Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Debate between Madeleine Moon and Ed Balls

Monday 13th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Ed Balls]

What the hon. Gentleman will not hear from us is support for a reform that a former Met commissioner has today said is

“without any intellectual underpinning or historical understanding”.

It will weaken police accountability by making it more personalised and less representative of local communities, and it will overturn a 170-year tradition of independence in policing by empowering one elected individual to direct police priorities, fire chief constables and hire political advisers to do his bidding. It will make cross-force collaboration harder, not easier, and it will divert millions of pounds—the equivalent of 600 police officers—from the front line to new elections. It is a flawed reform that will waste millions and do nothing to reduce crime, so we are very sceptical about giving the Bill a Second Reading.

[Mrs Moon]

South Wales police currently have a police authority that contains cross-party representation from the leaders of a number of local authorities as well as people who are independently selected. How can it be said that there is greater democratic accountability when one person is directly elected than when there is cross-party representation from across the whole police authority area?

[Ed Balls]

I do not know, and that is one of the flaws in the Bill that we will need to investigate in Committee. As I understand it, that problem was why the Liberal Democrats did not support the policy. They rejected it in their policy documents in the past two years, stating that

“police authorities must be representative of the whole community, including women and ethnic minorities, which is why we reject…plans for elected sheriffs.”

That was why they rejected the policy in the first place.