Police

Mark Reckless Excerpts

Tuesday 10th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mike Penning]

Cambridgeshire is also doing a fantastic job under the Conservative PCC, who I had the pleasure of knowing before he was PCC. So that I am not being too party political, may I say that fantastic jobs are being done around the country by PCCs of all political persuasions, including independents? They are not shy in coming to my door and explaining their areas’ needs. As PCCs go forward and we see the elections for them in 2016, I think we will see not only an uptake in the number of people voting for them, but that being in touch with the local community is vitally important.

Collaboration has not in the past exactly been top of the agenda with the police forces around England and Wales; it was talked about a lot, but not much came to fruition. However, it is where some of the recent savings have come from. Communities want to see their local bobbies, and see their local constabulary badge on them, but that is only a tiny proportion of what goes on in England and Wales police forces. That is what the public care about most, but we must make sure they are also aware of the work that goes on elsewhere.

Collaboration is vital as we continue to look at making savings, with boundaries and silos having been broken down not only, as we have seen in Hampshire, with other local government agencies, but across borders and across the country. To get the benefits of collaboration does not mean it necessarily has to be between neighbouring forces.

[Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (UKIP)]

The Minister just said that visible public-facing policing constitutes only a tiny proportion of what the police do. Does he think that proportion is too low and should be increased?

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[Jack Dromey]

Over the past 12 months, I have visited 34 of the 43 police services, and there is without doubt an unprecedented collapse of morale, from the chief constables to the police constables and PCSOs, because of that combination of the mounting pressures on the police service and the negative tone set by our Government.

We believe that a different approach and a fresh start are essential. Today’s vote on policing is a choice between a Tory plan to cut 1,000 more police officers next year and a Labour plan of reform and savings to protect the front line, so that chief constables can prevent those 1,000 police officer posts from being cut. The Home Secretary should be straining every sinew to protect the front line, but she is not. The Home Secretary and the Tories, and their human shield, the Liberal Democrats, just do not get what pressure the public services and the police are under, and they are turning their backs on obvious savings that could keep those much needed police on our streets.

The Home Secretary has said that it does not matter that thousands more police officers are set to go, on top of the 16,000 already lost, reversing a generation of progress under the previous Labour Government; she says that under her plans all is well because crime is falling. The truth is that crime is changing, pressures on the police are going up, and this is the worst possible time to inflict the biggest cuts on the police service of any country in Europe, just when the police are facing mounting and serious demands.

Over the past 20 years, volume crime, as it is often called, has indeed been falling. Cars are more difficult to steal than they once were, because crime has been substantially designed out, and homes are more difficult to burgle than they once were. That has been a worldwide trend over the past 20 years, because of a combination of advances of the kind I have described and the success of neighbourhood policing, with its emphasis on prevention. But the figures are clear: police recorded violent crime is increasing, and online crime has shot through the roof. For example, Financial Fraud Action UK has said that online banking crime has increased by 71%, e-commerce crime has increased by 23% and card crime has increased by 15%. We have also seen the mounting terrorist threat posing an ever more serious challenge to our police service, and just this weekend assistant commissioner Mark Rowley, the national anti-terror lead, warned that he needs more resources to respond.

At the same time, the police are struggling to deal with crimes that are ever more complex in terms of what it takes to investigate them properly. Hate crime, one of the most hateful of crimes, is up. I have seen this at first hand in my constituency. A fine woman was out with her disabled son, who was in a motorised wheelchair, when he had stones thrown at him because of a whispering campaign about how anyone who has a car or Motability vehicle on benefits somehow has to be a scrounger. I sometimes think that Ministers should be ashamed of the tone they set, because of what it leads to in communities all over the country.

Hate crime is up. Reports of rape and domestic violence are up, yet the number of prosecutions and convictions is down. Reports of child sexual abuse have increased by 33%, but referrals to the CPS from the police have decreased by 11%.

There are serious delays in investigating online child abuse. That means that victims are finding it much harder to get justice and more criminals and abusers are walking away scot-free. After the exposés of the past two years, there is now a great national will to tackle the obscenity of child sex exploitation and abuse, both historical and current. But, because of the mounting pressures on the police, there are serious question marks over the effectiveness of their response. The National Crime Agency, for example, has, thus far, failed to bring to account those identified under Operation Notarise. Some 20,000 people were found to be accessing child pornography, thousands of whom will be contact abusers of children, but only 700 have faced any action.

Police services in Lincolnshire and all over the country say that such are the pressures on their resources that they will find it difficult to do anything other than cope with current cases, and that they will not be able to look into historical cases of abuse and exploitation. I have seen the effect of those mounting pressures in my own police service in the west midlands, where 10% and rising of police resources are now dedicated to doing nothing else but dealing with child sex exploitation and abuse.

Even in basic responsibilities, such as road safety, the police are being over-stretched. The number of traffic police on our roads has fallen by 23%. The number of driving offence penalties has fallen substantially while the number of fatalities and casualties has gone up—the number of child fatalities and casualties has gone up by 6%. Neighbourhood policing is being badly undermined.

[Mark Reckless]

Does the hon. Gentleman recall how the Government used to stress the need to protect the front line and to put the emphasis on visible policing? But just now, the Minister said that that accounted for only a tiny proportion of activity and he seemed very happy with that and had no desire to increase it.

[Jack Dromey]

The hon. Gentleman is right to be concerned, because his police service has lost 604 members of staff since 2010. It is certainly true that policing is complex and requires investigatory teams, not all of which will be on the front line. None the less, front-line policing is essential. We created neighbourhood policing, and it worked; we saw substantial falls in traditional forms of crime and it was popular with the public. It is about not just detecting crime, but working with communities to prevent crime and to divert people from crime. Lord Stevens rightly said that neighbourhood policing is the bedrock of policing, but under this Government it is now being hollowed out. Many forces all over the country are taking officers off the neighbourhood beat, putting them back into cars and forcing them to deal with only emergency response. They are now off the front line and into response, when they should be building community partnerships and intelligence and preventing crime.

Criminal Justice and Courts Bill

Mark Reckless Excerpts

Tuesday 13th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

With the leave of the House, I shall say some brief words in response to the two contributions.

First, the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter), argued that the reforms are wrong. I simply remind him that, time after time when Labour was in government, we heard Ministers arguing about the impact of judicial review on Government and the need for change. It is interesting that Labour takes a very different view now that it is in opposition.

What Labour is actually arguing for is anonymity for people who provide financial backing to a judicial review. That anonymity would apply not just to a small backer, but, for instance, to a tobacco company using a third party to judicially review the Government’s public health policy. I simply do not understand why Labour would oppose the idea of a court knowing who is funding a judicial review to a major degree. We will simply have to disagree on that.

It was interesting to hear the shadow Minister say that if, heaven help this country, Labour finds itself in government in May, it would restore judicial review to its current position. I did not hear him commit to introducing primary legislation to reverse our measure. I would wage the usual fiver that, in the unhappy event of the Labour party being in government again, it will not seek to reverse our reforms.

My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr Cox) and I are clearly not going to agree. The point about the amendment on procedural defects is that it ensures that a public authority cannot commit a major breach of procedure. It also ensures that a public body that commits a minor and unimportant breach of procedure cannot then face a substantial bill as a result of someone using that breach to bring a case when there is little likelihood of a different decision being taken. That simply ties up the costs and staff time of public bodies for weeks on end on a matter that is only really ever brought for campaigning or delaying purposes. I assure my hon. and learned Friend that the Government see regular examples of cases being threatened or brought on precisely that premise.

My hon. and learned Friend mentioned the stipulation of exceptional public interest. Put simply, there are many matters that are of general public interest and we are seeking to set the bar higher. It seems to me to be a simple proposition to say that a court must certify that a matter is of exceptional public interest—which might relate to a major, fundamental and worrying breach of procedure by a public body—rather than of general public interest. As a Government and, I hope, a Parliament, we are consciously setting the bar one notch higher. That is what the measure is designed to do.

I am afraid that I do not agree with my hon. and learned Friend’s point about judges being forced to make or evaluate a decision themselves. If a judge is able to decide whether a ministerial decision is irrational, quash a Government decision and send a major policy matter back to the drawing board, surely they can also decide that a matter is so minor that it would not have led to a different decision being taken. That is the purpose of the measure.

[Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (UKIP)]

The judge can assess rationality and reasonableness, but my particular concern is about legality. Will what the Minister is doing allow public bodies to delegate things that Parliament determines they should do themselves, and will a decision made by such a body be allowed to stand under the reforms even though Parliament has not said that that body should make that decision? Can he give me any reassurance?

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Grayling]

We will probably beg to differ on that, but my hon. and learned Friend is absolutely right. One of the circumstances in which I could envisage the amended clause being used is if a public body has blatantly flouted the way in which consultations should be managed and procedure handled, but it is likely that the ultimate decision would have been the same. It is reasonable for a court to then say that that is simply unacceptable—that it is a matter of exceptional public interest that a public body of this kind should be able to behave in such a completely cavalier way—and it will therefore allow the case to go forward. The amendment gives the judge the freedom to take that decision. It was our judgment that it accorded that freedom, but it also achieves our goal of ensuring that permission is not given for technicalities, which is particularly important.

[Mark Reckless]

On transparency, I think I am inclined to support the Justice Secretary, but if there is a shell company without material resources, surely the solution is just to apply for costs against it?

[Chris Grayling]

That may indeed be an option in the courts. I go back to the Richard III case which, the hon. Gentleman may remember, was brought by Plantagenet Alliance Ltd. It is still to this day not clear to me who the Plantagenet Alliance were and who was behind it. It was launched on the basis of it being the family of King Richard III—his descendants—demanding a right to a say in where he was buried. I suspect that most of us in this Chamber are, in some way, shape or form, descendants of King Richard III given the way the generations have spread out. The Department was subject to a case and won that case. The court ruled that I had fulfilled my statutory duties appropriately. None the less, as a result of that case the taxpayer faced a bill, if I recall correctly, in excess of £100,000. To my mind, that is not good use of public money.

My view, therefore, is that at the very least we should know—as I say, I do not know to this day—who the backers of the Plantagenet Alliance are. It is my full intention to put forward a proposal to set a £1,500 threshold, but I will also be considering how to prevent the use of shell companies to provide a shelter for those bringing judicial reviews. I hope that will command the support of the House. I still do not understand why the Labour party is so opposed to it, because I cannot see how it is in anybody’s interest for public bodies to be subject to court cases by bodies that are unknown. We do not know who is behind them, who has set them up, and whether they are a front for an interest group that we would find utterly distasteful.

