Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Lord Soley Excerpts

Tuesday 24th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dear]

My Lords, I support what the noble Lord, Lord Condon, has said, because my views accord very much with his. Normally, I am a great fan of pilots—they give you a step-by-step approach, they are often sensible, they lead to a sense of being sure-footed, and they hammer off the rough edges of what was proposed in the first instance. In this case, however, I submit that they would lead to a sense of great unreality.

I, too, have taken a straw poll of members of the police service, ACPO members and so forth, and I have met with the same result. So far as I can make out from a fairly detailed survey, the service wants a degree of certainty, certainly nationally. That is particularly so when one looks forward. One does not need much of a crystal ball to recognise that more is coming down stream towards us that has not yet reached your Lordships' House, such as the national crime agency, which relates to national issues. Today, we have been focusing more on the local, and issues of leadership that are bound to flow from what part 2 of the Winsor report will propose. All those things and others depend on a sense of certainty. If we get into pilots now and they overtake us, the service will not be in a position to handle the other issues that are bound to come before your Lordships' House in the next 12 months or so.

What I propose flows logically from the argument that we have just heard. We should make quite sure that the proper checks and balances surround the whole concept of police and crime commissioners and at that stage vote yes or no. We either have them or we do not, having given them due and appropriate consideration in your Lordships' House. We should not get into the business of pilots, which will be disruptive.

[Lord Soley]

I share the concern about pilots, but I also very much share the concern expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee. The Bill contains so many unanswered questions that we are in danger of causing policing in this country more problems than we need. My profound anxiety is that, having spent the past 10 or more years trying to get the police from where they were 20 years ago, which was not a good place, to where they are now, which is a very much better place, we are in danger of losing that if we do not think this through.

I pick up on the suggestion made by the noble Baroness and echoed by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, that there is a strong case for the Government to go away and think about this. They should think about how they can ensure that this Act will not introduce profound changes to the police that are unpredictable in their outcome and that might move us backwards rather than forwards. The police are in a better position than they used to be. Let us not throw out the good for the sake of something that we think might be better but that does not have the checks and balances that are necessary.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

My Lords, I have two amendments in this group: Amendments 38 and 253. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, and the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, who I assume will speak to his amendment in a moment, I propose a system of pilots.

I listened with great interest to the words of the noble Lords, Lord Condon and Lord Dear, who are worried about the impact of pilots. As they said, the feedback that they are getting from chief constables is that the worst thing of all for them is to have uncertainty about the future. I understand that point of view. I declare an interest as chair of an NHS foundation trust and as a consultant and trainer in the NHS. We are going through a similar process in the NHS. Obviously, people worry about uncertainty and about where they are going, but the crux of the point is that made by the noble Lord, Lord Dear; he said that we should see what checks and balances we can get into the Bill and then vote yes or no on the whole thing.

I understand the noble Lord’s point. I have no doubt that if the Minister responds sympathetically to some of the points put by noble Lords in our debates on recognising the need for stronger checks and balances, the argument for pilots would become less persuasive. However, the enormity of the change that is being proposed and the potential politicisation of our police forces are serious matters. There has been no Green Paper and no pre-legislative scrutiny. No evidence whatever has been produced to justify the changes that are being proposed.

On that basis and despite the uncertainties that this might produce for chief constables, I suspect that, retrospectively, if elected police commissioners were introduced without checks and balances, those chief constables might look back and wish that there had been pilots so that some of the most contentious points of the arrangements could have been tested. The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, has gone for two-year pilots, the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, for three years, and I have gone for four years. However, the substantive point is that they need to be long enough to see how this works out in practice. I also think—and the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, really has endorsed this—that there needs to be an independent evaluation as well. That would give confidence that the experiment has been judged and considered, and it would give Parliament time to consider the matter again. Above all, it would raise issues around governance, checks and balances, and the role of the panels, which the Government might wish to consider in the light of experience of those pilots.

In reflecting on and understanding the point about uncertainty, and given the Government’s position at the moment, the case for pilots is pretty persuasive.