Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Lord Soley Excerpts

Tuesday 24th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dear]

I was going to speak at length about the points that have been very adequately covered by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew, and, not for the first time, I find myself in complete agreement with what he said. I will just pick up one or two of the points in an effort to be brief. Let us get a sense of reality back to this. I have heard phrases such as chief officers getting their own way and blue-eyed boys—by which I assume we mean blue-eyed girls as well. As has been said, no chief officer today or in the past 15 to 20 years could get away with that sort of piratical approach to policing. They have to prefer discussion and challenge. Of course, they like winning but I think that if one gets used to winning all the time, there is an in-built problem with the management style.

As for blue-eyed boys and girls, I suppose that loosely you could say the same thing about generals, captains of industry or the judiciary. The whole point is that if, as I think will be demanded under the new regime, you have a system with independent assessment and/or a proper board structure but, above all, transparency which in the final analysis is defensible in the courts, there is nothing to lose. I, for one, would not want to see the legislation being overprescriptive on this. You have to leave some room for balance and common sense, appreciating that, if you go past a certain line, particularly in the area of appointments, you are going to be challenged, so you do not tread over that line in the first place.

I want to say a brief word about the finance officers. There are of course two in place at the moment—one in the police authority and one within the force itself. I am not sure whether I was the first but I was certainly one of the early chief constables who civilianised the old police role of assistant chief constable, admin and finance, bringing in a very well-qualified civilian. I put them on ACPO rates of pay and ranked them equal with ACPO. You would certainly find that model in many police forces up and down the country today. There is some risk of duplication but I think one has to avoid that risk. One has to recognise the two roles, as has already been said, and expect a constructive tension between them.

I close by saying once again that I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, and I am sure that this will not be the last time that I do so.

[Lord Soley]

Perhaps I may follow on briefly from what my noble friend Lord Harris said. He made a very thoughtful and, as usual, very forensic analysis of this part of the Bill. When he referred to the Taser issue, I was reminded that police forces have purchased contentious weapons on a number of occasions. Many years ago, there was a big argument about rubber bullets, for example. It is not immediately clear to me from the Bill but, as I understand it—I do not think I am wrong about this—when police forces purchase guns, which they have to have in store, there are very tight Home Office controls on what they can buy and in what number and so on. With the corporation sole model, to which my noble friend referred, I am not sure whether they would be able to choose the number of their weapons and, more importantly in a sense, the nature of the weapons, which can determine the outcome in certain critical situations. That may not change at all and the Home Office may retain full control over it. However, in view of my noble friend’s comments about Tasers, I should like reassurance that there will be some control over the overall picture and that it will not be left to individual police forces to determine what they need.

[Lord Shipley]

What seems to be missing in this debate and in the Bill as a whole is a clear indication of the net cost of these proposals. There are existing costs both within a police force and within a police authority, but everything I hear and read suggests that the cost of police commissioners, with their offices and staff, will be significantly higher than the costs that we currently meet. There will be 41 full-time police and crime commissioners. They will have an undefined number of staff, with buildings to house them in, and they will have their running costs. Given that the police commissioner will work full time and, I understand, be paid a low six-figure sum of money, the implication is that the cost of a police and crime commissioner’s office is likely to run into several million pounds a year. The figure is very hard to estimate and it is not clear from the Bill documentation what it is likely to be. It seems to suggest that the net cost will not be significantly different from current spending. We will see, but I have come to the conclusion that the total net cost of police and crime commissioners, with the structures that will underpin them, is likely to be somewhere between £100 million and £200 million. I could be out and it could be higher than that.

It goes back to the nub of the issue about duplication, on which we have had a very good debate and I hesitate to repeat things. I have not understood who will be making exactly what decision on spending. I understand that there is operational and there is strategic, but there is also the challenge from the commissioner’s office on day-to-day spending on the basis of the police and crime plan and the challenge from the finance staff of their colleagues on the operational side of finance about what money is being spent. The Bill says that a chief constable will have a chief finance officer. Words matter because a chief implies that there will be others as well. A chief constable will have a chief finance officer for the police force’s financial affairs and the commissioner will have a chief finance officer for the commissioner’s financial affairs.