Criminal Justice and Courts Bill

Mark Reckless Excerpts

Tuesday 17th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Dr Huppert]

I am fascinated that the hon. Gentleman is prepared to pay £20 million. My point is not for or against saving lives, but about which approach will save lives more effectively. Will we save more lives by agreeing the new clauses, at a cost of £20 million? Or will we save more lives by spending that money on reducing the gang crime that blights our cities and other areas? Which will reduce knife crime by more? I am not saying that the hon. Gentleman’s proposals would not have any effect at all, but I would challenge whether they are the best way of proceeding and of saving the most lives.

If we had that extra money, we could do many more of the things that we should be doing. We could do more to teach 11 to 16-year-olds of the consequences of knife crime and the harm that can come to them, and to encourage them to report knife carrying so that it happens less in our schools and on our streets. We could make more young people aware of the downsides of gang culture and run much more effective anti-gang programs. We could extend the highly successful “This is abuse” campaign to girls who are associated with gang members and who are at particular risk of sexual exploitation. Those are all things that the Government could do that would stop people picking up a knife in the first place. We could use money for that instead of just locking people up.

The Secretary of State used to understand that. When he gave evidence to the Select Committee on Home Affairs, he said that what

“I would seek to bring to Government, if we win the election, is all around the principle of early intervention...I think that the way in which we make the biggest difference to knife crime and indeed to other violent crimes, particularly amongst the young, is through more effective early intervention.”

He was right when he said that; the money should be spent on early intervention, as I think, and the Justice Secretary used to think, that that is more effective. Deputy Assistant Commissioner Hitchcock, as he was then, also explained why we are going to get this wrong, as I highlighted earlier.

We should make it very clear that carrying a knife for whatever reason, whether it is driven by fear or to threaten others, is not tolerated, but banging up people who have been misguided and making the situation worse is not the way to do that. This is about finding alternatives, and there are some fantastically effective alternatives. Since 2006, the organisation Redthread has been embedding workers in the trauma centre at King’s College hospital. Its staff work closely with accident and emergency staff to try to disrupt the cycle of violence that brings hundreds of young people to the hospital each year. Every week, their clinical colleagues see mostly young men who for a range of reasons find themselves victims or perpetrators of gun and knife crime. Redthread staff take the opportunity to try to turn around people who have been involved, injured and seen the worst that can happen as a result of such crime—at a time when they are shocked and their lives can be changed. Supporting anti-gang work at the scene in A and E, with better education and more awareness-raising in schools, seems to me to be the way to reduce knife crime further.

There is another thing we should do and which I am surprised the Justice Secretary has not done: insist that the Sentencing Council re-examine the current guidelines for knife crime. They were last looked at in 2008. There is a strong case to look at them again, and to look at them in the round to make sure that we have the right sentences. I do not know why the Justice Secretary has not done that ahead of time. He could have done so easily, as he did recently for one-punch killing.

[Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree with my proposal that in order to ensure that sentences are looked at in the round, that they reflect the views of the public who elect us and that they are effective, the Sentencing Council should be a committee of this Parliament?

[Dr Huppert]

rose—

Police Federation Reform (Normington Report)

Mark Reckless Excerpts

Thursday 13th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (Con)]

As my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton North (Michael Ellis) said, it is a shocking statistic that 91% of members of the Police Federation demand change. But another shocking statistic from a poll is that only 1% of police officers believe that politicians support the police. It is important that it is understood by police officers in particular that this debate is not Members of Parliament having a go at the police, still less the constables, sergeants and inspectors who do the vast amount of policing work. In terms of even-handedness I would add that last month I was fortunate enough to have a debate in Westminster Hall when we examined the Association of Chief Police Officers, and Members were as excoriating of that organisation as hon. Members have been today of the Police Federation.

The background to the Police Federation is important. We had four police strikes between 1872 and 1919, and the federation was a resolution of the labour discontent involving John Syme and Tommy Thiel, the people who set up the initial police unions, and what was seen in the first world war.

Of my various books on the history of the police, the one that I think contains the best summary of the setting up of the Police Federation is Richard Cowley’s “A History of the British Police.” He writes:

“The Police Federation was established in 1919 for the ‘purpose of enabling members of the police forces in England and Wales to consider and to bring to the notice of police authorities and the Secretary of State, all matters affecting their welfare and efficiency, other than questions of discipline and promotion affecting individuals’. At long last, for the first time in ninety years, the Police Federation gave the police what they had been agitating for—the right to confer; a representative, negotiating body.

But in granting this, constraints were placed upon it. The right of the police to take strike action was specifically withdrawn, and it was made a criminal offence for any police officer to strike or for anyone to induce him to do so. Thus it was called the Police Federation rather than a police union”.

That is really important in informing what we say today.

We also need to understand that the structures of the Police Federation date all the way back to 1919 and that much of its internal organisation relies upon statute. Those structures have changed significantly less, to put it mildly, than have most organisations and institutions over the past 95 years. That might require Parliament to change some measures in respect of the Police Federation, but I think that ideally any such changes should be led by the federation.

When Stephen Williams gave evidence to the Home Affairs Committee, in contrast to the three officers who appeared before us in our previous inquiry, whom we did not see as representative of the Police Federation—he was elected—we felt that our concerns were being listened to and that he was dealing with the federation’s affairs as openly as he could, subject to some serious constraints. We wish him well in changing that organisation, having commissioned the Normington report. We want to see it pushed through, so it is really important that we do not just have this debate today and then let the issue go off the boil. That is why the Committee is having the inquiry. We have followed up on a number of our inquiries, which I hope will be one mechanism by which we can keep accountability and public reporting of these changes.

Recent reforms to the police have contained so many detailed changes that it can be difficult to keep track. The Police Federation is almost unique in not having unionisation—there are also the armed forces, of course—as the police do not have the right to strike and do not have a union as such. Some of the recent changes for the police have been different from what has happened elsewhere in the public services. To give just one example, the police had their pay increments frozen for two years. That might sound like a small thing, but I do not believe that it is, because across much of the rest of the public sector, despite the vaunted public sector pay freeze and now the 1% maximum increase, public servants have been receiving rises almost automatically year on year as they serve in a post. Those increments push them up pay scales in a way that the police have been specifically excluded from. That is one source of discontent among the police.

Another thing that stands out about the police is that, uniquely in the public services, they cannot be sacked, except for gross misconduct. There is no mechanism by which one can insist that a police officer is made redundant. I thought that we were going to change that. Tom Winsor rightly drew attention to it. The idea that after two years of probation someone has a job for life, or at least for 30 years, has been done away with in every other sector, if indeed it was ever there.

I will enjoy hearing the Home Secretary when she strays beyond her brief and sets out some of the principles that we, as Conservatives, should seek to apply in future. It is difficult to reconcile those principles with leaving that “jobs for life” specific legislative exemption for the police while every other employee is potentially subject to that type of dismissal. Once a police officer has a job and has been in probation for two years, irrespective of the level of the crime or the amount of money in the public sector, they have that job and nothing can be done about it. That sets the police apart, and I was looking forward to seeing that changed. I will be disappointed if the Home Secretary does not take that forward.

Another area that we need to look at, in relation to the straitened financial circumstances, is facility time, meaning the number of police officers working on Police Federation business and the amount of their working time that is taken up by it. There have been reductions in police officer numbers overall, as the shadow Minister, the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson), vigorously emphasises, although they have not been as great as they might have been, as a result of the efficiencies and changes that we have made, for which the Minister deserves much support. However, when we have had those changes, have we seen similar, and indeed appropriate, reductions in the amount of time spent on Police Federation duties?

Although it is good to have wider consultation, I think that some of the structures of the Police Federation lead to a use of time that is perhaps not the most productive. We need to look carefully at the extent to which police officers could be spending more time on front-line duties and less on that part of federation business that might not be delivering directly the representative benefits that its members need. I hope we will consider that in addition to whether some of the police officers could get back the £500 that it is said is being held on their behalf.

I would like briefly to discuss the No. 2 accounts. I have not seen evidence that anything has been going on within the accounts that should not have been, and still less that there has been any misappropriation of funds—I would like to make it clear that I am not suggesting that there is. However, the very fact that they are known as No. 2 accounts raises, for many people, the idea that money might not be properly accounted for. We hear of people running a second book of accounts in a business: one that is real and one that is for the tax authorities. When people hear of the Police Federation No. 2 accounts, they wonder whether something like that is going on. I have no evidence that it is, but I am concerned that people will draw conclusions that may not be justified until such a time as that money is properly accounted for, the chairman of the Police Federation knows what is going on with those accounts and they are put properly into the public domain. As a body, the Police Federation should not operate only for its members, but act in the public interest.

In talking about the public interest, I think that legal action is an incredibly important area for us to examine. The Chair of the Select Committee, the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), spoke earlier about our terms of reference. I strongly questioned the officers who appeared before the Committee on what they were doing with regard to the legal actions. I think that is an area for us to include in our terms of reference and in our report. I do not think that should mean delving into the details of current legal actions, but we should look back and get some baseline about what actions the money has been spent on, how often the police defend a member and how often they proactively go out with a sword, as my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton North said, rather than simply defending their officers, making members of the public subject to a legal attack from the Police Federation and funded by it. That is an area of huge concern. We need first to understand how much of that is going on and what the baseline is before we can say what should be done about it.

I worry about how much the law firms involved are earning and on what basis they are given fees and are being commissioned. It is simply not good enough for the federation to say that it looks at the merits of each case and then decides on the basis of the prospects for success. Simply because a case might have a better than even chance of succeeding is not a sufficient reason for engaging in legal action. The federation also needs to take into account its reputation as an organisation, that of the police, the interests of its members, of course, and the public interest. I think that area of legal spending by the federation should be very closely examined.

Ultimately, I wish the chair of the Police Federation, all its elected officers and its members the very best in getting the organisation back into the sort of shape that will mean that both officers and the public can take pride in it.

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[Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg). I pay tribute to many of my colleagues for their comments. The words “change” and “reform” have been used a lot in this debate and I want to focus not on specific events, but on how the force needs to evolve. The Police Federation is made up of different levels, including constables, sergeants and inspectors, who make up the majority of the police force. If change is to come about, they must embrace it.

