people’s minds.
It is the Government’s aspiration that in cases where relations break down, the PCP will step in at that point. It will have the role of reviewing or scrutinising every decision of the police and crime commissioner. In particular, it will have a right of veto over the precept and the appointment of the chief constable. It will have a say in the police and crime commissioner’s appointment of senior staff by holding confirmation hearings. It will play a significant part in the complaints procedure around the police and crime commissioner, and it will hold the police and crime commissioner to account for his or her role in the complaints procedure of the force. Therefore, we have strengthened the position of the PCP.
We look to a model in which the PCC and the PCP will work together and the police and crime commissioner will take the police and crime panel into his or her confidence. The panels have been enlarged and have the ability to appoint independent members in addition to local authority representatives. That answers the question of providing governance in the round. I suggest that the House is now underplaying the concessions that the Government have made and the consequent role of the police and crime panel. We have listened and we share the concerns that have been expressed around the House from a range of positions. However, we are not persuaded that we should put in the Bill any further mandatory requirements from the centre, or seek to constrain the police and crime commissioner, when there is a proportionate degree of advice, guidance and scrutiny that is accountable to the public already built into the system. Having, I hope, provided reassurance on these issues, I respectfully request that the noble Lord withdraw his amendment.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, I am enormously grateful to those noble Lords who have contributed to this short debate, which has been extremely interesting and powerful. I am particularly grateful to the trio of former Commissioners of Police of the Metropolis who, in varying degrees, lent support to my amendment. I am also grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Lympne, for reminding me of our many productive—or nearly productive—discussions in the past on all sorts of other matters.
I do not claim that this amendment is perfect. I suspect that the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, accepts that her amendment is not perfect. She said that it talks about consulting PCCs. One of the dangers is that by the time PCCs are in a position to be consulted they may well already have taken a whole series of decisions around good governance. I suspect that if your Lordships were to support any of the amendments in this group we would need to revisit those amendments at Third Reading or when the Bill comes back from the Commons, but the important point is the principles that have been raised.
The key issue that has been highlighted as an argument for not proceeding with this measure concerns the changes that are being made to police and crime panels. I have listened to the noble Baroness, Lady Browning, say that the Government are listening. However, the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, then stands up, says that he has listened but then describes exactly what changes are being made. What changes are being made to PCPs? We have moved from a threshold of three-quarters having to vote on an issue to a threshold of two-thirds. During my four years on the London Assembly, and in the succeeding seven years, I do not think there has been a single occasion when the London Assembly has achieved the two-thirds threshold needed to do anything about the mayor’s budget, so two-thirds is a high threshold. The threshold has been lowered from a monumentally high one to a high one. That is a very big concession for which your Lordships will, of course, be grateful.
The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, talked about the direction of travel, working with people as well as checking them and the introduction of confirmation hearings for a small group of officials. That is all very positive stuff but it does not constitute significant movement in this area. There are two principal problems with PCPs as regards providing a structure of robust governance. First, they will by and large exercise that role after the event. Where there is a need to improve governance it is important to have intervention in advance of those decisions being made, which is where non-executive boards could come in. The second problem, which I do not think has been mentioned so far, is the nature of PCPs. They will still be essentially highly party-political bodies. They will be made up either of the direct political opponents of the PCC or of people from the PCC’s own party, who are often the sternest and most difficult critics, as many elected and former elected politicians will testify. They will constitute a political forum in which these decisions will be batted backwards and forwards, not a forum where robust governance can be implemented.
We had a flight of fancy from the noble Lord, Lord Wasserman, regarding where all this might lead. He referred to conferences and associations and complained that the amendment was too prescriptive because it says that there should be between four and seven members on a non-executive board. However, he then complained that all sorts of things were not included, so in fact he was arguing that it was both too prescriptive and not prescriptive enough. I do not think that that flight of fancy is terribly helpful to us. However, if the noble Lord was prepared to come forward with the precise balance of words which would be prescriptive enough but not too prescriptive, I am sure that we would all be very grateful and very pleased to receive it.
Do we want proper governance around these individuals, who will have very substantial personal mandates with all the authority and perhaps arrogance that that brings? Do we want a proper structure whereby the people who have elected them can see that they are carrying out their functions properly and appropriately? I am not satisfied with the Government’s response. Therefore, I wish to test the opinion of the House.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, I echo the remarks of my noble friend Lady Henig about how difficult it is to get our heads around some of these extremely complicated amendments in the very short time that we have had to look at them. I have a series of questions, which I am sure Ministers will be able to answer in the detail that I expect. However, I suspect that it will demonstrate that quite a lot of further work still needs to be done on the amendments put forward today and on the other proposals. I repeat what I said earlier, which may have appeared frivolous, about the advantage of Third Reading being in September: there is still an awful lot of work for Home Office officials to do to get some of the details of the Bill right. That is the case whether or not one agrees with the general direction of travel or whether one agrees about where we are going to end up. Some of the mechanics of the Bill are going to fall apart unless this detailed work is done.
My questions relate, first, to the mammoth extension of powers for the PCPs, which enable them to have approval hearings of the chief executive, the PCC’s office, the chief financial officer and any deputy appointed. That, I am sure, is helpful. I have no problems with it as a principle and I think that it is good governance and useful. However, what I am not clear about—it may be here and I have just not found it, or it may not be here and has not been thought about, or it may have been thought about and is being rejected, but it would be useful to know—is what the role of the PCP will be in circumstances in which the PCC removes or dismisses the chief executive or the chief financial officer, or indeed a deputy. There is a more difficult point in this. One of the concerns is that newly elected PCCs may decide to dispense with the services of chief executives and chief financial officers. In those circumstances, what is the role of PCPs? I cannot find it, but it may be here. No doubt the Minister will enlighten us on that point.
I assume that there are more government amendments to come, but we do not know. I had understood that there had been considerable discussions about the transfer schemes of staff from police authorities to police services, to chief officers of police and/or to PCCs. I had understood that there had been an acceptance that it might be necessary to have a two-stage process, simply because of the detailed work that needs to be done and simply because of the importance of enabling the newly elected PCCs, if that is what we end up with, as I suspect we might, to see how that will work, and giving them the opportunity of influencing that decision rather than having the outgoing police authorities determining which staff are transferred under what conditions. Such an amendment may be here and I have just missed it, but I am not clear that there is an amendment yet which specifies how that two-stage process will work.
In any event, I think we are in some difficulties because Amendments 67 and 86 prevent PCCs or the MOPC or deputy PCCs—if that is what we get—and the deputy mayor for policing and crime, arranging for a member of staff from a police force to exercise any of its functions. I understand that the reasoning behind that is that Ministers want to separate completely the functions and staffing of forces and elected local policing bodies. That may be a perfectly good and sensible principle, but disentangling what existing staff, who are currently employed by police authorities and who are under the direction and control of chief officers of police, which is the current situation, provide what function, particularly in the absence of a two-stage transfer process, will be a very large piece of work.
Currently, for example, the Metropolitan Police Authority delegates functions to the commissioner through the scheme of delegation. The commissioner has overall management responsibility for a large number of staff who are under his direction and control, although technically they are MPA employees. Under the first phase of the proposed two-phase transfer scheme, staff who are currently police authority employees, but under the direction and control of the commissioner, will transfer to the PCC or the MOPC, but will no longer be under the direction and control of the commissioner and chief constable. The legislation will allow the PCC and the MOPC to delegate to those staff who had previously been under the direction and control of the commissioner; however, as the MOPC and PCC and their deputies would not now be able to delegate to the commissioner and chief constable, it would appear that the current arrangements, whereby the police authority can delegate these functions, would no longer be lawful. Therefore, current delegations would need to be changed with the consequence that you would have very large numbers of staff, particularly in the areas of finance, property, communications, procurement and legal, for whom you will now have to decide whether they spend all their time working for the new structure under the PCC and the MOPC or working for the chief officer of police. Those are quite complicated decisions because at the moment they often split their time; some bits of work are very much police authority functions and some bits are very much for the chief officer of police.
Under these two amendments you are essentially saying that it is unlawful to delegate those functions to such people, so a hard-and-fast set of decisions will have to be made for each individual about which side of the fence they are on and the Government wish all that to happen by May of next year, or possibly earlier in London. A two-stage system of delegation is needed to allow all those details to be sorted out and to allow the newly elected PCCs to have some influence over what staffing and support structures they will want. At the moment, in the absence of a government amendment on that—unless it is there and I just cannot find it—the Government are making that unlawful. I am sure that that is not their intention and I hope that the Minister will reassure me that I have completely misinterpreted what this means or perhaps give me some assurance that she will come back at Third Reading. I suspect she may need more than three weeks to sort this out.