These are not different things. The commissioner is responsible for constructing the police and crime plan. That plan implies a budget as a budget is a statement of policy. The statement of policy is therefore the plan. There is the budget, the heads of expenditure and the precept. I find it hard to understand how you will not end up with conflict if you run two separate staffing structures on finance. There will be conflict and difficulty because there will have to be an assessment of whether the police and crime commissioner’s plan, which is the budget, is being carried out operationally. That requires the staff to work very closely together. I think there is great cause for concern about how the structure is being put in place. At the moment the costs on the police authority side are comparatively low, and certainly a great deal lower than the costs on the force side.

We are about to put up the overall costs of a public service at a time when there are major reductions in the numbers of police officers on the beat. The priority needs to be to keep neighbourhood policing at a high level rather than increase the costs of accountability. It is in that accountability between the two parts—the police force and the police commissioner’s office—that we will end up with it not being clear who is in charge of what. That will cost money because people will be challenging it. There will be more meetings, more reports, more audits, more explanations, and so on.

I am very concerned about this. Amendments 43 and 44 are probing amendments to see whether there is clarity on who would be responsible for what. I feel that some work now needs to be done to get these issues clear. That would start with a clear costing of the overall cost of this. That then would produce a definition of what the policy really is.

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[Baroness Browning]

My Lords, I am very grateful for the further contributions that have just been made to the debate. I can assure my noble friend Lord Carlile of Berriew that if, for example, forensic science commissioning were suddenly needed, there would not be a time lag while permission was sought. That is not our intention. I also take on board what noble Lords opposite have said about getting the balance right. I can assure the Committee that we will bring forward an amendment that I hope meets the concerns that have been expressed.

[Lord Soley]

Would the Minister answer my question, which arose from the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Harris, about the number and type of weapons purchased? Does she need more time to find out what the situation would be if it is a corporation sole? Does she want to come back to the Committee, or can she answer the question now?

[Baroness Browning]

I hope that I can answer the noble Lord now. The situation will be as it is now.

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[Lord Soley]

So the situation now would override the corporation sole nature of the body.

[Baroness Browning]

Yes, that is right. I ask noble Lords not to press the amendment.

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Moved by

[Lord Soley]

68ZA: Clause 5, page 5, line 9, at end insert—
“( ) A police and crime commissioner must issue a crime prevention plan within the financial year in which each ordinary election is held.”

[Lord Soley]

This is an important group of amendments dealing mainly with crime prevention, which is an important matter. It deals also with the way to vary the crime plan and the various people who could be involved in that. To synopsise, it could be people like those in Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary, the Home Secretary and others, to change or vary the plan or their powers to submit information on it.

This is an important group of amendments, and it is a pity that we are taking it at this time of night. The Minister might be worried to know that I can wax lyrical for many a long hour on the importance and complexity of crime prevention, and if I chose to do so we could all end up by having breakfast on the Terrace, which would be a wonderful way to start Wednesday. So maybe I will do that.

This is the crime prevention part of this Bill, and to me it is very important. In an act of great modesty, I say that Amendment 68ZA in my name is the most important. Some of the other amendments are probing, but they are all important because they deal with how the plan is structured, and so on.

I have a couple of key questions, which I shall put in context for the Minister. First, are we to assume that the crime plan really does mean crime prevention? I would prefer if we actually gave a duty in Clause 5 to draw up a crime prevention plan. A crime plan could mean almost anything.

The second issue that this covers is that if the assumption is that the crime plan includes crime prevention, it raises the funding of crime prevention. A number of references to funding are in this Bill. In Clause 9, a body can fund measures to combat crime and disorder. But if it is to be assumed that crime prevention is included in the plan—this is the other question to the Minister—are we really going to assume that all the other agencies that deal with crime prevention are also going to lose those functions into this? If they are, that is going to have profound financial consequences. If, for example, the Home Office gave up many of its crime prevention projects and plans, are they to go over to these localised—although they are not really that localised—police areas? Are the various organisations that operate under either funding from, or the direct organisation by, other government departments to be transferred, too? This is why I say that if the Government put in the Bill that there is to be a crime prevention plan, they can at least define what is in the plan, which powers are to be transferred and what funding is available to it.

I want to put this in the context of the battle to reduce crime, if I can. I suppose that is always an ongoing battle, but over the past 10 years or so we have been remarkably successful in reducing crime. One factor is policing; the police are obviously important as a deterrent and in detecting crime. If you can increase the conviction rate, crime tends to reduce because one of the greatest deterrents is the certainty of being caught. However, the police alone cannot deliver and that has long been the history of this crime prevention strategy. Crime prevention is more than better locks on windows and doors. It is everything from parenting through to some of the special projects that go on.

