Policing and Crime Bill

Lord Porter of Spalding Excerpts

Wednesday 14th September 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

My Lords, the speech from my noble friend Lord Bach underlines the perils the Government are going through with these clauses. I hope I am not being unfair to the Government when I characterise the first five clauses of the Bill as a sort of machismo exercise in saying, “Despite the fact that we can’t find a problem, we’re going to have a thundering great piece of legislation which places a statutory duty on people to do things that they do already”.

Then you move into the next chapter of the Bill, whose clauses say, “We’d really like to do something here but we’re a little scared of the consequences”—all the speeches in the debate so far have highlighted the difficulties and complexities—“so, although we’ll appear a little tentative, we are going to make it voluntary”. The reality is that the Government are being incredibly cautious here and not really saying what they want. Precisely as my noble friend Lord Bach suggested, they want this to happen, I suspect: they want directly elected police and crime commissioners for areas to take over responsibility for fire.

There might be a case for doing that, but not if it will cause immense difficulties and will work in only a comparatively small part of the country. The noble Baroness, Lady Scott, highlighted the problems with co-terminosity. The Minister took through this House the devolution Bill that has created yet more problems in the relationship between the new directly elected mayors and police and crime commissioners in their areas—and presumably between them and fire services in their areas. Of course, we do not know whether the re-formed Government are still in favour of the old agenda of directly elected mayors, and if so how much, but it was a further piecemeal change—a further complexity—so far as co-terminosity was concerned. We also know that the Government have been timid on the fact that some police forces around the country are too small to deliver the full range of policing services—that the Government are not prepared to embrace directly the need for mergers.

We have a Government who would like to see something happen, but are too frightened to bring forward proposals of sufficient scale to merit the disruption and complications to which other Members of the Committee have already referred. If the Government were serious about saying, “We want to bring a number of the emergency services together under a directly elected commissioner of some sort”, you would start to ask what the rational size around the country was for the delivery of emergency services. What is the scale? With all due respect to my noble friend, it is not Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland. It might be larger if you were talking about all the emergency services put together. You certainly would not end up with 41 police services outside London and, for some reason, two in London. Similarly, you would not end up with the same network of fire services; again, there have already been some piecemeal changes. You would try to achieve co-terminosity. You might end up with eight or 10 regional emergency services commissioners; you could tie in the ambulance service, although that would no doubt bring a huge backlash from the health interests, which would say that it was all much too complicated. You might also look at the whole question of how the criminal justice system worked in a particular area.

If you really want to have radical change and transform things, that is the direction you would look in. However, these proposals fail by being both too half-hearted and not thought-out. It is the worst of all possible worlds. I am sure that it is not the Minister’s fault; the decision has been taken elsewhere as part of a grand strategic vision—but frankly it is not really a vision and it is not really strategic. It says, “There might be an answer by bringing police and fire together, but because it’s all a bit difficult we are not going to enforce it; we will encourage it and make it voluntary”. I suspect that, as my noble friend suggested, it will become more and more difficult not to do something in this area because of financial pressures. It will be piecemeal and chaotic, and the disruption will not deliver the benefits that no doubt some in the Government think are there.

Will the Minister go back to the new Home Secretary and explain that the Lords have a lot of problems with these clauses? Will she suggest that the Government take them away, think about them again and come back with something that has been truly thought through? They could deal with the problems of co-terminosity, which her noble friends have raised, and look at the most sensible synergies between all the emergency services and with the rest of the criminal justice system. They could then bring back to Parliament some sensible proposals that address all those issues. Frankly, these clauses do not do it.

[Lord Porter of Spalding (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak briefly to the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Harris, about the elected mayor. There is no confusion about that: the Secretary of State made it quite clear in a public statement last week that the 11 deals on the table would not be renegotiated and that the mayor was a mandatory requirement. The noble Lord sitting behind the noble Lord, Lord Harris, will be aware that the north-east deal fell over last week because they would not agree on a mayor; five of the authorities would not agree and that deal was rejected by the Government. They have made it quite clear that a mayor is mandatory for those devolution deals. It would be unhelpful for this House to spread any more confusion about that.

[Lord Beecham (Lab)]

My Lords, I endorse the approach that my noble friend Lord Harris has advanced. Equally, I was very taken with the argument of my noble friend Lord Rosser in questioning why, for example, the ambulance service was not regarded as a likelier partner for the police service in any reorganisation. It seems to me that, if one has to do this—and that is another question—it would make more sense than amalgamating the two rather more discrete services of fire and police.

That is not to say that, in any circumstances, whether there is any reorganisation or not, there might not be some financial savings to be made by looking at the joint running of the back offices for all three of those services. It seems to me that that is potentially practical without changing the nature or accountability for the service. It would be a sensible investment in making savings, which can of course then support the services.

It seems odd that, despite suggestions that one should take place, there has been no consideration by the Government of a trial amalgamation, whether it be as envisaged in this Bill, a potential wider amalgamation involving all three services, or an alternative approach involving the fire and ambulance services. Will the Minister indicate whether there has been any discussion about the possibility of such a trial between two or more of the relevant services?

There is a real concern about the further concentration of powers in a single pair of hands—although it is potentially two pairs of hands in this case. You will have a chief officer of a combined authority, who will have overall responsibility for the two services as envisaged in the Bill. You may also have, in a mayoral combined authority, the role of the police and crime commissioner, which will bring with it that combined service, in the hands of the elected mayor. The mayor already has enormous powers under the devolution proposals as they are proceeding in the 11 authorities to which the noble Lord, Lord Porter, referred. It is questionable, to put it mildly, whether it is sensible to concentrate so much power on issues of this kind, as well as everything else, in the hands of an elected mayor. I should refer to my local government interests, which obviously have some bearing on the approach that I take in these matters.