Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner for North Yorkshire (Fire and Rescue Authority) Order 2018

Debate between Lord Harris of Haringey and Baroness Harris of Richmond

Wednesday 21st November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Harris of Richmond (LD)]

My Lords, my contribution to this regret Motion will necessarily be rather more targeted, as the area in question is my area of North Yorkshire, the largest single rural county in England. I was a county councillor there for 20 years and chaired its police authority for a number of those.

The Minister certainly knows my firm opposition to the introduction of police and crime commissioners. Indeed, some of your Lordships will recall that, with help from many of your Lordships, I defeated the coalition Government’s proposal—one of David Cameron’s ideas—to bring in a single police commissioner in place of the 17 or 19 members of police authorities. As we see, it was a pyrrhic victory. Nevertheless, the concerns many of us from across the House expressed have been well and truly realised across the country, not least in North Yorkshire.

Our PCC has been embroiled in an unseemly and unprofessional case of bullying some of her members of staff. She was hauled before her police and crime panel, which did a superb forensic job of getting to the bottom of the complaints and asking her to consider her behaviour. I am told her response to them was arrogant in the extreme: she denied the complaints and then tried to complain about the way she had been treated by the panel. She was found guilty of bullying behaviour, and I understand more complaints are in the pipeline.

This is a PCC who wanted to put a new police headquarters on a piece of land in the middle of a field in a small rural village. This is a PCC who auctioned off the contents of silver cabinets and much else from the old police headquarters without first asking if former officers would like to bid on any of the contents, in which many of them had a particular—and, in some cases, personal—interest. This is remembered with much anger and bitterness.

She treats people who disagree with her with utter contempt. She certainly treats members of the PCP like that. It does not stop there. All the local political parties in North Yorkshire, as we have heard from my noble friend, were opposed to her taking on the running of the fire and rescue authority. No one I have spoken to thinks she is a fit and proper person to undertake such a responsibility. The fire and rescue service in North Yorkshire certainly does not want it, but that has now been foisted on it by government decree. All the consultation the PCC says she has undertaken to establish her business case went by the board. She took absolutely no notice of anyone.

Our fire and rescue authority was not underperforming in any way. Indeed, I was a member of it many years ago, and there was always a good collaborative relationship between partner agencies. Why should the PCC want to take it over? It was running perfectly well. She says she can save a lot of money by doing so. The report in the Press in York says that she is already, just a few days into her new job, contemplating slashing the fire service. She claims the independent report she received said that the service was in an unsustainable financial position and that she would have to identify savings and set an emergency budget. She says that, as North Yorkshire’s PCC, she has saved thousands of pounds since taking over from the old police authority. I find this hard to believe. When I helped set up our first police authority in North Yorkshire, we had a clerk, a secretary and a clerical assistant. She has at least 14 members of staff. I cannot imagine that her wage bill is less than mine was, even accounting for the remuneration of police authority members.

Indeed, it appears that she has led North Yorkshire Police into its worst financial crisis since the millennium. There is a £10 million shortfall this financial year, which may come as a surprise to the people of North Yorkshire as there has been no public acknowledgement of this gathering storm. It is strange to compare that with how widely her takeover of the fire service has been publicised. She promises a proper, transparent plan for dealing with this. I wish her luck with the Fire Brigades Union.

Unfortunately, it is the Government’s idealistic policy that has brought us to this point. No proper scrutiny by anyone with any experience or knowledge of the fire and rescue service was brought in to assess her business case. The CIPFA report even acknowledged that there was no overwhelming case for change, yet the Government decided to back this politically ambitious woman, who has absolutely no experience of the fire and rescue service.

York, which has world heritage status, is fearful that some of the PCC’s proposals for saving money will reduce even further the funding of the fire and rescue service. Local councillors, who know their area best and who would have had input into any suggested changes to fire service provision, will have no say whatever from now on. York already suffers from being among the worst funded places in the country for public services, per resident, so their concerns are well justified.

