Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 2016 (Consequential Provisions) Order 2017

Lord Hope of Craighead Excerpts

Wednesday 10th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Harris of Richmond]

The noble Baroness makes a good point and I concur with what she says. I predict that this will go horribly wrong at some point and that is a real shame. I hope that the noble Lord has listened very carefully to the views that have been clearly expressed around the House, and certainly the resolution that the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, talked about, as that will be extremely important.

[Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)]

My Lords, as a fairly frequent traveller on the east coast railway line from Edinburgh to London King’s Cross, I would like to say a word or two about this issue. As the noble Lord, Lord Maxton, pointed out, there is no train station at the border, which you reach a little north of Berwick-upon-Tweed on your way to Dunbar. As I understand the situation, that means that in order to police effectively south of the border, British Transport Police officers will have to get on to the train at Waverley in Edinburgh, so they will travel the whole way down the line, as they do at present. Going north, they cannot get off at Berwick-upon-Tweed, because they still have several miles to run in England before they reach the Scottish border, and they will have to travel all the way to Waverley.

Therefore, the ridiculous situation created by this proposal by the Scottish National Party is that the British Transport Police force will remain on the train, as it does at present. It will cease to provide the kind of security north of the border that the noble Baroness, Lady Liddell, talked about, although to do its job effectively in England, it will have to travel the whole journey. Therefore, members of the Scottish police force will be travelling on the train, getting off at Berwick if they are lucky—but not every train stops there—or going all the way down to Newcastle and then having to travel all the way back again. I cannot speak for the west coast line because I am not so familiar with it, but presumably the same problem applies there, and you have to travel at least to Carlisle before you can get off the train.

[Lord Maxton]

It is even worse on the west coast, because Carlisle is even further south than Berwick-upon-Tweed.

[Lord Hope of Craighead]

My Lords, a curious feature of this measure is that if British Transport Police officers are brave enough to exercise their powers as British Transport Police officers north of the border, they are given the power to do that by paragraph 2 of Schedule 2. In fact, the paragraph is consistent with the idea that we do not go ahead with the merger at all. It is a perfectly sensible method of solving the problem which the Smith commission had to face up to, which was to say that the functions of the British Transport Police in Scotland will be a devolved matter. That is a perfectly sensible proposition. What has gone wrong is the Scottish National Party’s interpretation of it, as the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, said.

For all the reasons that others have given, I am strongly against the merger. However, like the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, I cannot see anything wrong with the order we are asked to consider. Therefore, if the Motion were pressed, I regret that I would have to vote with the Government because that is the state of play. However, I entirely sympathise with the plea of the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, to the Minister. Given the practical example I have given to the Minister, I hope that he can point out to the Scottish National Party that it is a waste of public money to have two police officers travelling on the train from Newcastle all the way to Edinburgh and back again just to solve the problem of the merger which it is trying to advance.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

My Lords, in opening the debate, the Minister referred to the degree of opposition to this proposal in this House. He was not wrong in that. He could also have mentioned the degree of opposition in the Scottish Parliament, most particularly among his colleagues in the Conservative Party, who are on record as opposing this proposal most vigorously, particularly Ruth Davidson. He could have included the Liberal Democrats and the Labour opposition in the Scottish Parliament as well. But above all, he should have mentioned the opposition of the British Transport Police and the British Transport Police Authority. When it gave evidence to the Scottish Parliament in March, it said that dealing with fatalities, for example, could take 50% longer under the new plans, and that,

“there is well-defined evidence that a non-specialist force is less able to provide the consistent levels of service that a dedicated policing commitment can offer”.

Decades of experience of dealing with IRA threats would be lost, and the work that the BTP undertakes as the lead authority on scrap metal theft across the whole of Great Britain would also be lost if this proposal went through.

Fortunately, there is an opportunity for the Scottish Parliament to think again about the model of devolution which it is putting forward. Indeed, it would have been helpful if this House had passed the amendment which a number of us tabled almost exactly two years ago, which made it clear that, while we were not opposed to devolution of transport policing in Scotland, that devolution should be on the basis that a force linked to the British Transport Police should be the agency that carries it out. I spoke to the chief constable of the British Transport Police, and he is entirely happy with that. Indeed, in its evidence to the Scottish Parliament the BTP said that it is happy to have a direct relationship with Scottish Ministers and with Holyrood. If it is necessary to change the name of the force in Scotland, for the reasons that the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, referred to, that is possible—there is no reason why it should not be called “Transport Police Scotland” or “Scotland Transport Police”. Nobody is hung up on the name of the British Transport Police. What matters is that the job is done properly and in the most effective way.