Baroness Browning
My Lords, I will have to clarify that and come back to the noble Lord. However, an example was given a short while ago in our debate about chief executives. Certain members of staff within the PCC’s office are politically confined in what they can do and should be politically neutral. The recruitment procedure should ensure not only their political neutrality while holding the post but that their neutrality is considered before their appointment. The Nolan rules would apply to the key appointments in the Bill. I hope that the noble Lord will not mind if I come back to him with a more detailed structure, because there is a lot of detail around it.
The noble Lord, Lord Harris, raised several issues. I have to put it this way: I think he was being rather naughty tonight—engagingly naughty as always but naughty none the less. He asked me a lot of questions, particularly about transition. It is an important issue, but I am quite sure that as a member of the MPA the noble Lord knows what the situation is because there have been formal consultations and discussions about the transition period. He is shaking his head. I apologise if he has not been party to this information but it is generally known—and one or two people in the Chamber are smiling—that as part of these discussions the Government are planning to lay an amendment next week to give effect to the transfer scheme that has been formally discussed and made known to the MPA. That is why I thought he was being a little bit naughty.
Lord Harris of Haringey
I am always happy to be called naughty by the noble Baroness. However, I do not think that there have been any discussions with the MPA, or indeed the APA or APACE, about the details of the amendments tabled today. This is a very real problem that I hope the Minister is able to say something about, because the text of the amendment that the Government intend to lay next week has been shared, and I suspect that the reason it will be laid next week is that the text is not yet finalised—otherwise no doubt the Minister would have laid it with this batch of amendments.
Baroness Browning
That is quite true but we want to get this right. This is an important issue. I apologise that I am not able to discuss it in detail today but it has been the subject of a great deal of consultation, not least with the MPA, and we want to make absolutely sure that we get it right. I will come on to that later.
As I mentioned earlier, the amendments in this grouping have come about as a result of consultation and, of course, in Committee, where several noble Lords raised some significant issues around this area, not least my noble friends Lord Shipley and Baroness Hamwee. For example, they were concerned that the mayor could appoint a non-Assembly Member to be a deputy mayor, which would have cut across the democratic principles that the Bill seeks to establish. The Bill allows the Mayor of London, operating through the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime, to delegate the day-to-day handling of policing governance to a deputy. However, in accordance with general legal principles, the mayor will not be able to pass on the responsibility for any delegated work. As I have just explained, PCCs will still hold that responsibility, whatever they delegate. I accept that this is a new governance model but it is essential that the mayor is always held responsible for the way that his or her functions are carried out.
Clause 20 establishes that the selection must be made in line with existing provisions for mayoral appointments. Further essential details, such as the eligibility criteria and terms and conditions for the post, are set out in Schedule 3 to the Bill. I should explain that in the initial draft of this Bill some particularly crucial functions could not be delegated to the deputy mayor for policing and crime, or anyone else, such as issuing a police and crime plan, preparing an annual report on policing, attending meetings on the police and crime panel, and representations on appointment of the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. However, the committee in the House of Commons agreed to remove the barriers to the deputy mayor for policing and crime determining policing objectives, preparing an annual report and attending the police and crime panel on the mayor’s behalf. I would urge noble Lords to respect the decision of the other place in this matter, particularly given what I have already said regarding the ultimate legal and democratic responsibility of the mayor in these matters.
Baroness Browning
I have said that I will write to the noble Lord on this whole question of staff. Clearly there are different categories of staff and I would like to take some advice on those before I give him a definitive reply. I promise to write to him very quickly on that matter. The point was raised particularly about chief finance officers but, as I have mentioned, they are appointed on merit and are politically restricted. I will look at other categories of staff that he has just raised.
Lord Harris of Haringey
I do not think that the noble Baroness responded to my points about whether PCPs would have a role in the dismissal or removal of chief executives or chief financial officers.
Baroness Browning
They will be able to dismiss a chief financial officer and there is nothing in the Bill that in any way prohibits them from doing so.
Baroness Browning
No, PCPs will not be part of that but of course the new amendment gives them an opportunity to be part of a confirmation process for those appointments. If for some reason the PCC decided to part with the services of the chief finance officer or the chief executive, that PCC would still be accountable to the panel for the reasons why they had done so. There is still that link of accountability, they are answerable to the panel, and if the panel was concerned about the circumstances around that I would expect it to call a scrutiny hearing to find out what had happened and why. I suspect that it would be pretty alert if there was a really serious problem brewing as a result of that.
Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill
Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts(13 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Dear
My Lords, enough weight of artillery fire has been directed at this target to demolish it. I shall take a few moments more with my own artillery to reduce the demolished target to rubble. We are not talking about protective clothing or equipment. Clearly, that is a requirement that all chief constables always have to address. We are not talking about the adequacy of kit and, for example, putting appropriate equipment into patrol cars to cone off and properly protect the scene of a road accident, to protect not only the police officers themselves but others who are still present on the road. All of that is common sense.
The nub of this discussion is that we are not here to inhibit the voluntary assumption of risk. Medals have already been mentioned in this debate. I remind this House of the range of medals that are available not only to police officers but to members of the general public and institutions if they put themselves, as is often said these days, in harm’s way. In descending order, you start with the George Cross. Then comes the George Medal, then the Queen’s Gallantry Medal and then the Queen’s Commendation for Bravery. The circumstances in which those medals are earned will vary. One thing that is laid down very clearly as a matter of public record is the percentage of the assumption of risk. In ascending order, for the Queen’s Commendation for Bravery there has to be an assumption of a risk of 20 per cent likelihood of death. That means there are two chances in 10 that you will die if you do it, and that if you do it you accept that risk. Going up through the Queen’s Gallantry Medal and the George Medal, you end up with the George Cross, which has a 90 per cent assumption of death. Nine times out 10, if you do it you will die. That has to be assumed by the person undertaking that obligation, probably in a split second. It has to be judged in that way. It occurs to me that not only police officers but lifeboat crews, fire brigades, coastguards, the military operating outside theatres of war and certainly the police face such circumstances if not daily, certainly on a regular basis.
I repeat—because it is worth repeating—what has already been said about any chief officer who puts forward a recommendation or citation for the award of medals. I recollect putting forward six recommendations for George Medals on different occasions, all of which were granted. It means that, if you take this subject to its logical conclusion, in writing that recommendation, you are also inviting a prosecution against you for having allowed that act to take place. It has to be a nonsense.
I give one more quick example, not from high buildings or the London Underground. What about public order? Like other Members of your Lordships’ House, I have, on occasions in the past, been in control of very large, serious outbreaks of public disorder, when violence and injury were part of the scene. In those circumstances, if the senior officer, with properly equipped and protected officers, orders those officers to maintain a position—to control a road junction, for example—or to advance against a disorderly crowd, he is, by definition, inviting them to a position where they will incur injury. The case follows that they will incur injury.
I conclude by reminding your Lordships of two instances of about three years ago. The first was in the north of England when two young people died in a very large lake and the police were criticised for not going in to rescue them; I do not know the circumstances, but that was how it was reported. Around the same time, in the Thames Valley police area, a barbeque in somebody’s garden got out of hand. There was an altercation, somebody went and fetched a shotgun, and a man was shot and lay bleeding in the garden. Armed officers were called, and were told to stand off until a health and safety assessment had been made. It is said, rightly or wrongly, that the man, had he been rescued, would have lived. It is said, rightly or wrongly, that he died because he haemorrhaged to death because of the timidity of the police officers who were holding back. I emphasise that I do not know the circumstances of that incident in detail. However, I do know that there was considerable public disquiet about both of those instances, and a great deal of criticism of the police for holding back.
The public quite rightly look to the police, and other uniformed agencies, and almost expect bravery. They expect a degree of putting service before self. We should recognise that in your Lordships’ House as well. We cannot require people to be brave; it is the voluntary assumption of risk that is rewarded with the medals that I have already mentioned. However, we must not inhibit it when it would take place. We must encourage and applaud it. Anything that can be done by Her Majesty’s Government to relieve the circumstances which we have heard described today, and which still hang in the air as a possibility, would be a good thing. For that reason, I applaud and support the generality of the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, I was chair of the Metropolitan Police Authority when the noble Lord, Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington, as the then Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis, was called to the Old Bailey to answer the charges. I well recall the internal impact that it had on the service, and the implications that would have followed had there been a guilty verdict.
However, the context of all of this is one of ensuring that there is a legal framework protecting the health and safety of our police officers. I do not think that anyone is arguing about the importance of doing that. When I ceased to be chair of the police authority, I took over chairing the committee of the police authority which, among other things, monitors the health and safety obligations of the police service. I am not sure where that function might fall under the new arrangements that we are talking about in the rest of the Bill.