In a fast-changing world, I think we would all call ourselves reformers, but there are, perhaps, two kinds: those who want reform and those who want reform but not now. I wonder which category the Police Federation falls into. If we observe any major traffic incident, we will see that the efficiency and ease with which all three of our blue-light services work together—the gold-silver-bronze command structure—is extremely impressive. However, if the incident is more complex and involves other agencies or wider geographical areas—such as the tragedies at King’s Cross, the events at Buncefield, the 2007 floods and the 7/7 terrorist attacks—an altogether more complicated wiring diagram is relied upon, which attempts to link together organisations, agencies and Government Departments by using complex processes and protocols that have been built over decades, but that urgently need to be updated. They are so embedded that successive Governments have been reluctant to address them.

The Police Federation must appreciate that there are cultural and technical shortcomings that affect the ability of different constabularies to work together and with other agencies. Even today, different voice procedures are used in the 43 constabularies in different parts of the country. When Cobra sits, decision making is swift, as we have seen over the past few days, but when it breaks there are 43 separate police forces, 46 separate fire services and hundreds of local authorities running separate independent local resilience forums without any formal co-ordination from above.

We can all be very proud of the London 2012 Olympics. It was the largest and most complex event the nation has ever hosted and it was incident free, thanks to the years of preparation for a time-limited event and the additional resources and structures that have now largely been dismantled. The federation needs to appreciate that. I hope it will start to appreciate that there are strategic, operational and financial efficiencies to be gained from not only simpler and stronger ministerial leadership, but the streamlining of policy formulation and unambiguous inter-agency operational command at both national and local levels.

The federation recognises and is in fact involved in the Joint Emergency Services Interoperability Programme, designed to improve joint doctrine. The federation must appreciate that if a forum such as JESIP needed to be created, there is something wrong with the way in which our emergency services work together. Given the types of natural and man-made threats we now face, it is time to overhaul our resilience capability, from the local resilience forums—the basic emergency decision-making units found in every county—all the way to Cobra at the top.

[Mark Reckless]

Will my hon. Friend explain what specific role he sees the Police Federation playing in assisting that process?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. Before the hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) answers that, may I say to him that this debate is about the Normington report on reform of the Police Federation and that the debate on the police was yesterday? He needs to focus on the Normington report and not every so often in a sentence say, “Police Federation,” to make himself in order.

Police and Crime Commissioners and ACPO

Mark Reckless Excerpts

Wednesday 15th January 2014 Westminster Hall

[Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Rosindell. I am grateful to have secured this debate, which is timely, as the police and crime commissioners’ decision on the funding of the Association of Chief Police Officers is pending.

ACPO still receives £4 million of public funding. Some £1.2 million of that is provided directly by PCCs to ACPO centrally, with the remainder almost all going to national policing units still overseen by ACPO—something that I and other members of the Select Committee on Home Affairs have repeatedly said is wrong. The Home Office has already ended funding to ACPO, so I hope the Minister will find General Sir Nick Parker’s independent review of ACPO helpful.

The PCCs to whom I have spoken do not in any way interpret recommendation 4, on having a change management programme, as a criticism of the Home Office; rather, they see it as an offer to work with the Home Office to ensure that the transition from ACPO happens, and to provide a final year of funding to do so. The Parker report’s other three recommendations also strongly support the changes to the policing landscape driven by the Home Office, and they will be welcomed by members of the Select Committee, and by many chief constables who are perhaps not part of the ACPO in-group, if I may describe it in that way.

The Parker report’s first three recommendations are central to today’s debate, and I will address them in reverse order. Recommendation 3 states:

“PCCs should seek greater visibility of National Business Area governance and output. Even though the overall responsibility for management is transferring from ACPO to the College of Policing the level of resources that Business Areas consume at local level mean that PCCs remain a major stakeholder.”

The Select Committee would probably also add that Alex Marshall and the College of Policing are in charge. The College of Policing is a new body that will take time to get into its stride, which I believe it is now doing. It is important that chief constables look to Alex Marshall, who is operationally in charge of the college, to provide that leadership, because it now happens through the College of Policing, rather than through ACPO.

Recommendation 3 runs counter to the rearguard action being fought by a number of chief constables; that point is addressed on page 10 of the report, where General Parker refers to the “concerns” from some that

“the wide representation of stakeholders within the College, and the processes necessary to ensure appropriate consideration, may delay the implementation of tactical procedures. Chief Constables should retain an important stake in the speed of decision-making and the priorities set to address issues. This will allow Business Area Heads to ensure timely, credible implementation and, if the situation demands it, provide an effective counter to obfuscation by other stakeholders within the College who may not have responsibility for operational effect.”

That betrays some chief constables’ lack of understanding of how the new policing landscape should operate, and particularly of the role of the College of Policing in running those business areas, and the key role of the police and crime commissioners on the college’s board. As the general says,

“it would be wrong to assume that there is a clear dividing line between policy and practice”.

That is why it is necessary for PCCs to have oversight. The business areas should not just be pushed off on to a professional committee within the College of Policing; the PCCs should be central either in directly managing the business areas or delegating them to ensure appropriate supervision. That is essential, as General Parker emphasises in his report.

The second recommendation is on national units, of which there is a great range. Some are small in what they do, although they are often important, and some are smaller or larger in terms of funding. The general says that we need

“alternative models to governance, funding and support currently provided by ACPO, such as the lead force…to streamline governance and financial accountability by reinvigorating the bilateral contact between forces and each national unit. This will ensure that individual force requirements are met in the most cost effective manner.”

The report continues:

“ACPO does provide important administrative services, particularly in support of national units. It governs some commercial interests and acts as the home for CPOSA. There are alternative solutions, including more widespread use of the lead force model in the case of national units.”

There is a clear model for the direction that that should go in, so the question is how we arrange the transfer over the next year, if the PCCs are kind enough to provide funding and support for the Home Office to oversee it.

Finally—this is key—nobody has any objection to chief constables getting together to discuss matters of mutual interest. That is something that they have done, as the so-called chief constables’ council, within ACPO, using ACPO as the agency to the extent that that was required, but the consensus, certainly in the report, is that the status quo is no longer feasible. General Parker says that we need change that

“shifts responsibilities…to the College of Policing and other appropriate bodies, one of which must represent senior…operational leadership at the national level”.

ACPO will therefore have no further role in that. I emphasise that responsibility is shifting to other appropriate bodies, one of which will provide a central focus at the national level and can act as a forum for the senior leadership of the police service.

[Jack Dromey (Birmingham, Erdington) (Lab)]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. He rightly quotes at length the Parker review, which praises the historic work of ACPO, recommends a collective national policing function to conduct operational and managerial co-ordination, and argues for reform. It has been embraced by ACPO and supported by the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, which are now collaborating in a transitional board. Does he accept the importance of a focus akin to that which ACPO has provided historically? Whatever the future reforms, there should be that focus on the effective co-ordination of operational and managerial delivery. Is that not key to the safety and security of the communities that we represent?

[Mark Reckless]

What is key for our communities is democratic oversight. As I said in my maiden speech, if Labour is now not the party of democratic oversight, which the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) has an honourable record in pushing, but of ACPO, then it can stand on that basis, but that is a sad change. I am not sure whether, in the shadow Minister’s remarks, there was a degree of confusion between ACPO and the National Police Coordination Centre, in terms of that national co-ordinating role during times of crisis—the most obvious recent example is the riots. Everyone agrees that that role is required, but we need appropriate oversight of that, and there is appropriate oversight in that centre. The president of ACPO does not have direction and control; he is one of a number of people serving on the new body, which includes representation from the Cabinet Office and the Home Office. That is the right model.

It is perfectly fine to discuss and develop the idea of whether chief constables need a collective view, and whether or not the body should be called the chief constables’ council. The traditional tripartite model involves the chief constable and the police authority locally, and the Home Office setting the national framework. Unfortunately, over several decades, ACPO began undemocratically to set that national framework centrally, when it is much more appropriate for such things to be delivered locally and with democratic oversight. If there is to be a chief constables’ council, which is perfectly sensible, it should be run by a part-time chair elected by the members—even ACPO was run in that way before 2003. There is no need for some great legal entity and superstructure that has human resources, finance and legal functions; it can operate like the other business areas. The elected chair could use his staff officer and a number of officers within the local force as appropriate, with the costs falling as they lie with the business area. That is the appropriate model, which would allow chief constables to work together, with the chair speaking on their behalf when appropriate. That is all that is required, and we must be sure that the transition does not allow a revamped ACPO to return from the dead.

--- Later in debate ---

[Damian Green]

Indeed. My hon. Friend makes a good point. I am about to come on to the college and its vital, central role in future, but first I will point out the one part of the Parker review with which I disagree: the need for a centralised change management programme for police reform, potentially run from the Home Office. That is exactly what we do not need and is very much against the ethos of the more accountable, locally driven and bottom-up police service that we are introducing. That is one of the reasons why I am so glad that the PCCs have grasped the nettle of reform themselves, because it shows that we do not need a small group in the Home Office driving all change.

[Mark Reckless]

The PCCs I have spoken to do not interpret the report in that way. I can see how the Minister might, reading it broadly, but that has not been their interpretation, to the extent that change management is needed and the Home Office’s co-operation with that is desired. I believe that is an issue for the transitional final year funding that PCCs are prepared to offer to help the Home Office to ensure that ACPO’s functions are wound down and that the appropriate transition is made.

[Damian Green]

Absolutely. I thought that that was what I had said. I am conscious that PCCs want to do that. I am not saying that there is no role for the Home Office—there is of course a role for it, and we have a very senior official sitting on the transition committee precisely so that the legitimate interest that the Home Office has in the process can be represented at this vital time of change.

I have been invited to talk about the College of Policing, however, so I will. We saw before Christmas with the code of ethics that the media and the public are increasingly—and rightly—looking to the college to speak boldly on how it believes the police should response to press and public concerns, in the way that, in the past, they would have looked to ACPO. The college has taken on much that we used to look to ACPO to provide—setting out the case for change, providing leadership and enabling police forces to provide a more effective service to their communities.

In future, we will be looking to the college as the body responsible for developing a better police force, for identifying the challenges that policing faces and for setting out how those challenges should be met. In future the college will come up with the big ideas for reforms to improve the way policing is delivered. I expect to see the college providing dynamic leadership in the face of a wide range of challenges, including reducing bureaucracy, increasing officer discretion and driving the modernisation of the police.

To achieve all that, the college will need to be visible not just to the few at the top of the police or to the many thousands working in policing but—perhaps most important of all—to the general public, without whom the police could not be effective. We have always had a model of policing by consent. The famous dictum of Robert Peel, that the

“police are the public and the public are the police”

needs constant reinvention in every age. It will be to the college that Governments, the police and the public will look to interpret how we achieve that hugely desirable end, which has always been at the heart of British policing, in the 21st century.

