Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Lord Soley Excerpts

Wednesday 20th July 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Harris of Richmond]

I support my noble friend in her comments. The whole point of tabling the amendment was to try to persuade the Government to bring on the strength of the checks and balances. That has not been done, and I cannot imagine what they could come up with at the ping-pong stage. But I hope they do come up with something because it is the strength of those checks and balances that this House, which voted so strongly in favour of my amendment, supported. I therefore urge my noble friend the Minister to see what she can do.

[Lord Soley]

I rise to speak in support of Amendment 3, and I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, because I can now abbreviate what was already going to be a small number of comments. I agree with what he said, and believe that the only danger the noble Lord faces is that he is likely to win the award for parliamentary understatement of the year when he says that he thinks the Government will be minded to reverse the amendment in the other place. I think we all know that they will.

The position is exactly as he has said: recent events have emphasised the importance of the checks and balances. The particular word that I picked out of my noble friend’s Amendment 3 is “impartiality”. The problem, as we have seen recently, is how a senior police officer can be impartial not only when dealing with the Government, but also when dealing with large organisations. In the recent case, of course, the organisation is News International. That is a profoundly important point.

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[Baroness Browning]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way; I did not pick up on this point. I would point out that, despite perceptions, the current mayor has not fired anyone and does not currently have the power to do so. It is the Metropolitan Police Authority that has the power to dismiss the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. It was suggested that the mayor was responsible for the resignation of Sir Paul Stephenson, but that is definitely not the case, as was said both in his evidence yesterday to the Home Affairs Committee and in other statements.

[Lord Soley]

My Lords, I did not say that he was responsible. I indicated that he apparently supported the suggestion that Sir Paul Stephenson should resign. From what I understand, the mayor said that he did not oppose the offer to resign by those two people. In the case of Ian Blair it was different.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

The House would not want us to go into the details of the resignations of commissioners. What is clear is that the mayor has had an influence. It shows quite clearly the risks of having party politicians so directly involved. The noble Baroness says that there may not be party politicians elected to these posts, and of course that may be true. I suspect, however, that in the 42 police areas that we are concerned about in my amendment, the great majority will have political labels. We would expect them to carry out their duties without fear or favour but many of those people will be seeking re-election. The point is that their activities will be coloured by wishing to seek re-election.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Dear, that to be a chief officer of police is a lonely business at any time. While I certainly believe chief constables need to be held to account, they also need support. My concern is that elected police commissioners will not be in a position to give the kind of support that is necessary to officers who have to bear those heady responsibilities.

The noble Lords, Lord Cormack and Lord Newton, made very important points and asked the Government to reflect. It may be that in the Statement to come we will hear a little more about how the Government will reflect. I hope that they do. Ping-pong can be flexible but there are limits. The best way to ensure that the other place and the Government properly consider the issues surrounding the responsibilities of police and crime panels is to send my amendment back to the Commons; it will then put the issue in play.

I do not agree with the noble Baroness that my amendment takes the PCP beyond its current responsibilities into direct intervention. No, it gives strong signals to the police and crime panel about the impartiality and integrity of the police force. They are there to scrutinise through the police and crime commissioner. That would be a very important signal for this House to give. I beg to move.

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[Baroness Browning]

My Lords, the Bill ensures that direction and control of the police force remains with the chief constable and that the functions of PCCs in securing the maintenance of an efficient and effective force and holding the chief constable to account are the same as the functions of the police authorities at present. There is nothing in the Bill that would allow a PCC to compromise the operational independence of the chief constable. However, it is clear to all in the House and in another place, and indeed in the wider policing community, that there remains concern as to how the proposed model of reform will work in practice. These concerns have been heard and noble Lords will be aware that we have been working with our policing partners on a draft protocol that sets out the nature of the relationship between chief constables and PCCs and the delineation of their responsibilities.

We have indicated in the past that we are keeping an open mind as to whether the protocol should be put on a statutory footing. We have considered the current draft of the protocol, the comments made by representatives of the existing policing tripartite during the drafting process and the points raised in the useful debates on this subject in your Lordships’ House. I am also very grateful to noble Lords who have attending meetings with me outside the Chamber specifically to discuss the protocol. We have tabled an amendment requiring the Home Secretary to issue a protocol by statutory instrument that will be subject to parliamentary scrutiny under the negative resolution procedure.