Something that struck me powerfully was that one of the responses of the police service—and, indeed, many other organisations—to new legislation is to create an internal unit that is responsible for guidance on it all. That is often quite separate from the people who are making day-to-day operational decisions. Something that I have tried to ensure and, through the committee that I chair, now require is that each senior police manager certifies once a year that they are personally satisfied with the health and safety arrangements in the area for which they are responsible. Each assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police takes on that responsibility for their area. That is not really different from what the law actually says about senior managers, but it has helped to mainstream this as part of the normal, day-to-day operational decisions that any police leader would be taking.
That is the critical point. The danger is where you have a department created which says, “This is health and safety law, and this is what the rest of you in the police service must do”. That is the sort of environment in which you get some of the silly responses that you hear reported or which are alleged to have taken place. However, the way forward is to make sure that the person who has managerial responsibility takes all of these factors into account and then makes a proportionate judgment in line with the law—as was the spirit of the original legislation—to protect their own officers and the safety of the public.
I am not convinced that we should be exempting people from the legislation. I am sure that we should be making sure that the response inside each police service is proportionate and seen as a mainstream activity of senior police leaders. Most senior police leaders that I have spoken to acknowledge that uppermost in their minds all the time is not only the safety of their officers but the public’s safety as well. It is a question of acknowledging that and creating a system whereby that happens, rather than it being seen as an external imposition which then leads to some of the rather crazy anomalies that we sometimes hear about.
Lord Stevenson of Balmacara
While I am on my feet, I will make one or two points before the Minister responds. The noble Viscount, Lord Astor, made an interesting point. As a number of speakers have said, we will have to come back to this from time to time during debates on this portion of the Bill. I sense around the House an acceptance that, as a society, we have not really grasped the evidence before us that there is a need now for an overarching policy on all psychoactive substances, including drugs, tobacco and alcohol. If we do not grasp that opportunity now, we will all suffer. I accept what the noble Viscount said—that in this case there will be an element of drugs—but the greater problem is that we are not dealing with this in a holistic way.
Secondly, the figures that we have heard today about how alcohol influences our society are really terrible. They are growing and getting worse, and we must do something about it. The frustration I have also heard around the Chamber is that there has not been a scheme—or schemes—that we could get behind which would really have an impact. In that sense, the sobriety scheme seems an appropriate and attractive way to go forward. We will be supportive of that if the Minister is minded to take it further. It seems to give a triple win: it reduces alcohol-related crime and disease; it reduces the costs to our public services, particularly to those of the police and health; and, most importantly, it will help to shift our culture. For those reasons, taken together, one would want to support it.
Having said that, one of the arguments used to persuade your Lordships’ House was that the Mayor of London wants to introduce this as a pilot and would be giving his full support to it. Of course, that name, attached to any project, does not commend itself to this side of the House, but we will be gracious and not oppose it on this occasion.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, I also support this group of amendments. When Kit Malthouse, the deputy mayor of London—for those who are not aware, he is the putative deputy MOPC for London, so clearly a person of great relevance to these discussions—first raised this matter with me, I admit to being rather cynical about it; first, for the reasons my noble friend Lord Stevenson alluded to about this being just another mayoral gimmick, but also because I did not immediately see that the experience of South Dakota was necessarily relevant to London. However, having looked in detail at the proposals that have come forward from the mayor’s office, and the thought that has gone into them, I think that it is worth reflecting on the fact that nothing is lost by going down this road, having a trial in one or two London boroughs and seeing how it works. If it is useful, you can extend it and use it more widely. That is its basis.
Given the cynicism that sometimes surrounds mayoral initiatives in London, it was interesting to note that when the measure was presented to a cross-party grouping of colleagues in the Metropolitan Police Authority, after people had got over their initial cynicism they said, “This is an idea that is worth trying. Let’s see how it goes. It would certainly be worth supporting and we hope that the Government will support it as well”. Therefore, we have an entirely unanimous debate in this House.
Lord Shipley
My Lords, I wish to put on record the support of my noble friend Lord Palmer for this amendment as he is not able to be here. We agree that this would be a very useful trial to undertake.
Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill
Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts(13 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Rosser
My Lords, I hesitated before speaking because I intend to be very brief and I was of the view that I would probably finish before everybody had managed to leave the Chamber if I started straight away.
Police authorities currently are covered by the Standards Board for England, but this will not be the case with the new police and crime panels provided for in the Bill. The amendment provides for guidance to continue to be given by the Standards Board for England in relation to the conduct of chief commissioners, members and co-opted members of police and crime panels and the police commissions in England and Wales, and also on the matter of the qualifications and experience that monitoring officers should possess. The current legislation states:
“In exercising its functions the Standards Board for England must have regard to the need to promote and maintain high standards of conduct by members and co-opted members of relevant authorities in England. … The Standards Board for England … may issue guidance to relevant authorities in England and police authorities in Wales on matters relating to the conduct of members and co-opted members of such authorities”.
If the situation is that while police authorities are currently covered by the Standards Board for England but that this will not be the case for the new police and crime panels—indeed, I understand that it is the Government’s intention to abolish the Standards Board—the purpose of this amendment is to ask what the Government intend to do in future in relation, for example, to the new police and crime panels. Is it intended to replicate the functions currently carried out by the Standards Board as far as, for example, the new police and crime panels are concerned and, if so, by which individual, body or organisation? One would have thought that since one of the key functions of the Standards Board for England is to have regard to the need to promote and maintain high standards of conduct, that would be even more important in relation to the new bodies and organisations that will be established under the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill that we are discussing. One finds it difficult to believe that the Government do not intend to provide some sort of substitute for the Standards Board for England, if it is their intention to abolish it, and that they do not intend to ensure that similar guidance is not going to be issued in future in order to maintain high standards of conduct in relation to, among other bodies, the police and crime panels. The purpose of this amendment is to seek to ascertain from the Government what their intentions are in this regard. I beg to move.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, I rise first to speak in support of the amendment moved by my noble friend Lord Rosser. To some extent, we touched on these matters at an earlier stage. The absence of a standards regime for these new bodies which are going to be responsible for the oversight of the police service in England and Wales is really rather extraordinary. In the previous day in Committee, I gave an example of the sorts of things that could happen where having a robust standards regime would be a better solution than one that says that, if these individuals step over the line and actually break the law, they can be investigated by the police—for whom they have a direct responsibility, of course, which raises some interesting questions—and, if necessary, prosecuted. A standards regime that is going to protect the integrity of those individuals and provide assurance to the public that they are acting properly and appropriately is clearly important. It will be interesting to hear from the Minister how the Government envisage that this will be dealt with.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for that reply, which raises quite a number of issues. Let us deal first with the question of standards and what is to happen. I accept that the Committee is in the very difficult position of considering a piece of government legislation that is possibly going to change the law in respect of standards, and trying to deal with a piece of legislation where we have already slightly altered the direction of travel, which may or may not revert. The principle that the Minister seems to be enunciating is that there is nothing below the threshold of criminal activity which will be investigated. That is a very worrying situation to create in areas where there will be all sorts of difficult arguments to be had about the extent to which the functions of overseeing the police service are being properly fulfilled. That is a genuine difficulty.
A further genuine difficulty is who will investigate such matters. In the context of the Localism Bill, if we are talking about the investigation of misbehaviour by a local authority member, then the local police force may well be the adequate route to follow. However, where it is the individual or individuals with responsibility for the oversight of the police service in question who are being investigated, for that force to investigate that individual will raise some real and difficult issues unless it is also being said that, under all those circumstances, the individuals will be suspended. Again, I am not sure that that is the import of the other part of the Bill.
Two questions need to be addressed in respect of the Minister’s answer on standards. First, is there anything below the threshold of criminal activity on which there should be some guidance on standards of behaviour? Secondly, what safeguards exist for the police investigating the people who are responsible for oversight? The latter situation could work both ways. It could be the police going soft on the person who is responsible for oversight, or it could be the police investigating more rigorously than might otherwise be the case the person who has been giving them a hard time in their role of oversight.
That is one group of issues that has been addressed in these amendments. I say to the Committee that we really must look at what items we bring together in amendment groupings because it is getting a little bit complicated. I know that on our previous day in Committee we all became confused about where we were and the sheer range of subjects being considered in one group.
The second set of issues related to the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey. Quite understandably, she characterised it as being just about London. But this is Committee stage. Yes, the amendment is cast in terms of London, but the principles apply to everywhere else in the country. If there is a real issue here, we need to look at it across the country and not just in terms of London. Is the Minister saying that there will be mechanisms for an independent appeals process, or will it just voluntarily be done by chief officers of police or, in London’s case, the Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis? How will the power of the local policing body be exercised if it feels that a complaint has not been dealt with properly? Will it simply be a matter of complainants coming to the local policing body and saying, “Hey, our complaint is not being dealt with properly”? In virtually every instance where a person feels that they have a complaint against the police, they will first complain to the police service and then go to the local policing body, which will have no power to do anything about it other than to go back to the chief officer of police and say, “Look at it again”. I suspect that police and crime commissions and commissioners, and the MOPC in London, will end up having to do an enormous amount of complaints work because they will be seen as the route down which you will have go to prod the police to take your complaints seriously.