We have talked about accountability today, and I agree that it is important. The college is accountable through its board, with a far greater range of people from right across policing responsible for taking decisions about the way the college works. It will also be accountable to Parliament for the standards it sets.

[Mark Reckless]

The key is that the range of people on that board include a serious number of PCCs, who are elected. That is the difference, surely.

[Damian Green]

It is one difference, but the most important difference, and the next thing I was going to say, is how inclusive the college is. It is for the whole of policing: officers, staff, special constables and volunteers. There is a wide range of people on the college board as well as on its professional committee. As my hon. Friend says, that rightly includes PCCs, who are themselves directly elected.

The college is new and new organisations need time to get their strategy and structures in place, and to make sure that they have the right people in post to deliver their aims, but there has already been huge progress. In September, the college published its strategic intent, inviting views on its strategy, including on whether police officers and staff should pay a fee to join. In October, it consulted on the code of ethics for police officers and members of police staff. While we are debating the changes to ACPO here today, the college is working through its longer term structures and developing its commercial strategy. All that is being progressed alongside the work the college is doing on direct entry, on the threshold tests linking pay to skills, on police digitisation and on freeing up police time. It is essential that everyone not only gives the college time to develop but supports it in that development. It will be a vital institution for the future success of policing in this country.

We should all recognise that it will not be some diktat from the Home Office or lever pulled by the Policing Minister that will bring about reform. We need to work in partnership with police and crime commissioners and chief constables to ensure that the model for the future is the right one. We continue to take a strong interest and financially to support those critical national functions that chief constables undertake and must continue to deliver, namely those where operational co-ordination is needed on national issues. Critical national functions including the national police co-ordination centre and the ACPO criminal records office must continue so that we safeguard work on, for example, the sharing of international criminal information across the EU and the rest of the world—clearly an area of increasing importance to the police.

Sir Nick Parker’s review was comprehensive and looked at the future of ACPO in the round. It concluded that reform was needed to ensure that chief constables have a forum with functions and structures that fit the new police reform landscape. I support that objective. The changes to the policing landscape that followed the publication of the review of ACPO will take time to unfold. Once those changes take place, it will be essential that they work. We have already seen the changes the Government have made to this part of the policing landscape through the creation of the college. Those changes have worked because they have been supported by all parts of policing—by chief constables, PCCs, the Police Superintendents Association, the Police Federation and those trade unions that have members who are police staff. The changes to ACPO need to be worked through in exactly the same way.

I am grateful to ACPO and its members. Chief constables have shown the ability to adapt and evolve to meet new challenges. That pragmatic, reforming approach will need to continue as police reform and, in particular, a sharper focus on public accountability and transparency continue to drive change across the policing landscape.

Question put and agreed to.

Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill

Mark Reckless Excerpts

Monday 14th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Diana Johnson]

I will continue, because I have a feeling that this debate could go on all night with the Liberal Democrats.

I want to ask the Minister and the hon. Lady whether they feel that the threshold might be too high. I accept—the Liberal Democrats will like this bit—that there is a significant cost to the individual on whom an order is placed, reputationally, and particularly if that becomes public. We know that, because of public disgust associated with sex crimes, the effect of a sex offence order being imposed on an individual, whatever it is called, will be devastating to that individual.

It has not helped that the risk of sexual harm orders that were previously in place have been called, I think wrongly, sex offence ASBOs, because the higher standard of proof makes that comparison unhelpful. At the same time, we must accept that there will be many occasions when the police have a well founded, reasonable belief that someone poses a risk to children but are not able to secure a conviction, because, for example, they cannot present in open court the evidence required. In particular, the situation could arise if a vulnerable witness is not in a position to give evidence in court. In such cases, we may want a civil protection order, precisely because we cannot get a conviction at the higher criminal standard. Will the Minister comment on whether the new orders will allow for far more cases to be subject to the orders?

[Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (Con)]

We have learnt that many of the problems in this area have been a failure of enforcement—a failure of the various agencies to work together or to understand what was going on. However, I want to press the hon. Lady on the previous question. If someone has a civil order and then breaches it, could they go to prison for up to five years without at any point the criminal standard having been satisfied?

[Diana Johnson]

The new clauses and amendments have been tabled by the Government and the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon and they are best able to comment on that. My understanding of them is that a term of imprisonment of up to five years is applicable if an order is breached. I am asking a genuine question about whether what we want to achieve through the orders will be achieved by having a criminal standard for a civil order. The hon. Gentleman might want to take that up with the Minister when he responds.

I am conscious of time and of the fact that many other hon. Members want to speak so I will raise only a couple of other issues. Will the Minister explain the situation on appeals and rights of review that might be open to people who are put on the orders? With the scrapping of indeterminate sentences, might we have people on the street subject to the orders who in the past might well have remained in prison, and is the Minister satisfied with that situation?

The hon. Member for Mole Valley raises an important issue in new clause 7. It is topical given that at the weekend W. H. Smith had to withdraw information and e-books from its website. It has taken too long to obtain acceptance of the fact that viewing child abuse images is an integral part of the abuse process. Only the abusers deny that now. We know that viewing abuse often triggers behaviours in individuals. We know that Stuart Hazel and Mark Bridger had both been viewing legal pornography simulating violent sex and abuse prior to committing appalling crimes. The new clause, which deals with the written form of that abuse, is worth looking at. I hope that the Minister will comment further on that. We need to be careful, because we do not want genuine literature that describes abuse in a totally acceptable way to be captured.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Huppert]

I thank the hon. Lady for that clarification. My own view is that I would not even want to consider the idea of jailing somebody without going through the criminal process, because that is a fundamental position of our law. She was indeed only questioning it, but I am still surprised that it would even be questioned.

[Mark Reckless]

The record will of course show this, but does my hon. Friend agree that his point was to raise a concern that Labour Members might allow someone to be jailed for five years on the basis of balance of probabilities? All we heard back from the shadow Minister was an ad-hominem, or at least ad-party, attack on him, as though only a Liberal Democrat could object to such a thing. That is extraordinary.

[Dr Huppert]

I agree factually with the hon. Gentleman, but I do not want to dwell on that, because it detracts from the excellent work that has been done by the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon and so many others.

Questions still need to be answered for us to understand the details and the guidance, as the hon. Lady said. That is critical. I listened carefully to her comments about the idea that not everyone subject to an order could be jailed, but I would hope that that would be the principal aim. I think we would all like people who abuse children or vulnerable adults to go to jail, rather than receive a civil order. The gap between the two should be closed as much as possible.

I am concerned that there will still be strange applications. The case of Simon Walsh was interesting—it was surprising that it was brought in the first place— and he was eventually found not guilty, but I think he might have been caught by new clause 5, so I remain concerned about how we can avoid that happening when people have been found explicitly not guilty. I think we will have a chance to look at that and clarify the details.

Finally, I accept new clause 5 and have no problems with it becoming part of the Bill. I congratulate the hon. Lady on tabling it and the Minister on accepting it. One of my key findings during the Home Affairs Committee inquiry was that, yes, there is room for legislative change, but the vast majority of the problem was caused by organisational failures and by people not trusting or listening to young people—a series of things that will not be fixed by legislation. We must not delude ourselves that passing a law that makes certain behaviour illegal and that implements orders will, in and of itself, make the difference needed.

--- Later in debate ---

[Damian Green]

I thank hon. Members from all parties, not just for their universal support for the measures, but for the sensitive and sensible tone with which they have conducted the debate. My hon. Friend the Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood) will by now be blushing because of the amount of praise she has received. She should note that it has not been conventional praise—it is not a case of the House being conventionally polite—but that everyone, from all parties, really means it. She and the charities she has rightly mentioned have conducted an exemplary campaign on an issue of great contemporary importance. It is a subject that a few people have cared about hugely for ages, and now the whole country understands the important and urgent need to take effective action, which is precisely what we are seeking to do.

[Mark Reckless]

The Minister has said that a few people campaigned on the issue. Does he agree that others failed to follow through on this because they did not understand and recognise what was happening, and that some people perceived that earlier than they did?

Crime and Courts Bill [Lords]

Mark Reckless Excerpts

Monday 18th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Maria Miller]

My hon. Friend pre-empts something that I will cover in more detail later. I will not only deal with the cost regime, but explain that to comply with Leveson the new self-regulatory regime will include free arbitration, so giving those individuals the access to justice that he rightly says they should have.

New clause 27A establishes a second presumption—that a relevant publisher that chooses to stay outside the regulator would generally have costs awarded against it in proceedings for media tort, whether or not the claim is successful. In other words, a defendant publisher that does not join the regulator should always pay the claimant’s costs, unless the issue could not have been resolved at arbitration if the publisher had been a member of a regulator, or unless it were just and equitable for the defendant publisher not to pay those costs. These provisions deal with defendants and the costs they should or should not pay to claimants. The issue of claimants and the costs they might have to pay to defendants is also important and is addressed in subsection (5).

Lord Justice Leveson endorsed Lord Justice Jackson’s recommendation that qualified one-way cost shifting should be introduced for defamation and privacy cases. QOCS is a form of cost protection. The Government accepted that recommendation, and we have asked the Civil Justice Council, chaired by the Master of the Rolls, to make recommendations by the end of this month on appropriate cost protection measures to be introduced for defamation and privacy cases. The Government then expect to introduce a cost protection regime through the civil procedure rules.

Let us be clear: the new provisions on the awarding of costs, coupled with the provisions I have set out on exemplary damages, provide a powerful incentive to join the regulator and for disputes to be resolved through arbitration that meets the standards set out in the royal charter. Those defined as a “relevant publisher” for the purposes of the new legislation will, if they choose to sit outside the regulator, be exposed to the full force of the new exemplary damages and costs provisions. We want to ensure that the new provisions act as a powerful incentive—as I am sure you can hear me say, Mr Deputy Speaker—but we do not want to draw in too broad a range of publishers.

[Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (Con)]

Is it not the case that the incentives are so powerful—with the exemplary damages and the requirement to pay the other side’s costs, even if their claim may be very poor —that, in essence, we are almost forcing the press into joining the new regulator and being subject to the regulation framework determined by Ministers through the Privy Council?