Can the Minister tell me what contingencies will be put in place if all does not go according to plan and there is a major fire in the county? She will remember the devastating fire which engulfed part of the glorious York Minster some years ago. It was noted worldwide, such is the importance of that historic building. Indeed, all North Yorkshire firemen who helped to put out the fire on that fateful morning received a specially struck St William’s Cross for their bravery in tackling the blaze, and they are still worn on their ceremonial uniforms to this day. Reducing the number of engines and personnel in the fire and rescue service will do nothing to assuage the concerns of the people of York, who also rely heavily on them to deal with the severe flooding that York suffers from regularly.

In conclusion, I am very concerned that the PCC for North Yorkshire has been allowed to take over the fire and rescue service while still having further charges of bullying brought against her. The Minister, in an Answer to a Written Question about the police and crime panel’s power to hold the PCC to account, which I am grateful for, simply stated:

“Police and Crime Panels have the appropriate powers to effectively scrutinise the actions and decisions of Police and Crime Commissioners and enable the public to make an informed decision when voting”.


Well, the PCP did, but it has absolutely no power to hold the PCC to account or to correct her if necessary. It can do barely more than disagree with her. PCPs need proper teeth, as we urged the Government to give them during the passage of the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill back in 2011. PCCs can get rid of chief constables on a whim, it seems; no one can get rid of a PCC except the electorate, and they have to wait for an election to do so.

Therefore, I again ask the Minister: when will the Home Office give police and crime panels enough power to hold PCCs properly to account for their behaviour and, further, enable them to enforce any recommendations they might have? Until this PCC can understand that leadership means listening to people and taking them with her, rather than bullying them, she is not suitable to hold such a vital office.

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

My Lords, it is, as ever, a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Harris. However, I am slightly concerned that the reputation that I may have in your Lordships’ House of sometimes being rather blunt and trenchant will be sidelined by what the noble Baroness has just said.

I am not going to talk about North Yorkshire at all—I appreciate that that is perhaps not in the spirit of this debate—but I want to pick up just one point from what the noble Baroness has said. When police and crime panels were set up as a sort of safety net in respect of police and crime commissioners, they were very much a governmental afterthought. Very little thought was given to their composition or how they could be made effective, or indeed to the powers they might have. After six or seven years, now might be a good time for the Government to review the role of police and crime panels, how they might be made more effective and useful, and how they might effectively hold police and crime commissioners to account.

However, my reason for speaking in this short debate—I will do so fairly briefly—is to ask some questions about Home Office policy on police and fire mergers. The Home Office was extremely enthusiastic about this at first, but I get the sense that Ministers have rather gone off the idea: it is proving to be rather more complicated and is not demonstrating quite the benefits that they had hoped for. Therefore, I wonder whether the police and crime commissioner for North Yorkshire is not being hung out to dry on this issue, in that she no longer has quite the same enthusiastic support and facilitation that the Home Office might offer to make this policy work. I would be grateful if the Minister told us whether the Government’s commitment is still as intense as it was when this power to bring together police and fire was first introduced.

While she is answering that question, perhaps the Minister can tell me where we are with the role of police and crime commissioners in the areas they represent and the wider criminal justice organisation. Areas of synergy between the police and fire services are rather limited. There are a few, although not quite as many as people think; it is not just that people wear a uniform and go out and help people. There are far more synergies between the policing role in a local area—particularly in relation to the objective of reducing crime—and some of the other criminal justice responsibilities. For example, bringing together responsibility for oversight of the police and responsibility for oversight of the probation services—in particular, the monitoring of ex-offenders and those who have been through the courts—might produce far more savings for the country at large and the criminal justice system as a whole.

I wonder where the Government’s thinking is on that. If I remember correctly, there was a clause that said rather vaguely that this could be looked at at some stage in the future, but the Ministry of Justice was not very keen, so it did not get any real teeth in the original legislation. However, the Home Office ought to be directing its attention to delivering real savings, to turning people away from crime and to reducing the crime figures. I would be very interested in knowing what the current Home Office policy is on that matter.