The final and, I hope, the easiest point for the Minister to answer is on the powers of the local policing body to require information. Is she able to give us an undertaking that that information is about not only mechanisms and numbers but also, potentially, individual cases? There are two reasons for saying that it needs potentially to be about individual cases. First, an individual case may be a matter of local importance—in which case it is important that specific information can be obtained by the local policing body; and, secondly, there is enormous value in local policing bodies having the power to dip sample what has happened in terms of complaints because the dip-sampling process often tells you all kinds of extra information about the way in which the police service is operating in that case.
Finally, can the noble Baroness explain the distinction between a low-level complaint and other matters?
Baroness Browning
My Lords, perhaps I may begin with that last point. We all understand complaints which involve criminality—that is fairly clear—but below that there are issues about complaints to do with, for example, time-keeping, absenteeism, rudeness and that kind of thing, which I regard as low-level complaints. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Harris, will accept that those within policing are able to make that distinction quite clearly without too much written information in the Bill.
The noble Lord mentioned standards. A PCC will be subject to interrogation by the IPCC and the local police for criminal allegations, and the IPCC will decide which are the less serious allegations. So the IPCC will act as the arbiter of the panels. Less serious allegations will be decided by the PCP. I hope that there is already clarity about what is regarded as a serious or a low-level problem. PCPs will be subject to the standards applicable to local authorities under the Localism Bill. I shall come back to noble Lords on how we are going to handle having the two Bills before the House.
On the points the noble Lord, Lord Harris, made about London, the Government recognise that sometimes people feel that the independent scrutiny of such matters should be in the Bill but, as I said earlier, we do not agree. We are not persuaded of that and it is not our intention to make any changes in that respect.
I shall have to write to the noble Lord on some of the other points he raised. However, I cannot agree with the suggestion he made about revisiting the situation as it applies to London.
Lord Harris of Haringey
Let me be clear: the amendments are couched in terms of London but the principle of an independent element in matters where there are appeals against a chief officer’s decision is important and should apply across the Bill. Clearly there is not an amendment before us which deals with outside London—there may have been one in one of the many groups we dealt with the other day but we lost it in the wash. However, it is an important principle to which we will have to return on Report, as the noble Lord, Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington, has indicated.
The point made by the Minister about PCPs—or, in the case of London, the London Assembly—dealing with lower-than-criminality level complaints about the elected police and crime commissioner or the MOPC in London will create a situation where there will constantly be a party political row in the police and crime panels and the London Assembly panel as to whether the person concerned has performed their duties appropriately. If that is in the absence of a centrally laid down and agreed framework of standards, it will be a constant, politically damaging and wasteful process. There is still a need for a centrally laid down framework of standards for the behaviour and actions of police and crime commissioners.
Lord Soley
The noble Lord is quite right in saying there is potential for political conflict of the type that he describes. Does he foresee that there could then be a danger of a continuing battle over that, which would, in the end, go to the courts?
Lord Harris of Haringey
It is certainly possible that it would go the courts. However, I was thinking more of an equally completely draining and pointless political toing and froing over something when, with a clear framework or set of guidance and standards against which any of these allegations could be judged, the situation would be better for all concerned. It seems to me that a PCC, for example, or the MOPC, may have a particular view of the standards they should follow while the PCP or the London Assembly panel might have a different view—that would just lead to endless political argument and rows, rather than saying, “Here is a set of guidance and that is the way we should operate”.
Baroness Doocey
My Lords, I have tabled Amendments 221 and 222 in this group, concerning the duty of the Home Secretary to deal with national threats by issuing a strategic policing requirement. As my noble friend Lady Hamwee has already said, the words “have regard to” in the Bill are definitely too weak and need to be changed to a firm obligation. Allowing a PCC to disregard national threats in favour of political expediency or re-election strategies is not a good idea. PCCs are directly elected. There will be political incentives for them to behave partially, particularly in the run-up to an election. Decisions based on a PCC re-election strategy will not necessarily be the best way to address major threats and public order problems.
Imagine a scenario whereby a PCC has been elected on the promise of putting significant additional police officers into an area of high crime and then, two weeks before the next election, is asked to extract those same officers in order to deal with the policing of a major demonstration in London. At best, they will be very torn between the necessity of trying to get themselves re-elected and whether they should “have regard to” sending the officers to London. It is a difficult issue that really needs to be clarified, and to become a firm obligation rather than a suggestion. Under the Bill, the PCC would be free to disregard strategic policing requirements. We cannot afford to have dealing with national threats undermined by decisions taken for reasons of political expediency.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, this part of the Bill is one of the most important. I speak to Amendments 229 and 230 in my name, and also in support of Amendments 221 and 222 to which I have put my name.
This issue is extremely important because, for most citizens, interaction with the police is obviously about what happens at the most local of levels. It is about what is going on at their street corner, the threat of violence in the streets, burglary and anti-social behaviour. However, people take it for granted that more serious crime is being dealt with somewhere. They take it for granted that terrorism is being dealt with somewhere. However, every part of the country must be making its contribution to that effort. If it does not, there is a real danger that terrorism or serious and organised crime cannot be dealt with effectively. There is a need for a national strategic policing requirement. The Government are quite right to place it in the Bill as they have done.
However, there is a danger in the overall governance proposals in terms of whether the same level of priority will be given under the new governance structure to what the current Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis calls the “balanced policing model”: the balance between the handling of the immediate concern of the local citizen and these national contributions to making the country safer. There is a fear—which has just been expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, and by others as well—about the extent to which a directly elected police and crime commissioner, or the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, will necessarily place the same priority on that national obligation as ideally they would. I have heard the Minister of State for Policing get extremely irate on that point. He says that he cannot imagine circumstances in which a responsible person elected to these positions will not take counterterrorism and serious and organised crime seriously. I agree. Most sensible elected politicians would of course give a very high priority to such matters. However, the reality will be, particularly in times of limited resources, that judgments and choices will be made.
I give your Lordships an example. At the moment, police services around the country are facing extremely difficult budget rounds. In those areas of the country without a counterterrorist intelligence unit, questions may well be phrased as to what the appropriate level of requirement for those areas to maintain a level of Special Branch commitment is compared to the past. Local policing bodies, whether under the current model or—even more so—under a directly elected model in the future, may well make a judgment that these issues are not currently significant in their part of the country and that they can reduce their commitment to them. That would be a perfectly sensible and, in many ways, rational judgment.
However, the reality is that even—indeed, especially—in the most rural areas of the country there have been organised terrorist training camps. It is a fact, regrettably, that one of the most difficult threats that counterterrorism now faces is the individual who chooses to radicalise themselves on the internet, is not in ready communication with groups which might otherwise be monitored, who decides to build an explosive device following a recipe obtained on the internet, and who then goes out and does something in a local town centre. There have been a number of such individuals in the past few years. Those are precisely the circumstances under which you suddenly discover that that force would have been very well placed to have retained a good, high, strong Special Branch capacity. Yet that is the sort of thing that is vulnerable at the moment. No doubt the Minister will counter that this is not actually a problem, but it is the sort of thing that should be looked at in terms of the level of budgets that have been allocated for those sorts of things.
Similarly, it may not be apparent that activities and organised crime will impact on, say, a rural village, or even some of the leafier suburbs of London. Apart from the fact that these are often precisely the areas where some of the most serious criminals decide they want to live, it is not the case that they do not impact on those areas. Indeed, we have to take into account the insidious way in which serious crime operates, whereby quality of life is diminished over quite a long period. That requires long-term investment in tackling those problems. It is not something that you can just send in a task force to handle; you have to continually work on those areas. There is a risk. There is the sort of conversation which goes, “Why should we, in this force area, maintain a kidnap unit of this capacity and quality, able to deal with these sorts of incidents? Why do we need to do this?”. The reason is that if you do not, or if you do not contribute to something that is provided on a regional or national basis, when something goes wrong it will be your citizens who are potentially vulnerable.
Yesterday, the Home Secretary produced proposals for a national crime agency. One of the central planks is the ability of the national crime agency to direct resources. This will be an interesting way forward, and it will be fascinating to watch some of the discussions which will no doubt take place with chief officers of police as to how this is to be managed and who will have operational control, and all the sorts of counterterrorism issues that have had to be resolved over the past few years. It will be an interesting and exciting set of discussions.
I have no problem with the concept in principle; all I am saying is that it will be that much harder to direct resources if, when you contact the chief constable concerned, you say, “I am sorry. I just don’t have that capacity because I decided I didn’t need that number of detectives or that number of specialist units in my force area because it is not a day-to-day priority as far as I’m concerned. I know there is a problem as this group seems to be operating across my territory but I no longer have the resources”. That is why the strategic policing requirement is so important. I do not believe that sensible police and crime commissioners or the MOPC will deliberately say, “We are going to run down these things”, but when you are faced with difficult budgetary decisions and you are facing a difficult election campaign, having more police tackling day-to-day street crime and anti-social behaviour is a very compelling argument.
