Policing and Crime Bill

Lord Tunnicliffe Excerpts

Monday 18th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his masterly presentation of this legislation.

Part 1 of the Bill relates to the fire and rescue service, among other things, but undoubtedly that is the most controversial area. The noble Lord, Lord Paddick, my noble friend Lord Bach, the noble Baronesses, Lady Harris and Lady Bakewell, and the noble Lord, Lord Condon, all raised question marks over the concept of the PPC being responsible also for the fire service.

The fire and rescue service had to reduce its spending power by 17% in real terms between 2010 and 2015 and will have to reduce spending by a further £135 million between now and 2020. The National Audit Office revealed that the number of audits or inspections and fire safety checks by fire service and campaigns has fallen significantly. After decades of the numbers of fires, casualties and fatalities falling there was an increase in all those categories in the latest fire statistics, comparing those for April to September 2015 to the same quarter in 2014. For instance, there were 139 fire fatalities in 2015 compared with 108 in 2014. We are concerned that the Government’s proposals to allow PCCs to take over from fire and rescue authorities puts the independence and operational capacity of our fire services at risk. We are further concerned that, under the single employer model, it may be more difficult for the fire service to maintain independence, damaging its ability to carry out preventive work.

In this House, I have something of a unique relationship with the fire service. For 12 years, I was the London Fire Brigade’s biggest customer—such a big customer that it used to invite me to its Christmas parties. The reason for this was very sad, of course: in 1987 my organisation, London Underground, had a fire that killed 31 people. I joined as managing director after that and we then changed our protocols. We used to invite the London Fire Brigade to our premises 200 times a week on average. In that period, we came to realise just what a very unsafe environment we were managing and so did the fire brigade. Together with it and other specialists, we put an enormous effort into making the environment safe. At the same time, London changed its very fire brigade shape and created more and more unsafe environments, particularly tall buildings. The fire brigade adapted over that time into entirely new and extremely professional areas of concern because the essence of being a successful fire brigade is not to put out fires but to create the environment where fires do not occur in the first place. That is a wholly different area of emphasis.

As a number of noble Lords have suggested, under a single PCC who is unlikely to have had any intimate experience of the fire environment, there is a real possibility that the fire service could become second-class citizens—poor relations, as I think my noble friend Lord Bach put it. Before we go into that experiment, we will have to look at those provisions with great care and pore over that part of the Bill. I will take a great deal of convincing that that concept is sound, particularly the possibility of it being forced upon a successful fire authority. It is very probable that we will oppose it.

Part 2 of the Bill is about complaints and it was very useful that the noble Earls, Lord Lytton and Lord Attlee, as well as my noble friends Lord Prescott and Lord Harris, brought out the variety of problems that we still have with our police. We love our police but at the end of the day there has to be some way of knowing that they are sound: that there is not corruption and there are the right checks and balances. Listening to those contributions in the debate, one is left with the idea that there must be underlying problems which are still not being sufficiently addressed. We will look at the proposed new clauses relating to the IPCC with great care to see whether they will improve the environment or go far enough.

I was particularly seized by the comment—I wish I could remember which noble Lord made it—that taking “independent” out of the title to somehow make the body more independent does not seem self-evident. In fact, we will oppose “independent” being removed from the title. The Office for Police Conduct does not sound like anything that will hold anybody to account. I think it was my noble friend Lord Harris who made the point that the only person in this organisation who cannot previously have been a constable will be its executive head. We need to look at the composition of the board and the people working in the new organisation to make sure that they are not overly close to the police.

Part 3 touches on the issue of police volunteers. The loss of personnel in the police service is frightening. Funding from central government went down in the previous Parliament by 25%. The recent assurance that police budgets would be maintained has been drawn into question by the chair of the UK Statistics Authority, which ruled that in fact budgets will be cut in real terms between 2015-16 and 2016-17. Since the previous Prime Minister came into office, 18,000 officers have been lost, 12,000 of them from the front line. In this context, we will oppose any attempt by the Government to plug through the Bill the gaping hole in the police workforce with volunteers. We recognise the excellent work done by special constables, neighbourhood watches and police and crime panels, but there is a difference between volunteers bringing additionality to the police workforce and volunteers acting as their replacements.