I notice that in some parts of the Bill—I paraphrase slightly because of the lateness of the hour—the Government refer to certain things that the panel can do. For example, it can fund measures to reduce disorder. That is fine but if you are to do that, how do you define what it takes on and fund that? There is an assumption in the Bill that the crime plan, as it is referred to, really means crime prevention, but without mentioning it. Yet it does not then deal with the funding issue. If the Government go down this road and are not clear about crime prevention, crime will go up again. It already is; burglary, the one that worries people an awful lot, is going up. Street crime will begin to go up again for other unrelated reasons, which I will not go into at this late hour, but the old crime of mugging—as it was called, although it is strictly robbery—will go up because as unemployment and other issues go up, it rises, too.

One way we have been successful in reducing crime is by having all forms of intervention earlier. That of course involves some social aspects, such as children's centres and things of that nature. Yet the Government have produced a Bill which, leaving aside my other concerns about it, does not properly address crime prevention. We really will have a situation where crime goes up again unless we are clear about whose duty it is. There are two ways of doing this. One is to keep things much as they are now and be clear about what we devolve to these police commissioners. The other way is to say, “Right—we will shift as much as possible down”. From what the Government say, they want to devolve but if they want to devolve much crime prevention, they really have to come clean on the funding. That is not being identified here through a proper crime plan.

If in an area you get, for example, a number of hostels which are for people who are recovering from a mental illness, or who have been discharged from prison, or who have been through the court system, you will have a different type of problem there than in other areas. I think the noble Baroness, Lady Harris of Richmond, and one or two other Members pointed out that one danger of this structure is that because you have quite large police areas, the loudest voices will be heard most. Those will be from the leafy suburbs—the richer areas—while the voices of those in the poorer areas, where the crime rate tends to be much higher, will not be heard, although those areas are in most need of a crime plan, or crime prevention plan as I prefer to call it.

I want to be clear about this. If we are to have these large police areas and an elected commissioner for each area, that person will have to relate to the high crime hotspots which will not necessarily have the loudest voices in the election. That point has been made several times in a number of debates on this over time. That is why my Amendment 68ZA would include in the Bill a duty to issue a crime prevention plan. That would then relate over the whole area, people would not have to speak up about it and it could be checked. There could be a situation, for example, where the individual MPs or councillors throughout the area say, “What is the plan for reducing crime on this estate or in that street?”. At the moment there seems to be no thinking about that at all. It is just a police and crime issue without any definition of whether crime means a crime plan. I cannot overstate the importance of this. This is where the Bill is not well thought through. We have to be clear about crime prevention.

Think of the blood, sweat, tears and toil that were spent by the police, various government agencies, the previous Government, and politicians at all levels and of all parties to get crime prevention right up front. It really was a struggle and we are in danger of losing it. That is why I want the requirement to produce a crime prevention plan included in the Bill. I would then want to see individual MPs, councillors and others saying, “What’s the crime prevention plan for this area?”. At the moment that is not there. All we are doing is saying that someone can vary the plan, that there are restrictions on who can vary it, or that HMIC or the Home Secretary can have an input. We have to be clear about this. At the moment we still have a pretty good crime prevention policy in this country. It has been working well but I am not at all sure that that will continue under this structure. I strongly urge the Minister to see if she can work out the dividing line between these bodies and the existing groups that organise crime prevention programmes. If she does that and does it well, I might be able to let her have breakfast at home. I beg to move.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

I was hoping to intervene before the noble Lord sat down, but I will now put my question after the amendment has been moved. Although I am a bear of very little brain, there is the faintest possible ambiguity in the noble Lord’s amendment. I think I know what he will say but, to put it beyond peradventure, does his amendment mean that the crime prevention plan should be moved before or after the ordinary election to which it refers?

[Lord Soley]

I am not too worried about that but my view would be that it ought to be before the election.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

My Lords, this has been a short but interesting debate. I am very grateful to my noble friend. This series of amendments concerns police and crime plans. These are clearly very important because they set the strategic direction for how the police force is to be run. Clause 7(1) sets out the requirements for matters to be put in the plan, including,

“the elected local policing body’s police and crime objectives”.

As my noble friend Lord Soley has said, there is no mention in Clause 7(1) of anything to do with crime prevention. The points that he raised are very pertinent and we look forward to a positive response to them. My noble friend is also right to point out that there has been a very encouraging reduction in crime over the past decade or so. However, those trends are being reversed. A report to the West Midlands Police Authority last week showed the first rise in crime for many years, which is an extremely worrying trend. I agree that crime prevention needs to be an important part of the focus of any police and crime plan.