In the long distant days when I was a local authority leader, I remember that whatever my personal priorities were in terms of the value of education or the big spending items, the important thing in the run-up to an election was to divert resources to street cleaning as that was the key driver on how people voted. I hesitate to say that there will be similar key drivers in the election for police and crime commissioners or the MOPC in London, but I suspect that there will be. The danger is that the strategic policing obligations will be put to one side, even if for a temporary period, in the run-up to an election. Therefore, there has to be something in the Bill which gives the strategic policing requirement real teeth and real obligations.
My specific proposal is that we should give more powers and responsibilities to Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary. I say that for two reasons. One is that I think that is the sensible way forward. It would mean that the inspectorate would look at the way in which individual forces had chosen to meet their obligations under the strategic policing requirement, and would then report no doubt to the Home Secretary but also to the elected commissioner, the PCP and anyone else involved. Certainly those parts of the report that can be made public should be made public because, if there is a failing in this area, local electorates will want make to take account of it in determining whether they should re-elect a particular individual or deciding whether it is an important issue for their locality. That should be a regular process. Given the pliability of budgets, it should be done at least once a year; otherwise, I am not sure that you will necessarily resolve the matter. That seems to me the appropriate mechanism and it is consistent with the way in which the police service operates.
The other important reason why I think this is the right way forward is that it gets the Government off the hook as regards how much they specify in the strategic policing requirement. I have heard Ministers say—vehemently in the case of the Minister of State—that they do not want to put an enormous shopping list into the strategic policing requirement. As a general principle, that is right. This is not the way to do it because people will simply follow the shopping list, if that is what they are told to do, rather than necessarily working out what is the best way to deliver their obligations under it. However, I have heard counterarguments from chief constables who say that we have to have a document. They are busily preparing volumes of material which they say should underpin the strategic policing requirement.
I propose that there should be a police-led discussion on the most effective way of meeting a strategic policing requirement. The inspectorate would have the key role in determining what it is looking for as it goes round forces to see whether the strategic policing requirement is being met. The Government would not have to specify in mind-boggling detail how many officers should patrol a regional airport, for instance—expect that in that case the airport ought to be paying for them—or specify in enormous detail the size of a force Special Branch or how many detectives it is necessary for each force to maintain so that they have the capacity to receive instructions, guidance and requests from the national crime agency or from the local counterterrorist unit. Those matters would be determined within the police service in discussions led by the inspectorate.
Unless you have this sort of mechanism, it seems to me that despite having a strategic policing requirement there will be no means of making that happen. As a consequence, there is a real danger that over time we will find that we do not have the resources that the country needs to deal with serious organised crime or terrorism.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, the Serious Organised Crime Agency already exists and the national crime agency will be an expansion and revision of the role of the Serious Organised Crime Agency. This is evolution and not revolution.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, the issue is that the national crime agency will have the ability to direct resources which would otherwise be under the control of chief constables. That is precisely the substance of the group of amendments that we are discussing now about the strategic policing requirement, and in this instance we will ensure that those resources are available for the national crime agency to direct.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
There were so many questions that I missed that point in my notes. My understanding of what was said in the Commons was that the draft protocol was to be published during the passage of the Bill. Several drafts of the strategic policing requirement have been written. They are undergoing extensive consultation and the Government are concerned that they get this right. This will take some time, but I assure the noble Baroness that the process is under way. I was warned that it was quite possible that a Member of this Committee would get up and wave her copy of the report, but perhaps Members of the Committee have not yet seen the drafts. I assure noble Lords that work is under way and that consultations are taking place.
Lord Harris of Haringey
I may have missed it, but I do not recall the Minister responding to my point in relation to Amendment 230 about placing an obligation on HMIC to report on the way in which the strategic policing requirement is being met, to make the report available to the Home Secretary, police and crime commissioners and MOPC, and to put it, in some form, in the public domain.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
I will take that back before I start to drop my notes. My understanding is that the question of how local forces fulfil the range of their functions will be part of what HMIC will naturally report on; it will necessarily be part of an HMIC report. We will look at that again and make sure that we can satisfy the noble Lord.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My reason for pressing the point is that it is extremely important. It is a mechanism that will enable a proper discussion about the real requirements for the strategic policing requirement. It will obviate the need for that to be written into a document that emanates from the Home Office. It will be a process that the police service owns through the inspectorate that will identify and report on whether the spirit of the strategic policing requirement is being honoured. I hope that this will be taken back and considered seriously, because I will press the point on Report unless the Government come forward with a response.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
The strategic policing requirement is intended, among other things, to inform the inspectors on the sort of things that they should be looking at. We are all aware that the strategic policing requirement feeds into a range of discussions. The question of whether there is a division between local and national policing is one that begins to dissolve once you get into it. I had a fascinating briefing some while ago about traffic policing and the extent to which it has to be a co-operative activity between different forces. I had not thought it through before. There was a great deal of linkage all the way through. I am impressed by the extent to which our forces already co-operate in the sort of specialised units that the noble Lord talked about, outside London where there are many forces smaller than the Metropolitan Police. We will look at this and make sure that it is fully in the Bill.
Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill
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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.
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.
Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill
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Lord Beecham
I shall briefly endorse what my noble friend Lady Henig said and refer to three short amendments in the group: Amendments 86A, 86B and 86C in Clauses 12 and 13, which would reinforce the principle of accountability which my noble friend addressed, in this case to involve the chief constable in that accountability. All of us in your Lordships' House are persuaded that there needs to be enhanced accountability affecting policing. The amendments are intended to contribute to that by providing, in respect of annual reports, that in addition to, in the phrase of the Bill, the “elected local policing body”, attending before the crime and disorder panel at a public meeting arranged by the panel, the chief constable should appear before the panel to answer questions on the report and, similarly, to,
“give the panel a response to any report or recommendations on the annual report”.
I cannot see any intrinsic difficulty in that. Many chief constables already attend council meetings within their force area. They address them and answer questions. The amendment simply reflects good practice in a number of areas.
The third amendment relates to the provision of information for police and crime panels. Again, under the Bill, that duty rests solely on the elected local policing body. I think it necessary for the same duty to be laid on the chief constable. I hope that the Minister will take these points away and give them sympathetic consideration. I commend the amendments in my name.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, I shall speak briefly to the amendments. Although I have not taken up the Committee's time by tabling parallel amendments in respect of the arrangements for Greater London, they could be proposed for consideration.
I want to pick up three issues. First, I echo the remarks of my noble friend Lord Beecham about the importance of chief constables being required or encouraged to attend key meetings. That ties in with Amendment 83C, to which my noble friend Lady Henig referred. It is about the visible answerability of the police in public: the police being seen to be accountable. The Government's original arrangements did not create a mechanism whereby the police would be seen to be accountable. The amendments would write that into the Bill, either under the model of a police and crime commission or whatever other model one chose. That is extremely important. I have discussed this matter with a number of senior police officers and they, too, are conscious that when they take difficult decisions it is important that they are seen to answer for them in a public forum, that they are seen to justify why they have done what they have done, and that they are seen to answer questions from those who are informed and empowered to ask questions about that specific point. That is why the visible answerability of chief officers of police needs to be found a place in whatever arrangement finally emerges from this Committee’s and Parliament’s consideration of the Bill. I hope that, in replying, the Minister will be able to indicate the Government’s thinking on this and tell us where it is envisaged that the visible answerability will take place.
Finally, I want to pick up on Amendment 83ZZA, which relates to membership of crime and disorder reduction partnerships. The current legal framework has built on the concept that local crime and disorder reduction partnerships should, first, be centred around the local police commander and the local chief executive of the local authority working together to solve problems to reduce crime. Various key stakeholding parties have been added over time, one of which is currently the police authority. Whatever emerges from consideration of the Bill regarding how the police service is governed and held accountable, we will have the rather strange situation that the body which holds the police service to account and which, so far as concerns the public, is responsible for most of the key decisions on the direction and strategy of the police force will not have a seat as of right on local crime and disorder reduction partnerships. There is then the complication of who exercises that right, although it is important to have that input at that level in crime and disorder reduction partnerships. Again, I should be grateful if the Minister could indicate how he envisages that this will happen in the future.
I have already said that by and large these amendments do not relate to Greater London, although similar points apply. There is a need for the visible answerability of the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis to be seen to take place in some forum, whether it is the London Assembly panel which is created for that purpose or anything else. There will also be a need for input into local crime and disorder reduction partnerships from the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, because in many London boroughs those partnerships are the engine for delivering crime reduction.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
I recognise that police authorities traditionally have had this role. We are proposing a new model. Local authorities will be represented both on police and crime panels and, as they are now, on community safety partnerships, the importance of which we entirely recognise.