[Maria Miller]

I gently remind my hon. Friend that the criteria used in reaching judgments will not be determined by Ministers, as he will know from the earlier debate. The reason we are establishing a royal charter is exactly so that all this is put very much at arm’s length from Ministers. I suggest to him that every publisher has a choice it can weigh up. Publishers can come inside the self-regulatory process and get the support of the regime for exemplary damages and costs, or they can choose to stay outside. That was absolutely the essence of Lord Justice Leveson’s recommendation not to have compulsion, and that is why the Prime Minister and I were so against taking a statutory approach—because we did not feel the press would want to take part in such a regime, which would be a fundamental weakness in the system.

[Mark Reckless]

But is it not the case that Ministers, albeit with senior members of the Opposition, have agreed the royal charter on Privy Council terms—in some ways that is worse than statutory regulation, because MPs have had no opportunity to debate it on behalf of our constituents—and that in many cases the only choice the media face will be whether to join or be bankrupted?

[Maria Miller]

I would say to my hon. Friend that when I have heard people talk about the approach they want the Government to take, they say that they want regulation of the press to be very much at arm’s length from politicians. What we are talking about is a self-regulatory body for the press, set up by the press. The royal charter is a verification panel that will ensure that the press is doing what it should do. It will not be under the eyes of Ministers; it will be independent. However, I urge him to look at the detail of the charter so that he does not take just my word for it, but sees it written down in black and white.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Edward Garnier]

I most certainly am not saying that it is a complete waste of time. I am saying that we should not seduce ourselves into thinking that it will do more than it can. It will be a far better system, all being well, than the PCC. It will have real teeth. It will have the ability to discipline respondent newspapers that are within the scheme by awarding costs and penalties of one sort or another.

The cases in which the new system will award a penalty of £1 million will be so rare as to be unthinkable. I imagine that it will deal with cases rather similar to those that are dealt with under the provisions of the Defamation Act 1996 on summary decisions, for which there is a limit of £10,000. I suspect that many of the cases that at the moment go to the High Court under those provisions will, if people are sensible, go into the new scheme. It will look at low-level damages, low-level punitive sanctions and cases that do not involve lots of complicated factual and legal issues.

Just because the new system will not look at many cases and just because the cases will not be hugely complicated does not mean that we should not do it; we should. We need access to some form of arbitration system for the people who have been bullied and disturbed by tabloid newspapers sticking their lenses through people’s letterboxes and so on. However, I urge the House not to think that we have suddenly waved a magic wand and that all future disputes will be resolved between victims or individual claimants and large media organisations through a cheap and speedy system; they will not. We ought to be a little cautious about that.

[Mark Reckless]

I have been enjoying my hon. and learned Friend’s speech for the past 20 minutes and I believe that the House benefits greatly from his exposition of these concepts. However, I am still unclear whether he supports or opposes what is proposed.

[Sir Edward Garnier]

I do apologise if I did not make myself clear. I will try to do so again, but perhaps rather more speedily. I support what is in the measures. It is easy to understand that point, I suspect.

[Mark Reckless]

indicated assent.

[Sir Edward Garnier]

The second point is that, although I support the measures, I suspect that they will be of limited availability and limited use. However, that they will not solve every problem does not mean that we should not deploy them to solve some problems. As I said a moment ago, the sorts of problems that I think they will be used to solve are those that are currently dealt with summarily under the Defamation Act 1996 with a damages limit of £10,000. There is no suggestion of a damages limit here, but I think that it is in that area of dispute that the system will work. It will be broadly in disputes over meaning, unfairness or beastly behaviour by a newspaper that it will work.

The new system will also bring into the exemplary damages regime, to go back to my first set of arguments, causes of action for which punitive damages cannot currently be received under common law, such as breach of confidence and misuse of private information.

There is a lot to be said in favour of what is proposed. I just urge Members not to get excessively excited about what we are achieving. There will come a time when we have to look at the guts of the regulatory system, including at who is to be on the panels that decide the cases and so on. There is therefore a lot more work for the Minister for Government Policy and the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport to do, with co-operation, I hope, from the Opposition parties and our coalition partners.

I am probably going to the church by way of the moon, but I really do think that much of what has been said today is commendable, but that much of it is too overexcited. Yes, we should celebrate the consensus, but let us not be misled by it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (Con)]

The Home Secretary introduced her remarks by referring to how the Bill had been enhanced by parliamentary scrutiny. I have no doubt that the Public Bill Committee did good work, but as a description of the 20 minutes we have had in today’s debate to consider all the remaining non-Leveson clauses, “enhanced by parliamentary scrutiny” is probably not the appropriate one.

I welcome what I see as the core of this Bill: the creation of the National Crime Agency. The shadow Home Secretary cavils in respect of how it is not going to be greatly different from the Serious Organised Crime Agency, but surely the key difference is that the NCA will be able to task police forces with carrying out necessary policing activities in the national interest. SOCA has not had that power and has been reliant on persuasion to get co-operation from local forces, and the creation of the NCA is the other side of the coin of the election of police and crime commissioners. We are making local and democratic what properly should be local and democratic while ensuring the necessary central control over national policing, which we have not really had in this country previously.

I very much regret the attachment to this Bill of what I consider to be, in all prospects, a press law. An organisation, Hacked Off, seems to have taken over both the Liberal Democrat and the Labour party positions on this issue. In response to an apparent allegation that the Labour party was the political wing of Hacked Off, the deputy leader of the Labour party did not deny it; she merely gave great congratulations to Hacked Off on what it had achieved. I am concerned that what it has achieved is eliding two different groups: the genuine victims of the press, such as the Dowler family, and a group of celebrities who would like to engage with the press on their own terms. I fear that what is coming out of today’s proceedings will benefit that latter group at least as much as the former. Some older Members of the House may recall the days of the industrial relations court in the early 1970s. When trade unions did not co-operate with that body, it failed in its objectives. That could, and I hope will, also happen to the royal charter, with its statutory underpinning that we are pushing through today.

The problem with the royal charter is that in many ways it is worse than a statute, because we cannot actually scrutinise it; it is just Ministers and senior people in the Opposition meeting behind closed doors to cook up these instructions to the press, and next to no scrutiny is provided in this House. For instance, article 11.7 of the royal charter states that the board

“shall have the right to request further reasonable sums from the Exchequer. In response to such a request, the Exchequer shall grant such sums to the Recognition Panel as it considers necessary”.

It could be argued that that was a disbursement of public funds without scrutiny from this House.

Another area of concern to me in the charter can be found in paragraph 11 of schedule 3, which states:

“The Board should have the power (but not necessarily the duty)”—

whatever that means—

“to hear complaints…from a third party seeking to ensure accuracy of published information.”

The schedule goes on to say:

“Although remedies are essentially about correcting the record for individuals, the power to direct a correction and an apology must apply equally in relation to…matters of fact where there is no single identifiable individual who has been affected.”

Instead of the interplay of ideas between different journalists and individuals competing to have their material published and heard in the public sphere, a regulator will determine the meaning of truth—a Ministry of Truth, as it were.

People will have to submit to this process, and if they do not there will be exemplary damages or they will have to pay the costs of anyone who wants to take up a case against them, however ill-founded it might be. We are not going to the right place with this royal charter; it is not where we should be heading.

It is also extraordinarily unclear how the charter will apply in the blogosphere and to the web. The definition of relevant publisher almost suggests that one particular blog, that of Guido Fawkes, has been singled out to try to ensure that it is caught by the terms of the charter. Let us consider the statutory underpinning. Public bodies are exempted under paragraph 6 of new schedule 5, and apparently a public body

“means a person or body whose functions are of a public nature.”

I hope that my blog will be exempt and I will not have to answer to the Home Secretary for any transgressions I make within that sphere. The final issue in considering the charter is where it will go next. We are setting it up without any idea of its final destination.

One thing we failed to consider in today’s debate was the excellent new clause tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab). The Home Secretary referred to the respect in which she holds my hon. Friend, but judging by the letter she issued earlier today he would have caused the release on bail and the non-deportation of 4,000 people a year. We were not told that his advice has been signed off by three eminent QCs, whereas the record of the Home Secretary’s officials and, in particular, her lawyers in this area is, to put it mildly, less than stellar.

We heard yet again from the Home Secretary about the supposed binding rule 39 injunctions when, as the Abu Hamza case showed, they are merely indications to the Government of the European Court’s view according to its rules of what might be in the interests of justice. They are not binding on the Court and it is the Home Secretary who decides that these people will not be deported. It is as if she has not even read the second leg of article 8, under which she is able to interfere in the operation of the right to a private life in the interests of national security, public safety and the prevention of crime. What else could be covered by a rule saying, “You cannot consider this”, when a crime has been so serious that the foreign national has been imprisoned for more than a year? Those people should be sent back and if we had agreed to the new clause tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton, they would be sent back. Because we ran out of time, and because the Home Secretary is not prepared to take on his far better ideas, the situation will, unfortunately, continue.

Leveson Inquiry

Mark Reckless Excerpts

Monday 3rd December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Damian Collins]

rose—

[Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (Con)]

rose—

[Chris Bryant]

I will give way to the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe, but I will not be able to give way to the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless).

[Chris Bryant]

External pressure comes from the public; it is not that politicians are desperate to write elements of any code of conduct for the press. Anybody who wants to characterise any argument in this House as being in favour of politicians wanting to tell newspapers what they can or cannot write does a disservice to the argument. To be fair, the hon. Gentleman was not doing that, but like the Secretary of State he was trying desperately to find an argument for supporting the Prime Minister. I gently suggest to the hon. Gentleman that on this point it might be better to leave that alone.

In truth, we have been here before. We could replace all those in this Chamber with those who were here in 1947 for the royal commission, or in 1962—[Interruption.] I am sure my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) was not here in 1947, although I think she was here last time around. In 1973 there was Sir Kenneth Younger’s committee on privacy, and 1974 saw the royal commission set up under Professor Oliver McGregor, who went on to chair the organisation that was set up. There were two Calcutt reports.

Fascinatingly, in our last round of discussions on 21 June 1990, David Waddington rose from the Government Benches and said:

“It is now up to the press to take up the challenge…presented to it. I am confident that the response will be a positive one.”—[Official Report, 21 June 1990; Vol. 174, c. 1126.]

And here we are all over again. If anything, it is slightly worse, because changes in the digital economy have made it possible for the media to do things that they could not possibly have done back in 1990 although they would doubtless have loved to.

Victims of crime have once again had their lives turned into a commodity. That is the real immorality here. Abigail Witchalls was a victim of crime. In April 2005 she was attacked, rendered paralysed from the neck downwards, and month after month the press decided to invade her privacy. Sometimes, there was perhaps a contravention of the law, such as when 20 journalists were camped out in her garden and refused to leave. Perhaps it was an invasion of privacy to take aerial photographs of the building being built in her parents’ garden to accommodate her. Perhaps she could have gone to the law, but why should someone have to go to law, which is a very expensive process, simply to have degree of privacy after having been a victim of crime?