I have a series of amendments in this group, which are partly probing. I specifically ask the Minister about the rationale for Clause 5(4), the provision that says:

“A police and crime commissioner may vary a police and crime plan”.

Of course, I understand the need to have flexibility. However, my concern is that the ability of the police and crime commissioner to vary the plan at will may be used to exert undue pressure on the operational decisions of the chief constable.

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

We have another complex and technical set of amendments here. I listened with great interest to the noble Lord, Lord Soley, although I was not quite sure when he came to his conclusion whether he was referring to organising crime prevention or organised crime prevention.

[Lord Soley]

Organising crime prevention.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

We are all clear, and it is clearly the intent of the Bill, that the police and crime plan will be one of the core documents which will govern the relationship between the police and crime commissioner and the chief constable and will provide the basis for scrutiny by the police and crime panel. It is a core document. However, we insist that it should not be governed by an absolutely fixed calendar that, on 1 April every year, there must be a new annual crime plan, which is what is suggested in the amendment.

The intention behind the Bill is that, on being elected to office, a new police and crime commissioner should prepare and publish, in consultation with a range of others—including the chief constable and the police and crime panel, of course, but not exclusively them—a police and crime plan which may last for the full term of office but which may be varied. That is to allow a degree of flexibility. It is not intended that he should vary it every week; indeed, it states clearly in Clause 5 that, in variation, a number of people have to be consulted, including the chief constable. If you wish to vary the plan, you naturally again consult the appropriate people, including those whom you expect to carry it out.

[Lord Soley]

Can the Minister clarify one question I asked him? Does the crime plan mean crime prevention plan or is it something else? If so, what does it mean?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

It is clear throughout the Bill that the reduction of crime, which involves the prevention of crime, is core to everything. Clause 7(1)(a) states that the plan must include the PCC's police and crime objectives. Later, Clause 7 defines police and crime objectives as including objectives for crime and disorder reduction. In Clause 102, crime and disorder reduction is defined as,

“reduction of crime and disorder (including antisocial and other behaviour and adversely affecting the local environment) … combating the misuse of drugs, alcohol and other substances, and … reduction of reoffending”.

I recognise that part of what the noble Lord, Lord Soley, wants to get at is the range of other agencies involved in crime prevention beyond the police. We all recognise that crime prevention in the broadest sense, as well as the reduction of reoffending, is not a matter for the police alone and involves much of the work of community safety partnerships working with a range of other agencies, some public and others in the voluntary sector. That is a problem we have in all aspects of government: however you draw the line for the number of the tasks that you wish to perform, you must always co-operate with others.

We had not anticipated that the question of funding would come into the debate on the amendment but, as the noble Lord is well aware, crime prevention is funded partly through the police, partly through local authorities and partly through the Ministry of Justice and Home Office budgets through a range of channels, in which community and safety partnerships play a large role. In recent months, I visited a number in Yorkshire. They are examples of different agencies, including the police, working together to reduce inner-city crime, burglary, drugs-related crime and alcohol-related crime and so on. That is very much part of what has been practised over the past 15 or 20 years, and much of what happened under the previous Government contributed to that. As we all know, alcohol and drug-related crime is a very serious problem, and we will touch on some aspects of that during later stages of the Bill.

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[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, before the noble Lord, Lord Soley, replies, I wonder whether the Minister is in a position to respond to my question about the assessment of policing. I do not want to go through the arguments again but they relate to my Amendments 76ZA and 76C. If he is not able to respond, perhaps he would write to me about it. My question covers very similar ground to that covered by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, so, with safety in numbers, I think I can claim that this is a genuine concern.

[Lord Soley]

That was a disappointing reply. I really do think that the Government need to go away and put crime prevention in the Bill. We all want to reduce crime but simply saying that we want to do so is apple pie and motherhood. This is an important matter because, if you simply have a crime plan under an elected system, the loudest voices will decide what is done. The crime prevention plan needs to be drawn up on the basis of the crime statistics throughout the police area. If that does not happen, the loudest voices in any electoral system will make the decision and they will not address the type of crime that is most prevalent in the poorest areas.