It is very difficult to see why we need something different from special constables, who I believe have been around for over 100 years. They have constabulary powers and have been properly trained in how to use them. We have also developed the role of the PCSO, and debated and refined it over time. Should we not have properly trained PCSOs helping to secure an adequate police presence rather than looking to volunteers to fill the gap? For volunteers, there is already the special constable path. We will be looking extraordinarily carefully at the powers that are being requested for these volunteers, and the Government will have great trouble convincing us that they are anything other than a dangerous set of powers.

Part 4 reforms police bail and is to be generally welcomed. Indeed, some of the excesses of police bail in recent years have been truly appalling. There is no question but that if you are placed under police bail for weeks, months and in some cases years, it is a de facto punishment inflicted on you as an individual without a proper judicial process. We wholly welcome that reform. But it has to have the right checks and balances, and the enforcement of bail conditions must be fully adequate. It is particularly important that we have the right controls over issues such as confiscation of passports in the context of, for example, terrorism.

Part 4 does a number of other things. A key thing is that it recognises that 17 year-olds are children. The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, pointed out that this was partly a product of the European Convention on Human Rights. It is also of course laid down in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. How we came to ignore that convention and the human rights commission, I cannot understand. I commend the Government for putting this right but am sorry it has taken them so long to do it.

The other area covered by Part 4 that I will mention is mental health and holding people facing a mental health crisis in police cells. There has been total consensus in the Chamber that that reform is right. The noble Baroness, Lady Howe, hit the nail on the head when she touched upon parity of esteem—my noble friend Lord Harris and the noble Lord, Lord Condon, also raised it, I think. The provision of mental health services in this country is a disgrace, not in the sense that someone has done it evilly, but we all know we have been looking the other way for too long. Parity of esteem has to mean having the right resources. Holding people against their will in unsuitable accommodation is a central example of where many more resources will have to go in. To make sure that we are not holding people in police cells, they will have to go to proper secure accommodation, managed by the National Health Service. We must rethink, right through our legislation, how we work with mental health issues and must provide the right resources.

Finally, I will comment on Part 6, which relates to firearms. We await with some interest the amendments that the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, will table, including whether they will be specific to a .455 calibre or not—I am teasing him. One area where we will intervene is full cost recovery. The individual gun-holder’s licence must be the only one where a dangerous or powerful weapon is put in the hands of an individual and the state does not make full recovery of the cost of the licence it provides. I used to have a dangerous pastime, flying aeroplanes for fun. The state took enough money to pay for the cost of issuing that licence at every level—for example, if you are a professional pilot, they charge you the appropriate amount to make sure that that licence is maintained. I understand the difference is that the real cost is about £198, but we charge £88.

We look forward to examining the Bill in detail. It will give us an opportunity to discuss other issues: the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, will no doubt bring forward some interesting amendments relating to sport and drugs, as will my noble friend Lord Brooke on alcohol. I welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Trafford, to her new role—perhaps we might get a hint before the end of the evening about who on the Front Bench will do what. Given the sheer length and complexity of the Bill, I commend to her the willingness of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, in working with me or my noble friend Lord Rosser on previous Home Office Bills, to take as much stuff as possible off the Floor of the House and work face to face in informal committees. I do not think the Floor of the House is a good learning environment. Probing amendments are learning aids—we have to table them, but we can get some of those learning bits, where it is a matter of understanding things, out of the way. In addition, the Floor is not all that good an environment to try to negotiate compromises, and there will have to be a lot of compromises in the Bill. I hope that Ministers will be willing to put the effort in—we certainly will—to spend time off the Floor of the House to that end. With that, I hand over to the noble and learned Lord to reply and thank him for his efforts so far.