Police and Crime Commissioners

Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

Of course, because they are now elected and accountable, they can be referred to the Independent Police Complaints Commission. Previously, the chairs of police authorities could not be referred to that organisation, so it is a step forward.

[Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, given that one of the key reasons for appointing police and crime commissioners was that it was alleged that the chairmen of police authorities were not identifiable and that nobody knew them, is there any evidence that members of the public actually know who police and crime commissioners are?

[Lord Bates]

A few people in South Yorkshire might know who Shaun Wright is. The South Yorkshire chief constable, who gave evidence before the Home Affairs Select Committee, said that during his seven years he could not remember the name of either of the chairs of the police authority that he had had, but I am sure that he knows the names of Shaun Wright and his successor.

Identity Cards

Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate Excerpts

Wednesday 16th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

I am sure within your Lordships’ House there are plenty of people who can recite their national service number. I am not entirely sure that I agree with my noble friend on this. However, the Government are well aware of the importance of being able to satisfy identities in the modern age. The noble Lord, Lord West, referred to the modern age in his question. The Home Office is well aware of this and is looking at ways in which this can be done.

[Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the uniqueness of the previous identity card is surely the fact that it was biometric, which identified the person who was attached to the identity card very clearly without any doubt at all. In this case it is suggested that it should be voluntary. What is wrong with this idea?

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

My Lords, I have answered that question but I can reinforce the view that biometrics are important, and that is why the residence permit is biometric.

Alcohol: Late Night Drinking

Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate Excerpts

Wednesday 16th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, a police superintendent has the right to close premises where excessive disorder is being caused. Can the Minister tell the House how often this power has been exercised?

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

I cannot give the noble Lord a quantitative answer. One of the measures under the anti-social behaviour Bill, which will arrive in this House shortly, will give the power—on the authority of a police inspector—to order the immediate closure of premises.

Crime: Stalking

Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate Excerpts

Tuesday 12th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

The noble Baroness is also a member of the justice unions group, and I am grateful for the work that that group did. Cyber offences are explicitly included in the new offences and are designed to recognise that stalking can take many different forms. It is a form of harassment that this Government will not tolerate.

[Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that emphasis should always be put on the fact that stalking, like domestic violence, has male victims as well as female?

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

Yes. It is quite interesting that in the Crime Survey for England and Wales, 4.2% of females complained of being stalked and 2.7% of men also complained of being victims. It affects people regardless of gender.

Police and Crime Commissioners

Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate Excerpts

Thursday 13th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

I hope that noble Lords will agree with me that there is nothing wrong with party politics in its right place. The key thing about the way in which the role of the police and crime commissioners is structured means that the operation of the police will not be politicised. Chief constables will decide all operational matters, such as who is arrested and how investigations are carried out—these will not become political decisions. The policing protocol helps to set out where the PCC’s role ends and that of the chief constable begins.

[Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate]

My Lords, if a police and crime commissioner who represents a party finds that the public in the area he represents take a totally different view at the local level from the policies of that party, which policy should he implement? Should it be the policy of the public who elected him or the party policy?

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

This is something that all elected politicians have to come to terms with and I see no conflict here. For the first time, we have direct democratic accountability through the role of the PCCs and I see the next PCC elections bearing witness as to how effective this will be, in the sense that people will be making choices, some for someone they think represents their political point of view, while others will be looking for other characteristics. Above all, however, they will be judging on how well the PCCs have performed. That is the challenge that faces those who have taken on this office.

Police and Crime Commissioners: Elections

Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate Excerpts

Tuesday 4th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

My noble friend has worked very hard at producing figures which I am afraid I do not recognise. The total recoverable cost of the election in north Wales, as set out in the Police and Crime Commissioner Elections (Local Returning Officers’ and Police Area Returning Officers’ Charges) Order 2012 is £1,063,000. The north Wales police area returning officer believes that the cost of contingencies for Welsh language ballot papers comes to around £62,000. Therefore, with 80,000 votes cast in north Wales, it comes to significantly less than the figure quoted by my noble friend.

[Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate]

My Lords—

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, is not one of the lessons of this fiasco that people do not want gratuitous constitutional changes shoved down their throats?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

I note what my noble friend has to say on that matter, but I am a great believer in the coalition. We will be taking his advice, because the next election will be three and a half years from now, in May.

[Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate]

Are safeguards in place for the appointment of deputy commissioners? Is he aware of articles in the press suggesting that a number of deputy commissioners have been appointed by commissioners who were relatives and friends? Is this not the nepotism that was predicted?

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

I cannot speak to those particular allegations. All I can say is that the appointment of a deputy police and crime commissioner is not obligatory, but is something that police and crime commissioners can do. Further, they are required to appoint a head of paid staff and a finance officer. The latter two posts are the only ones that the law requires.

Police: Strike Action

Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate Excerpts

Thursday 18th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

Yes, there is a tribunal which considers these matters and, indeed, there are issues before it at the moment. I think that today is the first day on which it is taking evidence. There is a mechanism in place for resolving these issues, but there is also an argument which I think the Government should not be afraid of putting to the police force. The Tom Winsor proposals give the police an opportunity to improve their flexibility of working, for improving pay scales so that there is a better step up from constable to sergeant, and making sure in many ways that the pay structure for the police force, which was set up 30 years ago, is fit for purpose today.

[Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate]

My Lords, when the right to strike was removed in 1919, it followed large-scale disorder on the streets of the United Kingdom and by implication recognised the very special position that the police service was in. Does the Minister agree that the special case for the police—the X factor if you like—should always be borne in mind when the Home Secretary is deciding issues concerning the police?

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

My answer to that is yes.

EU Drugs Strategy: EUC Report

Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate Excerpts

Thursday 19th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate]

My Lords, I also speak as a member of the sub-committee of the noble Lord, Lord Hannay. Can I start by thanking him for his chairmanship and for securing this very important and interesting debate?

Some 12 years ago I made a speech early in my membership of this House. It was on cannabis. I felt in a lonely position. I fear tonight that I might repeat the experience. My short speech will be informed by a 35-year career in policing, part of which was in the drugs squad of Durham Constabulary—which was then and I might add remains one of the finest police forces in the country.

Illegal drugs are a scourge in modern society. I think that we all agree on that. I have seen at first hand the misery, psychological damage and, yes, death, caused to young, old, rich and poor by improper drug use. Only last week we read in the press of two tragic but different cases. One was that of a psychologically damaged 26 year-old woman, Hannah Bonser, allegedly addicted to cannabis, who for no apparent reason attacked and stabbed Casey Kearney, a 13 year-old stranger. It was for no other reason, it appeared, than that she was being told in her head to do it. This case illustrates the damage that newer, more powerful cannabis can inflict on the mind and should be compulsory reading for those who would relax controls on this mind-altering substance. Bonser was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

The other case is totally different. It is of two people of mind-boggling wealth, Hans and Eva Rausing, living in a wealthy part of London in a £50 million house. They lived in squalor to indulge their addiction to hard drugs and it resulted in the death of Eva, who was only in her late 40s.

I mention these two cases to illustrate that the drug problem affects all classes, professions and ages. If allowed to flourish it can eat away at the very fabric of a normal, healthy society. As responsible parliamentarians in a nation state or in a European union of states, we have a duty to get right our strategy for dealing with the problem. We are here to discuss the strategy of the European Union, but that will naturally be informed by the individual experience of member countries.

In this short debate I would like to discuss two areas and base my comments on many years’ experience of dealing not just with drugs but criminal activity generally. The main thrust of illegal drug control should be the task of individual states, each with different problems and cultures. Subsidiarity in this area is the correct approach. How can the European Union assist? Clearly, the fight against drug trafficking goes wider than state boundaries. The various countries of the EU should work together, pooling resources and experience in the fight to prevent the movement of illegal drugs within and outside the Union.

One of the key weapons in the fight against drug trafficking is good intelligence. It is essential. Rather like prostitution and pornography, drug crime is often described as victimless. You rarely have a complainant reporting the matter. As the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, mentioned, the victim does not always come forward. There are victims, of course: the child in the pornographic film, the trafficked girl now working as a prostitute, the drug addict and his family, and the society that has to fund his treatment. They are all victims. Good intelligence is critical.