My personal interest in this issue started because of what happened at Soham. Someone with whom I was at theological college, Tim Alban Jones, was the vicar of Soham, and his experience during that time was that the press would not leave the victims of crime alone. It is not just that the families of the two girls who were murdered had their phones hacked; every person in the village had their door knocked. People were turned into a commodity, and that is the problem.

Whole communities have been traduced. I referred earlier to Hillsborough. The families of 96 people who had lies written about them in The Sun did not have the opportunity to go to the law to find redress. It is not that criminality was involved; the information had not been secured illegally and there was no opportunity to seek claims for libel because the class of people was too large to be specific. No individuals had been named. Those who argue that everything dealt with in Leveson has been criminal activity that should have been better policed are missing the point.

We must bear in mind that the part of the Leveson inquiry published so far is just the dodgy stuff, not the criminal stuff. Lord Justice Leveson has had to circumvent the criminal stuff to ensure that prosecutions can go ahead unprejudiced and unhindered, including those on phone hacking, the suborning of police officers, conspiracy, cover-up and all the rest. Some worrying developments are still going on.

[Mark Reckless]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Chris Bryant]

I will not give way, if the hon. Gentleman does not mind.

The first worrying development is the lack of News International management standards committee co-operation with the Metropolitan police since May this year, which smacks of the Plimsoll strategy. As soon as the water starts lapping a little bit higher, senior News International and News Corporation management chuck somebody else overboard—a newspaper and an editor. The companies provided material on some of their journalists as long as they could ensure that the ship floated and the proprietor’s feet did not get wet. Given what Lord Leveson has said about management at News Corporation, I suspect that charges will be brought against senior directors, possibly including James and Rupert Murdoch as parts of the body corporate.

However, there is a mystery I do not understand. I understand—from two well placed people inside News International—that in 2005, The Sun and the New York Post, which are both News Corporation newspapers, paid a substantial sum to a serving member of the US armed forces in the US for a photograph of Saddam Hussein. A much larger amount was then paid via a specially set up account in the UK to that same member of the US armed forces. It is difficult to see how those who wrote the story in the UK and US, and the editors of the American newspaper and the British newspaper, could possibly pretend that they did not know how that material was obtained and that criminality was involved in the process of securing the photo. For that matter, they could not possibly pretend not to know that the laptop on which the information and the photograph were kept was destroyed; I believe it was destroyed so as to destroy the evidence of the criminality.

I therefore urge the management standards committee to provide all e-mails that relate to this matter—and particularly to the photograph of Saddam Hussein—from Rupert Murdoch to News International staff as a matter of urgency. Otherwise, people in this country will conclude that News International still does not get it, and that it is still refusing co-operate fully with the police.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mark Reckless]

(Rochester and Strood): This issue first came to my attention on 7 September 2010, at one of the first meetings of the Select Committee on Home Affairs that I attended. Into that meeting came the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) and the Assistant Metropolitan Police Commissioner, John Yates, following an article in The New York Times and an Adjournment debate that the hon. Gentleman had secured. Ever since then I have focused to a degree on the role of the prosecution authorities. I was struck by a quotation in The New York Times that said:

“A vast number of unique voicemail numbers belonging to high-profile individuals (politicians, celebrities) have been identified as being accessed without authority. These may be…subject of a wider investigation”.

That was in a file note of 30 May 2006, from Carmen Dowd, who was one of the top six people at the Crown Prosecution Service and running the case, to Lord Macdonald, then head of the CPS, and Lord Goldsmith, then Attorney-General. Ever since then I have asked myself, “Why was nothing done by the CPS about this issue?”

John Yates explained at that Committee meeting that, at least in his view, the Met investigation was limited throughout by the interpretation of the law given by the CPS. The issue is that section 1(1) of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 says:

“It shall be an offence for a person intentionally and without lawful authority to intercept, at any place in the United Kingdom, any communication in the course of its transmission”.

That appears to be the basis on which Carmen Dowd advised the police—as she clearly did throughout—that they needed to prove that the interception of the communication happened before the intended recipient picked up that communication or message. It appears that that high hurdle limited the police investigation, and the police have made much of that throughout.

However, if we look further, we see that section 2(7) of the 2000 Act says that

“the times while a communication is being transmitted…shall be taken to include any time when the system by means of which the communication is being, or has been, transmitted is used for storing it in a manner that enables the intended recipient to collect it or otherwise to have access to it.”

That provision, on the face of the legislation, clearly extends the period of transmission to include the time when a voicemail is being stored and the recipient might be ringing in, to listen either for the first time or repeatedly. I have therefore never really understood, like anyone else who has read the law properly, the basis of this narrow interpretation—there is a 2002 case involving NTL, but it related to an e-mail system that could not even store messages after they had been collected and it hardly takes precedence over what is so clearly on the face of the legislation.

Having heard Mr Yates and being aware of the Adjournment debate of the hon. Member for Rhondda and what he said subsequently, the Home Affairs Committee wrote to the then Director of Public Prosecutions, who wrote back to us in October 2010 saying that

“the approach…taken to section 1(1) of RIPA in the prosecution of Clive Goodman and Glen Mulcaire”

was that

“to prove the criminal offence of interception the prosecution must prove that the actual message was intercepted prior to it being accessed by the intended recipient…David Perry QC had approached the case on that basis at the time.”

That is why we see, with the royal household, there was a sting operation, in order to prove that the messages were being intercepted prior to the intended recipient picking them up—by telling the intended recipient not to pick them up until the police had checked whether the suspects had intercepted it.

We then have a series of pieces of evidence—we have 170 pages in the report on the CPS, on the police and on all how these issues went. I do not believe that there will be a part two to this inquiry. Frankly, I think that is partly why Leveson has gone as far as he has—by including those 170 pages—and, subject to the criminal prosecutions, given as much information as he has been able to. I have been tabbing up the areas in the report where it seems that that narrow interpretation of the law was given and sustained by the CPS and David Perry QC.

[Chris Bryant]

But it is also clear that the police and the Crown Prosecution Service, in the charges presented against Mulcaire and Goodman, never relied on whether the messages had been intercepted before the intended recipient saw them, so I am not convinced—as Lord Justice Leveson is not convinced—of that argument.

[Mark Reckless]

As Lord Justice Leveson says, the July 2009 review by the DPP was not assisted by the failure to examine witness statements and exhibits from the prosecution. I asked the CPS for the witness statements from prosecution and it did not provide them, so I had to submit a freedom of information request, and it still has not provided them. However, I spoke earlier to my right hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes), who was clear. He said that when he was one of the victims—in counts 16 to 20 of the indictment—a police key focus in interviewing and preparing his witness statement was on whether those messages had been listened to before he picked them up. He gave clear evidence to them, saying that he went into his voicemail and discovered that a number of those messages had already been listened to by someone else before he picked them up. That is partly why he felt he was picked: in order to give proof on the narrow basis of the legal advice that the CPS clearly—and, I believe, David Perry—was saying the police had to follow.

We also have the conference on 21 August 2006. The only proper, full note of that seems to have been taken by the police—Detective Chief Superintendent Williams, in charge of the investigation, is clear that the narrow interpretation was given. We also can say that, at most, the advice was nuanced. Carmen Dowd, who was from the CPS and who had throughout taken the narrow view, was actually in that meeting. David Perry was there, and although he was not contradicting the advice given by his instructing solicitor throughout, even on his own evidence he said it was tenable to take either the wide or the narrow view—despite the legislation being clear.

David Perry has another problem. He prepared a note on 14 July saying:

“We did enquire of the police at a conference whether there was any evidence that the editor of the News of the World was involved in the Goodman-Mulcaire offences. We were told that there was not (and we never saw any such evidence). We also enquired whether there was any evidence connecting Mulcaire to other News of the World journalists. Again, we were told that there was not (and we never saw any such evidence.”

The Director of Public Prosecutions said that David Perry had given him a personal assurance in a face-to-face meeting that that was the case, and that he clearly recalled saying those things. However, when Mr Perry gave evidence under oath to the Leveson inquiry, he said:

“I don’t think I would like to say that I necessarily expressed it in precisely those terms, but I was concerned to discover whether this went further than just the particular individuals with which we were concerned and I think I was conscious in my own mind that the question had to be whether it was journalists to the extent of the editor.”

That was much weaker than the assurance that had previously been given to the Director of Public Prosecutions.

Leveson suggests that David Perry might have said that in July 2009 because he was advising in a rush overnight, but the fact is that the DPP showed—or it was shown on the DPP’s behalf—and that his draft letter to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee was put before David Perry on 30 July, and he again confirmed that the narrow interpretation had been made. That letter was then supplied to the CMS Committee and used again to inform the DPP’s commitment to the Home Affairs Committee in October 2010. So that was then a question of misleading Parliament. On 3 November, junior counsel repeated that same basis when looking at the DPP’s letter and going to reconfirm this to the Committee once more.

Given all these issues, Clarke in charge of this said that the uncertainty of the legal advice limited the investigation, and that we have to give credit.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Hanson]

I think that the hon. Gentleman, who has dipped in and out of today’s debate, will know that my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition has said that he wants action urgently. He wants action by Christmas; he wants action in the next few weeks. I too want to see statutory underpinning of Leveson’s recommendations as a matter of urgency, and I hope that we can achieve consensus. When the hon. Gentleman—who has not been present for the whole debate—reads Hansard, he will see that his hon. Friend the Member for South Swindon, his hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough and others have supported some of Leveson’s recommendations.

I accept that there are concerns about state regulation. In a letter to me, the editor of my own regional newspaper, the Daily Post, said:

“I am strongly opposed to statutory regulation of the press.”

However, I say to that newspaper editor, and to others who share her view, that we need to consider what that means. In his summary of recommendations, Lord Leveson says:

“An independent self regulatory body should be governed by an independent Board”.

Is that state regulation of the press? He continues:

“The appointment panel… should be appointed”

in a “fair and open way” with “an independent process”. Is that state regulation? No. He continues:

“Funding for the system should be settled in agreement between the industry and the Board, taking into account the cost”.

Is that state regulation? No. The code and the board should

“subscribe to an adequate and speedy complaint handling mechanism”.

Is that state regulation? No.

“The Board should not have the power to prevent publication of any material, by anyone”.