The Home Secretary will be able to vary or replace the protocol once issued but only after consultation with interested parties and any variation or replacement would be scrutinised by Parliament under the same procedure.

[Lord Soley]

Will the noble Baroness reconsider it being under the negative procedure rather than the affirmative procedure?

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[Lord Soley]

My Lords, before the noble Baroness speaks I wish to comment on and support both Amendment 9 in the Government’s name, and my noble friend Lady Henig on Amendment 10. I just have a couple of points and I do not need to spend too much time on them. First, though, the Minister who just intervened on his own supporter and asked her not to speak so much should remember that the problem we have in this House is that government legislation on a number of issues has been brought to this House in a mess, and it needs to be put right by Parliament. It is not for Ministers to tell parliamentarians not to give it the attention it deserves to try to get it into some sort of order. It is not just this Bill, and it is not just me on this side of the House who is saying this. A number of Members on the Government’s side are saying that legislation is reaching this House in an inadequate form, regardless of whether you like the policy or not.

I have a couple of points on Amendment 10. My noble friend Lady Henig, supported by the noble Baroness, Lady Harris, is right. I was interested in the second unnumbered paragraph within the amendment: the issue of the dismissal of police officers. I do not want to go over the issue again; I simply want to make this point. The concern is that you make it a political issue, and there have been examples of that. I made it very clear in my last intervention on this that I am not saying whether the last two senior officers to resign were right or wrong: I stand back on that until there has been judgment. However, we do not want the discussion of these sorts of things on television and radio to become a regular thing. There have been three such cases with the present Mayor of London, and I am not sure that this will not happen in other situations when we have elected officials in this role. It will be so easy to produce a leaflet—and any of the political parties will do this—which says, “We need tougher policing in this area because crime is rising, and that means we do not want any more of this soft policing”. We know what that means: we will end up with the senior officer being persuaded to resign. My noble friend, supported by the noble Baroness, Lady Harris, has been trying to draw the attention of the House to that and to try and get that into the Bill, and they are right.

My noble friend Lady Henig was very generous to the Minister, and that was very fair: he has been trying to improve the Bill. I sometimes get worried that he goes back to the Home Office and they have an item on the agenda for the waterboarding of the noble Baroness, Lady Browning, in order to get her to back off. I simply say to her to beware of extraordinary rendition, and next time you go, take your toothbrush and overnight clothes—you might need them. There is a very clear attempt by the Government to say, “We are not going to give way on these central issues”. The noble Baroness, Lady Browning, has dealt with the House with enormous courtesy, and great wisdom as well, but she comes back with an empty purse.

I wish to say one other thing about the noble Baroness’s previous contribution on this. She was right to say that there was a loss of confidence in the police before, but I do not think she is right to say it now, and she presented the argument as though it was now. The reality is that there was a loss of confidence in the police in the 1990s. It was not about corruption but about their inadequacies in dealing with public concern: not coming back with telephone calls to victims of crime; not dealing with disorder affairs and so on. As an elected Member at that time, as she was, I am sure we both got the same sort of complaints. In my experience, by the time I left the House of Commons in 2005 those complaints had stopped, and there were very few of them coming forward because the police had got very much better at their public interface and were dealing with it rather well. The police deserve credit for this. When the noble Baroness says the public need to be given confidence in the police, she is fighting a battle that was fought some years ago, and is over. It is not the same now. There is, as my noble friend Lady Henig says, a lot of confidence in the police.

My last point is in relation to the Government’s Amendment 9, and proposed new subsections 3 (a) and (b) which deal with varying or replacing the protocol. I simply say, as an individual and not specifically as a member of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, that off the top of my head I find it very hard to see what the argument would be for this not to be under the affirmative resolution procedure. I would be asking myself on that Committee—as I suspect would other Members, though I cannot speak for them, obviously—whether Parliament will be happy with the Government putting forward a protocol on policing which varies or replaces it without them having an affirmative view of it, an affirmative statutory instrument approach.

It is possible that other Members of the Committee will take a different view. When I have been presented with the arguments it is even possible that I might change my view. However, I simply say that varying or replacing a protocol on policing is an important issue that I would see, certainly initially, as being politically important—not just in parliamentary terms but as party members on both sides thinking, “Is this sensible?”. The noble Baroness might wish to take this away and run it past her colleagues in the Home Office, if it does not put her at risk again. I am simply saying that one needs to think this through carefully. My immediate judgment is that the SI would require the affirmative procedure.