We will, to some extent, come to the other matter that is not addressed when we reach Clause 9. We can see what is going to happen—indeed, the notes on the Bill give it away in a sense. They say, as does the Bill, that the money can be paid into a scheme to reduce crime. We know what will happen. The Home Office will currently be funding one plan, or this or that organisation will be funding it, and will then say, “It is over to the police and crime plan now”. Where will the money come from? You have to have a crime prevention plan that actually addresses those issues and allows MPs to look at it as well and say, “If the Home Office is going to stop funding this, will the crime plan fund it instead?”.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

I am grateful to my noble friend for giving way and am sorry that it is so late but is not the point that the Government are doing that to get them out of responsibility for crime issues? It is clear that crime will go up over the next few years and that the Government will wash their hands and say that it is the responsibility of elected police commissioners. That is what it is about.

[Lord Soley]

My noble friend anticipates me because I was going to finish on this. It is a relevant point. Leaving aside some of the wider issues of accountability, election and so on, my fear is that we will lose what has been gained over many years by many groups, including local authorities under different party control. We will lose that if we do not have a clear requirement for a crime prevention plan. This is when amendments from Back-Benchers are not as good as government amendments. We must address the issue of crime statistics in the area, not simply rely on the electorate to tell the chief officer what they want done. Does the Minister not see the problem that the loudest voices will determine the priority, instead of the statistics of the crime perhaps determining the policies towards reducing those crime patterns? Do I make sense?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I can half see the problem but I am not fully persuaded that crime is quite so pocketed in one area. I am conscious that in West Yorkshire every weekend, very well off young people pour into the middle of Leeds, Wakefield and elsewhere and there is quite a lot of alcohol-related crime, which is focused in one area. It is not where they live, so things spill out from one area to another. The reduction of crime in some of the rougher areas of the region has benefited areas elsewhere. People do not always carry out burglaries in the places in which they live. They move to other areas as well. The noble Lord may be exaggerating the problem that the level of co-operation that we have among different agencies and between local authorities and the police is likely to be severely damaged by this development. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, adds, as a sort of conspiracy theory, that the Government are trying to shovel off responsibility. I suggest that neither of those things is correct.

[Lord Soley]

I ask the Minister to sit down and talk with his own noble friend Lady Harris of Richmond, who does understand this. I agree that patterns of crime are widely varied and that is why you should work on the basis of statistics. If your main aim is to please an electorate you deal with the loudest voices. That is the reality of elections. It is not just in inner-city areas. You get a pattern where people are worried and set up Neighbourhood Watch—a good thing which nobody is against—and do all these other things, such as coming to meetings with the police to ask them about a particular burglary, or whatever. In the poorer crime hotspots, where burglaries are more common, there is little addressed on that unless you have a very good local authority which then does a range of things, such as putting in caretakers, and all the other things that go with that. What we are doing here is saying that there is a crime plan and that we will fund some of the things, as indicated in Clause 9, but giving no indication of what will happen when other organisations, most notably the Home Office—or a local authority, for that matter—withdraw the funding and say that it is over to the crime plan to replace that.

As my noble friend on the Front Bench said, I would almost predict that crime goes up again and continues to go up if we do not give a clear direction to those organisations to take on crime prevention in a very clear way, based on statistics of crime. An MP in an area can then look at the different aspects, not just in relation to the election of the police commissioner but focusing on those statistics and reducing them in each area. If you do not do that, it will be the electorate who are most interested in the issue, in middle-class areas where crime is lower. In working-class areas with high rates of crime they may rattle the bars of councillors but they will not necessarily get the same crime prevention plan. That is what has happened in the past—we do not need to look in a crystal ball—and that is what we must avoid. I ask the Minister to look at this again. If he wants crime prevention to be done by another body, or to keep it as it is, we need to be clear about that. The alternative is to give it to these bodies but recognise the financial implications.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, as it happens, next week I will be taken round one of the poorer areas of Leeds by the head of the neighbourhood police. The police there are extremely proud of what they have achieved through the neighbourhood police forum and through neighbourhood policing. It is absolutely what we need to continue. I will reflect on what the noble Lord has said, both before and after my visit. We are all aware that neighbourhood policing, and working with local communities—poor as well as better off—are very much part of the future of policing and what we all want to do. I do not see the problem at which the noble Lord is gnawing, so to speak.

[Lord Soley]

I will wait to see what happens. I simply say to the Minister that crime prevention policy should be based primarily on the statistics of crime and should not depend on who votes for whom and when. I urge the Minister to be aware of the danger in the Bill of not having a clear policy on crime prevention. It is extraordinary that the Bill does not mention crime prevention as a core issue. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 68ZA withdrawn.