Is that state regulation or censorship? No, it is not. It is, by statute, the underpinning of a voluntary agreement between the press and the state in relation to regulation of those areas. It is no different, dare I say it, from the legal services body that was set up by statute to look at solicitors, or the Judicial Appointments Commission, which was set up by statute to appoint judges, or the General Medical Council, which was set up by statute to be the independent regulator of doctors, or Ofcom itself, or the Advertising Standards Authority. All those were established by Parliament, and they are all independent of Government and Parliament, but they all fulfil a regulatory role across the board. Those matters are important. We need to have that independence, and we need to underpin it with statutory regulation.

As the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice will be winding up for the Government and I am the shadow Police Minister, it is important to place it on record that Leveson’s recommendations are important in respect of policing. I believe we can do more, but it is right that the term “off the record briefing” should be discontinued. It is right that all senior police officers should record their contacts with the media for the sake of transparency and for audit purposes. It is right that there should be guidance to police officers on who can speak to the press and when. It is right that we should have an audit of who uses the police national computer and when. It is also right in respect of the police that we should examine guidance and spell out the dangers of hospitality, gifts and entertainment.

[Mark Reckless]

The police have been traduced in this matter by a number of commentators, including Members of this House. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that it is good that Leveson has given such a positive report on the police, certainly in terms of the initial investigation, although there were problems later with not reopening it?

[Mr Hanson]

Lord Leveson has done so in terms of the initial investigation. There are further elements to come in part two, however, and we will learn what he says about them. He has recommended certain measures, and I hope the Government will accept them in due course.

The Government must not only examine what the Opposition have said, but take on board the comments of Members from the Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru, the Democratic Unionist party, the Social Democratic and Labour party and, last but not least, their own Conservative Members. They have strongly said right across the board that the Prime Minister should act on the Leveson challenge. Failure to do so will show that the Prime Minister is looking for good headlines, but he will ultimately be on the wrong side of the argument.

For the victims of these terrible intrusions, there can only be one outcome, and that has been put very ably by Members of all parties this evening. The long grass is not an option. The Prime Minister has said he is not convinced of the need for statutory underpinning, but the majority of this House has said tonight it is in favour of statutory underpinning of Leveson’s recommendations. The Prime Minister must act. I hope the Government will reflect on what has been said tonight, and on the comments of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham and my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition. They must continue to work on a draft Bill and bring one forward before Christmas. If they do not, the Opposition will give all Members of this House the opportunity to give their opinion early in the new year.

Policing

Mark Reckless Excerpts

Wednesday 24th October 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) and we will all want to associate ourselves with his remarks about Greater Manchester police and, in particular, the tragic recent events in his borough.

This summer, during the Olympics, we heard very often about the armed forces and how they stepped in at short notice, but many police officers also stepped in at short notice and had their summer holidays cancelled for the second time, having been called in for the riots the previous year. We should pay tribute to the work they do with very little publicity.

I also welcome this debate. Those on the Opposition Front Bench have moved quite a way since I made my maiden speech on this subject. At that point, Labour appeared to me to be against elections full stop. The party that I had thought took its democratic instincts from the Chartists and the Levellers had become the party of the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Association of Police Authorities. That position has changed gradually and the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) suggested the direct election of police authority chairs, which would of course be as expensive as the direct election of police commissioners.

Initially, the line—I think this came from the APA—was that we should not have those elections because they cost money and that democracy was bad because it was expensive. The line has changed once again with this motion, however, and it seems that Labour Front Benchers object not to the principle or even to the cost of elections but to the cost of holding additional elections in November rather than May. At least some of us on the blue side of the House would have some sympathy with that view. I also congratulate the Labour party on putting up twice as many candidates in the election as our coalition partners.

In due course, these directly elected individuals will be entrenched as the figure of authority to whom members of their local community believe that they can go and through whom they can make a difference to their police. We did not have that in the past; we had anonymous police authorities and very little changed. I was delighted to hear from the hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy); the image of her policing a football match on horseback is very striking. She would be the perfect candidate for the enhanced specials that Craig Mackinlay, our candidate in Kent, is campaigning to introduce after the elections on 15 November.

We need a single figure who is accountable, who can set policy, who can reflect what the public want and who can ensure that policing, like other democratically accountable public services, delivers on the ground what the people in the area have the right to expect. We need to move on from a system under which national policing policy was set not so much by the Home Office but by an entirely unaccountable and private company, of which Sir Norman Bettison was vice-president until earlier today—that is, ACPO. I am afraid to say that ACPO is fighting something of a rearguard action against the Government’s proposed changes. We recently heard that Sir Hugh Orde believes that it needs to carry on. He thinks that it could be renamed the police leadership executive board—PLEB. That was an unfortunate suggestion by Sir Hugh.

The principle is that policy should be set by people who are elected and accountable. Each chief constable should report to their police and crime commissioner, who is elected. To the extent that there is national policy, we look to the Home Office, to Ministers and to the Home Secretary to set it, through the National Crime Agency where appropriate. We will also look to the professional body for policing—the college—that is about to be introduced. Half that body’s leadership will be civilian to ensure that it is properly accountable and reflects public desires and so that a group of senior officers do not go off on their own and try to carve up senior appointments, as recently happened—I believe—in the case of the head of the UK Border Force. I am glad that the Home Secretary has put a stop to that and that there will be a proper process.

Once we have elected police and crime commissioners, it will not be Buggins’s turn and ACPO will not be making the decisions. People with a democratic mandate will set policing policy in our country on behalf of the public. I hope and believe that that can now be welcomed on both sides of the House.

Undercover Policing

Mark Reckless Excerpts

Wednesday 13th June 2012 Westminster Hall

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

It is a pleasure to hold this debate under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I am very grateful for the opportunity to raise the issue of the rules governing undercover police infiltrators and informers.

I am sure the House will agree that when it comes to the deployment of undercover police officers, transparency and accountability are of the utmost importance. In recent months, however, a number of cases have come to light that seem to expose serious abuses of any guidelines that we might reasonably assume inform what police officers working undercover can and cannot do. The cases raise important questions about whether such guidelines are ever enforced, whether individuals who breach them are properly held to account, and the extent to which infiltration of campaign groups is a legitimate, or even effective, tactic. Also, I have details of new allegations relating to the behaviour of one undercover officer that I believe require immediate investigation and raise questions about the convictions of two individuals.

Since at least the 1968 protests against the Vietnam war, police chiefs, backed by successive Governments, have used the tactic of infiltration to secure more reliable intelligence about political demonstrations than could be provided by informants. Undercover police officers pose as political activists over several years, to gather reliable intelligence and perhaps disrupt campaigners’ activities. In the early days, such officers were part of a super-secret unit within special branch, called the special demonstration squad; more recently they have been under a second unit, the national public order intelligence unit.

Up to nine undercover officers have been unmasked following the exposure of Mark Kennedy in late 2010. I will say more about his case later, but the officers include Bob Lambert, know by the alias Bob Robinson. That officer pretended to be a committed environmental and animal rights campaigner between 1984 and 1988. By the summer of 1987, he had successfully infiltrated the Animal Liberation Front, a group that operated through a tightly organised underground network of small cells of activists, making it difficult to penetrate. In October 2011, after he was exposed as an undercover officer, Bob Lambert admitted:

“In the 1980s I was deployed as an undercover Met special branch officer to identify and prosecute members of Animal Liberation Front who were then engaged in incendiary device and explosive device campaigns against targets in the vivisection, meat and fur trades.”

Lambert has also admitted that part of his mission was to identify and prosecute specific ALF activists:

“I succeeded in my task and that success included the arrest and imprisonment of Geoff Sheppard and Andrew Clarke.”

The men Lambert referred to were ALF activists who were found guilty of planting incendiary devices in two Debenhams stores. Allegations about exactly what kind of role Lambert might have played in their convictions have come to light only recently.

In July 1987, three branches of Debenhams, in Luton, Romford and Harrow, were targeted by the ALF in co-ordinated, simultaneous incendiary attacks, because the shops sold fur products. Sheppard and Clarke were tried and found guilty, but the culprit who planted the incendiary device in the Harrow store was never caught. Bob Lambert’s exposure as an undercover police officer has prompted Geoff Sheppard to speak out about the Harrow attack. He alleges that Lambert was the one who planted the third device and that he was involved in the ALF’s co-ordinated campaign. Sheppard has made a statement, which I have seen, in which he says:

“Obviously I was not there when he targeted that store because we all headed off in our separate directions but I was lying in bed that night, and the news came over on the World Service that three Debenhams stores had had arson attacks on them and that included the Harrow store as well. So obviously I straightaway knew that Bob had carried out his part of the plan. There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind whatsoever that Bob Lambert placed the incendiary device at the Debenhams store in Harrow. I specifically remember him giving an explanation to me about how he had been able to place one of the devices in that store, but how he had not been able to place the second device.”

In the same interview, Sheppard says that two months after the three Debenhams stores were set on fire, he and another person were in his flat making four more fire bombs when they were raided by police. Sheppard alleges that the intelligence for the raid was so precise that it is now obvious that it “came from Bob Lambert”. Lambert knew that the pair were going to be there making another set of incendiary devices.

Sheppard was jailed for four years and four months, and Clarke for more than three years. For Lambert, it was a case of job done—in fact, so well had he manipulated the situation that he even visited Sheppard in prison, to give him support before disappearing abroad. Until recently Sheppard had no reason whatever to suspect the man he knew as Bob Robinson—he assumed that Robinson had got away with it, fled the country and built a new life.

It seems that planting the third incendiary device might have been a move designed to bolster Lambert’s credibility and reinforce the impression of a genuine and dedicated activist. He successfully went on to gain the precise intelligence that led to the arrest of Sheppard and Clarke, without anyone suspecting that the tip-off came from him, but is that really the way we want our police officers to behave?

The case raises new questions about the rules governing undercover police infiltrators and informers, particularly when it comes to those officers committing a crime—an area in which the law is especially grey. Police chiefs can authorise undercover officers to participate in criminal acts to gain the trust of the groups they are trying to infiltrate and, in theory, to detect or prevent a more serious crime, but usually they are not allowed to be involved in planning or instigating the crime. As I understand it, the specific law on that is the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, and that before its enactment, at the time of the Debenhams attacks, the rules were vague. They have not so far been made public.