Lord Harris of Haringey
I suspect that the Minister has been mesmerised by trying to work through how the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Henig, would work in practice. I treat this as an entirely positive development from the government Front Bench. However, the core of Amendment 83ZZA is that an arrangement should be facilitated whereby the local policing body, whatever it ends up looking like, will be represented on crime and disorder reduction partnerships. With this legislation, the Government are removing from each local crime reduction partnership the presence of a representative of the body that holds the police service as a whole to account. That is the gap that has been created. The amendment is trying to fill it. If the Government think that it is a good idea to remove from the crime and disorder reduction partnership the body to which the police service as a whole is held accountable, perhaps they could explain succinctly why.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, there is a question about whether police and crime panels, which are constituted from and representative of local authorities, should then appoint people back to local authorities. It is argued that the appointment of local authority representatives to the police and crime panels is part of what we need. I recognise that many amendments that we will discuss during the rest of the day are very much about the form of accountability that will be provided for both chief constables and police and crime commissioners between the four-year elections of police and crime commissioners, and therefore about the precise role of police and crime panels. The Government are very anxious to make sure that this is well thought through. Perhaps we all need to discuss between Committee and Report how much needs to be in the Bill.
The intention of Schedule 11 is to provide a framework—
Lord Harris of Haringey
I am sorry to interrupt the Minister in full flow. However, he has responded in terms of the position of the police and crime panel, whereas the amendment specifically says that a “local policing body” is to appoint, in this case, a member of the police and crime panel, because that is the model of governance that the Committee is currently working on. If the Government were to revert to something else, we would have a system whereby the local policing body would not have a status in individual local crime and disorder reduction partnerships. Is the Minister telling us that it is government policy that these magic new police and crime commissioners, if that is what we are to have, at the end of the day will not be represented on local crime and disorder reduction partnerships; and if so, why?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
It is very much the Government's proposal that police and crime commissioners should work in partnership with community safety partnerships. However, in places where—as, for example, in Thames Valley—there are 18 community safety partnerships, the idea of requiring the police and crime commissioner to be a member of each of those CSPs and to attend each meeting seems to us to be writing too much into the Bill.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, my recollection from when I was chair of the Metropolitan Police Authority is that we built relationships and appointed representatives to 32 crime and disorder reduction partnerships in Greater London—we did not have the pleasure of having representation on the City of London Police crime and disorder reduction partnerships, if such a thing there be. However, the point must be that if you want those relationships to exist and if you have settled on a process whereby there is a single police and crime commissioner, that person must be enabled to have someone—presumably a member of his or her staff if it is not going to be a member of the police and crime panel because the Government do not fancy having police and crime commissioners—and a mechanism to enable them to be directly represented. Those crime and disorder reduction partnerships are where local decisions are taken by the police, the local authority, the health service and the other responsible bodies on what has to be done in the local area. That is precisely the area where you would expect there to be collaboration and the police and crime commissioner, the local policing body, to be represented.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
Most of us who have dealt with chief constables will know that chief constables would be unlikely to be shrinking violets and absent from public meetings on such occasions. In the type of instances referred to by the noble Baroness, it is evident that the chief constable would be there to answer for his force alongside the police commissioner. However, it is the model of this Bill that, formally, accountability runs from the police and crime commissioner to the police and crime panel. We do not wish to muddle the line of accountability by establishing a direct link in which the chief constable on her own answers to the police and crime panel.
Many noble Lords have met chief constables far more regularly than I at public meetings and public consultations. In practice, when meeting CSPs and other bodies, chief constables naturally play their part in regular consultation: that is, consultation that answers to the public at large but is different from the relationship between the PCP and the PCC. We are, however, willing to take this away and to consider in detail whether there are ways in which the Bill can be tweaked to answer some of the issues that have been raised by those on the opposition Benches.
Lord Harris of Haringey
I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way and for the point he has just made. His explanation of how the Government envisage this working is as clear as it can be in the circumstances. He is telling the Committee that there is no requirement under this Bill for the visible answerability of chief officers of police. Visible answerability does not exist. It exists only if the chief constable, the chief officer of police, accepts an invitation to attend a panel. That is not going to be seen by the general public as being answerable in the same way as being called before representatives of the public to respond to questions is. That is the weakness of the Government’s proposals.
I understand the purity of the argument whereby a directly elected police and crime commissioner holds the police service to account, and that individual is then held to account by the police and crime panel. That is a wonderful concept, but it loses the visible answerability of the person with direction and control of the police force. That is what the public expect to see and what is missing from the Bill. If that is what the Government are proposing, that is fine; we understand it. However, I do not think it is in the interests either of properly accountable policing, or indeed of policing itself.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, we will take this away. However, the principle of the Bill is that the chief constable is responsible to the police and crime commissioner. It does not exclude public consultations and public meetings, but that is the principle of the Bill. Of course chief constables meet a whole range of people on a regular basis, but democratic accountability in this form is from chief constable to police and crime commissioner, with the police and crime panel scrutinising the actions of the police and crime commissioner. That is the purpose and design of the Bill.
Lord Condon
My Lords, I support Amendment 211ZB proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt. I agree entirely with him that it is not just a theoretical possibility. If this legislation was enacted, over time there would probably come a set of circumstances in which it would be totally inappropriate for the acting commissioner appointed to be a member of the commissioner’s staff—if the commissioner had been charged with corruption or a related offence. I urge the Government to think of redrafting this in a way that does not exclude the possibility of a member of the commissioner’s staff being acting commissioner if he or she is the appropriate person in seniority and there is no role conflict, but not to insist on their being the only candidate who can be appointed in those circumstances.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, I also speak to Amendment 211ZB on the basis that the principle that the Government should look to in this case is that the person who deputises under such functions must be an elected individual. If the principle of the Government’s legislation is that policing and crime commissioners are directly elected, the consequence must be that if they cannot carry out those functions, for whatever reason, the person who fulfils them in their absence must also be directly elected. I appreciate that in the current iteration of the Bill we are not talking about a directly elected policing and crime commissioner, but we are envisaging a situation in which the person who acts as policing and crime commissioner has a personal electoral mandate, not necessarily for the whole of the area but for part of the area. The principle of the person who deputises being directly elected is fundamental, whatever final models you have.
There are certain ways in which that aim could be achieved. If you had a direct election model for the commissioner, you could also require that a deputy was elected on the ticket at the same time, in the same way as a president and vice-president are elected at the same time in the United States. It would be a very simple change to make and would provide all sorts of additional sensible opportunities for delegation in the administration that was required. Alternatively, you could specify that it should be a member of the policing and crime panel who deputises, because they would have a personal electoral mandate and would be accountable in that way. However, the idea that individual officials, even if there is no cloud over them personally, could set the precept is an extraordinary one. I am sure that that is not what the Government have in mind and I am sure that we would all earnestly hope that there would never be circumstances in which a non-elected person set the precept. However, if the concept of the Bill is to vest these immense powers in a single individual, including the immense power of setting the precept, whether the veto is at 75 per cent, two-thirds or 50 per cent does not matter. You are vesting that power in one individual, and at the very least that person should have a personal electoral mandate.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton
My Lords, I hope that the Minister on this occasion—and I mean no offence to the noble Baroness, Lady Browning—will also quote what Professor John Stewart has to say about this idea. I agree totally with my noble friend Lord Harris about the confidence of the public in someone who has been elected. I also speak as somebody who was a member of a county council when an allegation was made about a chief constable and the chair of the police authority. Nobody knew where the ends of that ball of string would end up, and it is conceivable that somebody who was later drawn into the same allegation of corruption would have been the natural person to have been appointed instead. Flexibility has to be there because of the danger. It is not always clear at the beginning that it will go in a direction that involves members of staff.
The other points I put as questions to the Minister. I am a person who can see the potential for conspiracy, having been in politics so long, but it is possible that somebody would step aside with a spurious excuse in order that a member of their staff could act for a period of time and then stand for election themselves. You could see a situation in which the person concerned who had been elected was not aware of that. The Minister is looking puzzled, but it is quite possible that there could be collusion about the possibility of one individual appointing another individual into a post in their stead. That could lead to a form of nepotism, and that worries me unduly.
I come back to the point made by my noble friend Lord Harris. I do not think that the public can possibly have confidence in the system that is being proposed here.
Lord Shipley
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, for his intervention, because that is absolutely true. Insufficient work has been done on the impact of having an elected mayor in some cities but not in a whole police area. Of course, the boundaries in London are coterminous, but they are not coterminous in the larger urban areas in the rest of England. That is a potential problem. I take the noble Lord’s point. How the situation can be properly addressed, should there be a mayor, has to be talked through.