The difficulty is getting police officers, police forces and countries to share that intelligence. Before computerised databases we kept information on cards. The problem was getting detectives to put the information on the cards. Officers had a tendency to keep the information to themselves. When they were on leave or away sick, that valuable information was lost. Now that we have computerisation there is no excuse for that.

We saw from the inquiry chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, into the Soham murders in Cambridgeshire, that one of the main problems for the police was a lack of sharing intelligence. For that reason, one of the most important recommendations in our report before noble Lords today is paragraph 72. It states:

“The Government should fully support the Director of Europol in seeking to improve the use of Europol's unique databases and other facilities, and should urge other governments to do the same”.

Trafficking of course is the supply side of the problem. What about reducing demand? The criminal law has a part to play, as has education. Treatment, of course, is also essential, but it is a little late to go down that road when we should be trying to stop it happening in the first place. In our inquiry, the evidence from the Home Office was interesting in that our UK policies seem to be working. We were told by the drugs director that,

“drug use is actually falling in a number of countries across Europe”,

and that England is,

“showing some of the biggest reductions of drug prevalence across the EU … the fall is almost entirely due to reduction in the use of cannabis”.

To some extent, that was borne out in the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, who mentioned the reduction in the number of people trying to get treatment for drug addiction.

It made me smile when I put to witnesses who had perhaps a more liberal view than I that we must be doing something right in Britain. I got the response that we should treat the data with caution. Yet these are the very data used by that same lobby when drug offences were increasing. Of course, it then criticised the use of criminal sanctions. It is a classic case of shooting the messenger and using statistics rather like a drunk uses a lamp-post—more for support than illumination.

In conclusion, we need to change the culture of society. It is not impossible; we have done it before. We did it with drink-driving. Those who were convicted were punished and ostracised, and we increased the detection methods with roadside breath testing. I am very pleased that we are going to do the same with drug- driving, which is the cause of a relatively unknown number of deaths in this country. We also did it with smoking. We made it illegal to smoke in pubs and restaurants, and, I am pleased to say, in your Lordships’ House.

Most people do not like to be seen infringing the law and, over time, the culture of society changes. Peer pressure starts to have an effect, and this is living proof that there is a place for criminal sanctions, which can change society for the better. The European Union can assist in that endeavour. I commend the report to the House.

Police: Working Conditions

Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate Excerpts

Thursday 19th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I echo the noble Lord’s praise for the police service, and thoroughly endorse it. However, I should also say that it is quite right that we look at police pay and conditions, which have not been properly examined for 30 years. That was the point behind the Winsor report. We believe that that report will provide a good basis for discussion and consultation. This area has not been looked at for 30 years, and we think that it is right to look at it again now.

[Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate]

My Lords, in the light of the security debacle mentioned by my noble friend Lord Grocott, does the Minister agree that when it comes to service, duty and commitment, public is quite often far preferable to private?

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, that is another question. I praise the police force for all that it does. The noble Lord is a fine exemplar of the police service and we are proud to see him serving in this House as well. However, there are some areas where it is often better to use the private sector, and that is why we make use of it for such things as the security around sporting events. I do not think that the noble Lord would think that that would be a good use of police time or manpower.

Olympic Games: Security

Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate Excerpts

Monday 16th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I do not think that is a point that I need to respond to.

[Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate]

My Lords, in asking this question I declare an interest that is in the Lords register. Is the Minister aware of the advanced technical means of securing large perimeter areas by means such as radar, which obviously reduce the manpower required for these purposes? Is he aware that some 18 months ago an approach was made to the Olympic security authorities by a company that secured Sydney harbour in Australia? Presentations were given and considerable interest was shown by those who received the presentation but, unfortunately, there does not appear to have been any follow-up by those in charge of security at the Olympic authorities.

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord that technology can obviously always play a very important part in security but it would be a very rash and foolish Government who relied only on technology. In the end, one needs to have feet on the ground and to have people there who are properly trained and accredited to do the right job.