If Sheppard’s allegations are true, someone must have authorised Lambert to plant incendiary devices at the Harrow store, and presumably that same person may also have given the officer guidance on just how far he needed to go to establish his credibility with the ALF. We simply do not know, and in the absence of any proper framework or rules, the task of holding Lambert to account is very difficult. Even if strict protocols are in place to try to control the actions of undercover officers, who decides what the protocols say, and how can we hold those people to account, given the secrecy that surrounds such activities?

[Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (Con)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Caroline Lucas]

Yes, but very briefly, as I am short of time.

[Mark Reckless]

Is not an alternative explanation that there were no protocols in place and that decisions were taken at the discretion of this officer, who was not properly controlled? To the extent that there were protocols, is it not clear that the guidance for undercover officers was coming from the Association of Chief Police Officers, which is an entirely unaccountable organisation?

[Caroline Lucas]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. The truth is that we simply do not know, and that is the problem. We need clarity, which is what I hope the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice can help us with later.

There is no doubt in my mind that anyone planting an incendiary device in a department store is guilty of a very serious crime and should have charges brought against them. That means absolutely anyone, including, if the evidence is there, Bob Lambert, or, indeed, the people who were supervising him.

Ironically, as we have seen, the use of undercover police infiltrators can make it much more difficult to secure successful convictions. Three Court of Appeal judges have overturned the convictions of 20 environmental protestors, ruling that crucial evidence recorded by an undercover officer, Mark Kennedy, operating under the false name of Mark Stone, was withheld from the original trial. The judges said that they had seen evidence that appeared to show that Kennedy was

“involved in activities that went further than the authorisation he was given”,

and that he was “arguably, an agent provocateur.” The latest allegations concerning Bob Lambert and the planting of incendiary devices prompt us to ask: has another undercover police officer crossed the line into acting as an agent provocateur, and how many other police spies have been encouraging protestors to commit crimes?

Mark Kennedy’s exposure in 2010 has shone a light on how officers behave when they go undercover, and especially on the rules governing whether they are permitted to form intimate relationships with those on whom they are spying. Jon Murphy, Chief Constable of Merseyside and the police chiefs’ spokesman on the issue, claims that that is “grossly unprofessional” and “never acceptable”, yet one undercover police officer, Pete Black, claims that superiors knew officers had developed sexual relationships with protestors to give credibility to their cover stories and help gather evidence.

Eight women who say that they were duped into forming long-term loving relationships with undercover policemen have started a legal action against the police. They have a copy of a letter from a Metropolitan police solicitor that asserts that the forming of personal and other relationships by a “covert human intelligence source” to obtain information is permitted and lawful under RIPA, so either rogue undercover officers have been breaking the rules set by senior officers, or senior officers have misled the public by saying that such relationships are forbidden. We need to know what the truth is, and we need any rules of engagement to be published and open to public and parliamentary scrutiny or challenge.

The eight women allege that the men’s actions constitute a breach of articles 3 and 8 of the European convention on human rights. Article 3 asserts that no one shall be subject to inhuman or degrading treatment, and article 8 grants respect for private and family life, including the right to form relationships without unjustified interference by the state. The women go on to allege that the actions amount to common law tortious acts of deceit, misfeasance in public office and assault.

Bob Lambert is one of the five men named in the legal action, as is Mark Kennedy. The Guardian has also reported that Bob Lambert secretly fathered a child with a political campaigner whom he had been sent to spy on, and later disappeared completely from the life of the child, concealing his true identity from the child’s mother for many years. Lambert has admitted having had a long-term relationship with a second woman to bolster his credibility as a committed campaigner, and he subsequently went on to head the special demonstration squad and mentor other undercover officers who formed deceitful relationships with women.

The police authorities have made virtually no attempt to hold those or other men to account, or to examine whether they have broken any rules on relationships when undercover. The solicitors instructed by the Metropolitan police have taken a totally obstructive approach to the litigation, threatening to strike out the claims as having no foundation. Furthermore, police solicitors argue that cases can be heard only by the investigatory powers tribunal, in secret—a move that would prevent the women, whose privacy was invaded in the most intrusive manner imaginable, from hearing the evidence, such as the extent to which intimate moments were reported back to police chiefs. It seems that the police do not want anyone to be able to challenge their version of events or to scrutinise their actions. To paraphrase one of the women involved, it is incredible that in most circumstances the police need permission to search someone’s house, but if they want to send in an agent who may sleep and live with activists in their homes, that can happen without any apparent oversight.

The rules governing undercover police infiltrators and informers are also remarkably deficient when it comes to giving false evidence in court to protect a secret identity. For example, Jim Boyling, who was exposed last year for infiltrating groups such as Reclaim the Streets using the pseudonym Jim Sutton, concealed his true identity from a court when he was prosecuted alongside a group of protestors for occupying a Government building during a demonstration. It is alleged that from the moment Boyling was arrested, he gave a false name and occupation, maintaining this fiction throughout the entire prosecution, even when he gave evidence to barristers under oath.

Boyling was reported to have been present at sensitive discussions between other activists and their lawyers to decide how they would defend themselves in court, undermining the fundamental right of the activists to hold legally protected consultations with a lawyer and illicitly obtaining details of private discussions. A lawyer representing activists who were charged alongside Jim Boyling has noted:

“This case raises the most fundamental constitutional issues about the limits of acceptable policing, the sanctity of lawyer-client confidentiality, and the integrity of the criminal justice system. At first sight, it seems that the police have wildly overstepped all recognised boundaries.”

Yet Boyling’s actions may well have been authorised. Pete Black, who worked with Boyling in the same covert unit penetrating political campaigns, said that the case was not unique and that, from time to time, prosecutions were allowed to go ahead to build up credibility with the activists being infiltrated.

The Metropolitan commissioner, Bernard Hogan-Howe, has defended undercover officers’ use of fake identities in court, claiming that there is no specific law that forbids it. However, I echo the concerns of Lord Macdonald, the former Director of Public Prosecutions, who said that Hogan-Howe’s defence was “stunning and worrying”. He commented that

“at the very least, the senior officers who are sending these undercover PCs into court to give evidence in this way are putting them at serious risk of straying into perjury.”

Bob Lambert, Mark Kennedy and Jim Boyling, as well as two other officers named in current legal actions against the police, John Barker and Mark Cassidy, have all crossed a line. Similarly, other undercover police officers may well have crossed such a line. The assumption is that they have been authorised and instructed to do so, or at least, if that is not specifically the case, that a blind eye has been turned to some of their actions.

Activists who have been infiltrated have called for one overarching, full public inquiry to examine what has gone on. Lord Macdonald has also called for such an inquiry to consider how we should control undercover operations, but the Government have ignored calls to set one up. Instead, the authorities have set up 12 different inquiries since January 2011, each held in secret and looking at only one small aspect of an undercover operation. Those inquiries have not been particularly thorough and have not resulted in follow-up action. For example, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC, ordered an investigation and report on allegations that the Crown Prosecution Service suppressed vital evidence in the case of the Ratcliffe-on-Soar environmental protestors. A key criticism of the CPS in that report is of the

“failures, over many months and at more than one level, by the police and the CPS.”

Nick Paul, the senior CPS lawyer who specialises in cases involving police misconduct, was not even interviewed as part of the investigation, and senior CPS staff have evaded disciplinary action. The CPS shows an ongoing reluctance to investigate past possible miscarriages of justice, and Keir Starmer is among those resisting calls for a more far-reaching inquiry.

The new allegations that I have raised today make the case for a public inquiry even more compelling. So many questions remain unanswered, including whether Bob Lambert planted the third incendiary device and, if he did, who authorised him to do so and why. More widely, the public have a right to know why money is being spent on infiltrating campaign groups, with no apparent external oversight of the decision to infiltrate or of whether the methods used are necessary or proportionate. Why are the rules on such practices open to such abuse? Why are high-ranking police officers and, presumably, politicians sanctioning operations that put police officers at risk and undermine basic human rights?

We need to have faith that police officers are beyond reproach, that robust procedures are in place to deal with any transgressions and that those making decisions about the deployment of police officers are accountable and subject to proper scrutiny. I hope the Minister will take this opportunity to review the various concerns I have raised, and that he can tell us that the Government will agree to set up a far-reaching public inquiry into undercover police infiltrators and informers, which will look back over past practices as well as look forward.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mark Reckless]

Will the Minister clarify whether RIPA also applies to ACPO’s responsibility for an undercover officer and its status as a private company? Moreover, did ACPO have any involvement in the Lambert case, or did it become involved only in later operations?

[Nick Herbert]

I will clarify that point later, but my understanding is that the accountability lies with chief constables, not ACPO. I am aware of and share my hon. Friend’s concern about ACPO and its status. I hope and believe that it will be addressed, but if there is anything further to say about the matter, I will write to him.

[Mark Reckless]

I am thinking in particular of the environmental protests at Ratcliffe-on-Soar, where it emerged that ACPO was responsible for the management of undercover officers. I am delighted that, since then, Ministers have ensured the transfer of the powers involved to the Metropolitan police.

[Nick Herbert]

My hon. Friend is correct about the responsible unit, and that important change has enhanced accountability.

RIPA applies to each of the instances that I have mentioned, because the true nature of the relationship, which involves reporting back covertly to a public authority what has been said or done, is hidden from the other person or people being talked to. In every case, RIPA requires that authorisation is given only if it is necessary and proportionate. RIPA sets out who can make a decision to deploy a covert source and for what purpose the deployment might be made. RIPA codes of practice provide practical guidance on how best to apply the regulatory framework and how to observe the human rights principles behind authorisations. External oversight and inspection are provided by the chief surveillance commissioner, and independent right of redress is provided by an investigatory tribunal for anyone who believes that they have been treated unlawfully.

That is the system, which was not in place when Lambert was deployed, but does it work? The published annual reports of the chief surveillance commissioner indicate that, in the main, it does, but that has not always been the case. That was shown graphically by the independent report produced by Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary earlier this year on the deployment of undercover police officer Mark Kennedy. It showed that there had been failings in the application of the existing system and safeguards, but it went further by making a number of recommendations for ACPO to strengthen both internal review and external quality assurance of undercover officers deployed against domestic extremism. It also invited the Home Secretary to consider the arrangements for authorising the undercover police operations that present the most significant risks of intrusion. In particular, it proposed raising the internal level of police authorisations for the long-term deployments of undercover police officers under RIPA, and establishing independent, external prior approval by the chief surveillance commissioner for long-term deployments of undercover police officers.

The Home Secretary welcomed the HMIC report, and since its publication the Home Office has been working with the inspectorate, ACPO, the chief surveillance commissioner and others on how best to implement its recommendations.