As to Amendment 137, the Bill states that a local authority member is excluded from being co-opted. I think that the opposite will prove to be the case. There may well be a need for a local authority member to be co-opted, perhaps to demonstrate political balance but, more likely, to demonstrate diversity or geographical interest. Preventing a local authority member who has not been directly appointed by the local authority from being a member of the panel is a potential mistake.
Finally, Amendment 138 states that:
“Panel arrangements may not include provisions for the approval of any member other than by that member’s nominating authority”.
This simply makes it clear that the power of appointment should lie with a member’s nominating authority.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, I hope that our discussion has highlighted to the Minister why the composition of these panels is a complicated matter to which a great deal of thought should be given. Earlier, the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, waxed eloquently about how wonderful these panels would be, how they would have a member from each relevant local authority in an area, how all this was going to be fine and that this meant that this would be the channel by which all the necessary consultation and discussions could take place. However, the reality is that the panels as envisaged in the Bill will not deliver that in that way. They will end up being cumbersome because of the other things that need to be taken into account as a consequence.
The Government cannot have it both ways. In one part of the Bill there are proposals for panels, but in London there is a proposal for a panel of Members of the London Assembly. Therefore, none of the 32 London boroughs will have an automatic right to be represented on the panel that will scrutinise the actions of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime. There may be one or two Members of the London Assembly with a dual mandate—something of which many political parties disapprove, but many members have a dual mandate—and, by chance, some people may represent an individual local authority. However, the norm will be that the members of the panel in London will not cover all local authorities in the area. Indeed, there may not be an elected Member of the London Assembly panel who covers a particular part of London, because the constituencies of the London Assembly Members may preclude that. It is also possible that none of the London-wide members may be elected. Therefore, in one part of the Bill there is a proposal for a panel that does not cover every local authority, while in the rest of the Bill panels are proposed for England and Wales that cover every local authority in the area.
The Government must address the question of which is the important principle. If the principle is that every relevant council should be represented, why does that not occur in London? If the principle is not so important in London, why is it more important outside London, where there is the additional complexity of districts, counties and unitary authorities? Also, if the Localism Bill goes through, there will be a whole series of directly elected mayors in addition to those we have at the moment.
These are questions that have to be resolved, as do the questions of proportionality and the balance between different geographical areas, because under the current Bill you could end up with all sorts of inequalities in terms of the balance of power within those panels. I am sure that that is not what the Government intend, which is why I am sure they will want to revisit this in our limited time available before Report.
The other point on which I wanted to pick up related to Amendment 123B, spoken to by my noble friend Lord Beecham, about the importance of having panels with separate panels to review the audit issues relating to the actions of the police and commissions in their areas. I chair the equivalent of the audit panel for the Metropolitan Police, and I have to say that this is not a small responsibility because of the number of audit issues that arise on a regular basis. These are matters that for the purposes of good governance must be addressed properly. There must be a route whereby internal and external audit can report, and it must be seen that those issues have been properly addressed. The danger of the present arrangement is that there is a vacuum regarding how audit issues can be properly dealt with. We discussed this briefly at an earlier stage in Committee, and I know that Ministers are having to think about this again. However, the principle remains that there should be some clear mechanism whereby these audit issues are considered, and if we are looking to strengthen the work of the police and crime panels, a requirement for there to be separate panels to consider audit issues would be a sensible way forward.
Baroness Randerson
My Lords, I should like specifically to address the amendments that refer to Wales, including Amendments 127A, 128A, 132A, 132B and 132C. When we discussed this issue previously, the Minister was good enough to confirm that there was due to be a meeting between Ministers here and Ministers of the Welsh Assembly Government. This is perhaps an opportunity for the Government to bring us up to date on the situation and on whether there is likely to be any agreement with the Welsh Government.
For those noble Lords who were not involved in the previous discussion, the background is that a legislative consent Motion is required from the Welsh Assembly in order for this Parliament to deal with issues that are partially devolved. The way in which this works is that local government issues are devolved to the Welsh Assembly; the Assembly and the Assembly Government have the power to cap the police precept; and there are numerous funding streams in Wales that are partly funded by local authorities and partly funded by the police. The two streams of power are literally intertwined and the Assembly has to give consent for the legislation to be passed.
For the first time ever, the Assembly did not give that consent. There was a negotiation, an agreement apparently was reached, and a proposal was put to the Assembly. Despite the fact that Ministers in Wales put forward that proposal, they abstained in the vote, and the proposal was defeated. Rightly or wrongly, Ministers were not convinced that they had been given sufficient say in how the panels were to be constructed. The proposal then was that Welsh Ministers should have the power to appoint a single member on each of the four panels for Wales. The legislation suggests that it could be either a Member of the Welsh Assembly in each case or a councillor. The Explanatory Notes imply that it would be an Assembly Member, but that is another issue which the Government might consider. That proposal was defeated and the Bill was then redrafted to give the Secretary of State the power to draw together the local authority representation on the panels. That clearly cuts the Assembly and Welsh Ministers entirely out of decision-making on the composition of the panels, which is undesirable in something which so closely affects so many aspects of devolution. Members were talking earlier about the possibility of friction between those areas with mayors and those without. There is a considerable possibility of friction between Home Office Ministers here and the Ministers of the Welsh Government if the latter have absolutely no say.
The amendments proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, and the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, would put the power in the hands of the Assembly rather than Welsh Ministers. That is good democracy at work. It gives the Assembly as a whole, on a cross-party basis, the opportunity to make the nominations. I urge Ministers to consider that, if they have not already reached an agreement with the Welsh Government on the way forward, because it is only right and sensible, in something that involves such close contact between the Government here and the Government in Wales, there should be a voice for the Welsh Assembly and the Ministers in Wales.
Baroness Browning
No, I take that point, but I think it goes even further than that. That is why it is so important that panels have the right to co-opt. I hope that they will see co-option as a useful tool in bringing equality to other issues, such as in discrepancies in the composition of the panel in relation to people from ethnic communities, the gender balance and so on. On the equality aspect of the panels, there is a lot to look at. The starting point of local authorities all having a representative is a good one. I am sure that the panels will not be so big and unwieldy that they will not be able to focus on the business in hand. Numbers are at the heart of being able to get a balance. Indeed, I have already taken that away and will look at it.
Lord Harris of Haringey
If it is such a good principle for every local authority outside London to be represented, would the Minister like to tell us why it is not a good principle in London?
Baroness Browning
The panel for the Mayor of London will be subject to an existing mechanism for providing a committee of elected individuals to scrutinise the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime. However, that mechanism does not exist outside London, as I am sure the noble Lord knows only too well, hence the provisions in the Bill to form a PCP of the unitary and district authorities. The policy intention is for elected people to be involved in scrutinising the PCC. The situation is not perfect for London, but London is a very different animal from the rest of the country. With his knowledge of London, the noble Lord will know why that is.
Lord Harris of Haringey
I certainly know why that is. We start from the basis that London is the greatest city in the world and that Birmingham and Manchester pale into insignificance. To be very serious about this, under the current arrangements, the 32 boroughs in London feel that they are not directly involved, which is one reason why we have had amendments in Committee on the importance of consultation and involvement with local authorities. It is all part of a package, and I hope that in looking at the issue outside London the implications inside London will be reflected on. Part of the solution will be to build in robust relationships between, in London's case, the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime and, outside London, police and crime commissioners and commissions or panels, or whatever else we have, and the elected local authorities in each area, both in providing scrutiny and in developing plans for policing in those districts.
Baroness Hamwee
I realise that I have not spoken in this debate yet, but following the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, perhaps the Minister would also consider the position of the current London Assembly. It appears not to be too concerned about most of the functions of the panel; it will be restricted to a number of the members of the London Assembly, but not all of them. On the noble Lord’s point, only a selection will do the job, not all 25 members, so the position there is exacerbated.
Baroness Henig
I thank the Minister very much for her very lengthy response. I also thank everyone who took part in the debate. The intention of the amendments was very much to start off a debate on these issues. I thought that the many points to which the Minister has just referred needed to be explored in debate. There has been an extremely full and good debate on a whole range of issues. Perhaps I may mention one or two of them.
The first issue is the composition of the panels. I feel the same way about the composition of the police and crime panels as I do about the composition of the House of Lords—I believe that composition should follow function. The composition of the panels should, in a sense, follow the functions of the panels, and I accept that I am trying to change those functions. I am trying to get the panels to have a more collaborative role. I do not want them just to be scrutinising the commissioner because I think that that would be a total waste of the panel members’ expertise. I am therefore trying to change the role. I am also suggesting that if the role should be more one of collaboration and getting involved in local policing, the composition will need to follow that. It will need to be somewhat more cohesive and to be balanced in the sorts of ways that I have mentioned. If the commission’s only function is to scrutinise the commissioner, which was the original model, then there is a greater case to be made that everybody should be included in this scrutiny exercise. But if that is all that the panels are going to do, it will be a complete waste of local talent.
Lord Harris of Haringey
Given that the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, has been telling us how, as a substitute for involvement in crime and disorder reduction partnerships, local authorities will be represented on the police and crime panels, does that not suggest that this is not just about scrutiny but about a much more important role? Therefore, all the noble Baroness’s points are even stronger.
Baroness Henig
I was going on to say that I remain absolutely convinced that political balance is essential. The political balance on police authorities at the moment—I lost the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, at one point—is established by the votes cast at the previous general election. That is the basis on which the composition of police authorities exists. It has worked extremely well for the past 15 years, and I see no reason why we should depart from that. In a sense, it is not that we want to keep police authorities in existence. That suspicion was voiced by the Minister, but that is not the issue. The issue is that we want to build on existing good practice. There are things that have worked very well in the past 15 years, and it seems stupid to throw them away. That is what we are trying to argue. The political balance of police authorities over the past 15 years was one of the positive changes that took place. To throw that away and to return to politicisation as we had it in the 1970s and 1980s is something that some of us want to avoid at all costs. That is one of the points about political balance.
The second point is about independent members. In the past 15 years, we have seen how effective independent members have been on police authorities. We know that two will not be sufficient. We know that you need diversity, gender balance and geographic balance. My suggestion of five or six independent members was intended to build on good practice. That is what I was trying to do in some of these amendments. It goes without saying that these independents would be appointed on Nolan principles. That has been established in the past few years, and I think it would continue.
On the other place sending us legislation, I have read all the debates. MPs came up with problems similar to those that we have been wrestling with here, and I have to tell the Minister that on more than one occasion people not just on the opposition side but also on the government side commented that they hoped that the Lords would be able to amend the legislation to meet the point. That was said more than once in the Committee stage in the other place and it is precisely what we are trying to do. We are trying to do what the other place suggested when it came up with problems. We are trying to find solutions, and that is running headlong into what the Minister confessed right at the outset—that there would be no changes to the overall structure of the Bill—and that is where we have problems. There is tension between no changes on the one hand and people in the other place knowing that there are serious flaws in the legislation and hoping somehow that the Lords will find a way to deal with them. We are trying to deal with these issues.
This was a probing amendment. I do not claim to have all the answers, but we have to try to meet some of these points. There are serious problems to be dealt with in this legislation, and that is what I think many of the amendments are trying to address—not in any hostile way, but simply to try to improve the legislation. If there are going to be no changes to the overall structure of the Bill—we will come back to that at the end—that will give us problems. However, at this point I will withdraw my amendment, but I shall feel free possibly to bring it back at a later stage.
Baroness Harris of Richmond
My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Henig, has tabled a series of important amendments, so she should not apologise to the Committee for taking some time over them. They are extremely important and I hope that noble Lords will read Hansard carefully tomorrow to make sure that they understand exactly what she has said.
I agree completely that the standards of conduct to be established for the PCCs are utterly inadequate in the Bill as presently drafted. Her amendments to address them make absolute sense. I also agree that the current provisions are inadequate for some of the more politically motivated complaints that are likely to be made. Just because they are political, it does not necessarily mean that they are by definition spurious, although of course many of them may be. A proper and robust mechanism for dealing with them is essential, but the Bill does not currently provide for that. More serious in many ways, though, is the lack of clarity about how complaints from ordinary members of the public are going to be dealt with or how generally poor conduct is going to be handled. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Henig, on the solution that she has set out. It manages to balance properly the independent oversight of these matters with an appropriate and stronger role for the panel. I therefore support the proposals wholeheartedly.
Moving on to senior officer appointments and dismissals, I agree that the final decision on these matters must rest with the governing body. It is not enough for only the chief officer to be appointed, disciplined or dismissed by that body; this must apply to the other senior ranks as well. I support particularly the concerns outlined by the noble Baroness about the negative impact that this will otherwise have on diversity in senior police ranks. I am therefore pleased to see that her proposals for appointing senior officers include a role for community representatives. That is to be warmly welcomed.
I wholeheartedly support the much stronger role that the noble Baroness proposes for police and crime panels in appointments, suspensions and dismissals of the top force team. This obviously guards against too much power being in the hands of one person and reinforces a more collaborative approach between the PCC and the panel, which is absolutely desirable.
I agree that it is not appropriate for the chief officer to be responsible for conduct and discipline matters for the other members of the senior force team. I share the concerns of the noble Baroness that this is asking for trouble and could easily lead to corruption. It seems to me that the provisions in the Bill relating to force corruption complaints and discipline must be changed. I agree completely that it cannot be appropriate for a serving police officer to stand as a PCC. How ridiculous that would be. It is much better for police governance that all former police officers must wait some time before they can become PCCs. The noble Baroness has suggested five years; I would make it life.
I also agree that the current provisions seem to discriminate unfairly by barring current police authority members from standing as PCCs. If councillors can stand without having to resign, police authority members should be able to do so, too. Any arguments about their possibly misusing the resources of the authority to aid their campaigns apply equally to councillors. In any event, as with local authorities, rules are in place for police authorities that prevent resources from being used in this way. I am concerned that this could lead to a number of police authority members resigning at a time when authorities need all the members that they have to deliver business as usual in a challenging financial environment and to deliver the successful transition that we all want to see.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, I apologise to those Members of the House who are keen to move on to the other debate, but I have to say that it is quite strange that we moved on at this point to this group of amendments, given their sheer number, complexity and importance. I am afraid that I have four issues to raise and, although I will abbreviate what I would otherwise have said, I think that they are important.
The first is that there must be a clear and robust framework for the conduct of people who are either elected police and crime commissioners or, in the case of London, the mayor or the deputy mayor responsible for policing and crime. The same applies to whatever other structure we may have, whether it be police and crime commissions or anything else. The reason why we must have a robust and clear set of guidelines for conduct is that potentially very serious problems could arise. Although provision is made in the Bill to deal with the most extreme examples, it does not cover the sort of things that are much more likely to happen. If an elected police and crime commissioner, having been briefed by a chief officer of police about a particular investigation, takes it upon himself or herself to telephone the subject of the investigation and talk to them about it, how will that be dealt with? Where are the guidelines and rules of conduct to say that that is not appropriate behaviour for such a person?
I find it extraordinary that there is no mechanism for dealing with such an event. I also find it extraordinary that there are no mechanisms for dealing with what are perhaps slightly less serious matters, or indeed for providing a framework so that the people who are elected understand what is and is not permissible. Things of this sort could happen, so there is a need for a robust and proper framework to deal with them. I am extremely grateful to my noble friend Lady Henig for tabling this group of amendments and for giving us an opportunity, albeit it at a rather inappropriate moment, to debate these points. There has to be a framework for conduct, whether it is the standard structure as set out in these amendments or something else. However, there must be an explicit code of conduct.
Baroness Browning
I will have to check that out for the noble Baroness, and write to her on that. It looks as though the Bill says that, just because you have been on a police authority, for some reason that is not obvious you cannot stand as a candidate. I agree that that reads in a rather strange way. But that is the position and I shall check out whether the same rule applies to people on local authorities. I shall write to the noble Baroness on that.
A lot of concern has been expressed about the police and crime commissioner and what would happen if they did something outwith the law or acted in a certain way. The noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, gave an example—that they might ring somebody with confidential information that had been given by the chief constable. That could be construed as perverting the course of justice, which would be a criminal offence subject to investigation by the IPCC.
Lord Harris of Haringey
I am sorry to hold up noble Lords who wish to speak in the debate that follows, but my example was not posed as a hypothetical incident. It happened in London. The present Mayor of London was briefed about an operation and phoned the person who was the subject of the investigation. I think it would have been disproportionate for the Mayor of London to be prosecuted, as the Minister suggests, for trying to pervert the course of justice. It would have been disproportionate to something that was ill thought out and a spur of the moment action by the Mayor of London to phone somebody that he regarded as a chum. Because there was in existence a robust, standard structure, with clear guidance and a code of conduct as to what was or was not appropriate, it was possible to hold the Mayor of London to account and go through a process whereby, I am sure, he would not do the same thing again. But if the only answer is to arrest the police and crime commissioner for perverting the course of justice, I suspect that we are getting ourselves into a very unfortunate tangle.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton
My Lords, I suggest that the Minister looks at a case in Lancashire, where the father of somebody accused of an offence telephoned a friend who happened to be in the same organisation—I do not need to go into detail—who then telephoned a friend of his who was in the same organisation, who then telephoned the chief constable, who then telephoned the police officers involved with the original charge. The charge was reduced as a result of the call from the chief constable, and the person got off from the lower charge. In the middle of all that could have been one of these commissioners. In the end, people lost their jobs, but there was not actually a crime committed anywhere in that chain of offences.