Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Mark Tami Excerpts

Monday 12th September 2011 Commons Chamber

[Nick Herbert]

I do not accept that there is a muddle. The right hon. Gentleman will know that it was the previous Government who set up the current governance arrangements in London. The Metropolitan police have national policing responsibilities and therefore answer in part to the Home Secretary, which makes them unique. However, the reforms in London to give greater local accountability have been popular with the public, and it is that principle that we seek to extend. Indeed, the principle of having one accountable individual directly responsible for the totality of force activity is crucial to the Government’s vision. Policing governance by committee has led to an unelected body having power over the precept, with no one being properly held to account for decisions or poor performance and no one truly being in charge.

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

The Minister states that this whole idea is popular. What does he base that on, because all the information I have seen indicates that the public do not want this?

[Nick Herbert]

If the hon. Gentleman had been paying attention, he would know that I was talking about the popularity of the reform that his Government introduced —the introduction of the Mayor of London. Evidence from opinion polls shows that a large majority of the public welcome the idea of enhanced local accountability for policing.

The public have not had a voice. As the shadow policing Minister, the hon. Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker), has pointed out:

“Under the current system, 93 per cent of the country has no direct, elected representation.”

Indeed, only 7% of wards in England and Wales are represented on a police authority, so it is no surprise that only 7% of the public understand that they can approach their police authority if they are dissatisfied with policing. Most people have no clue who their police authority chair is. How can a body be an effective link between the police and the people if it is invisible to the people? I agree with the former policing Minister, who said that people must “know who to go to” and be

“able to influence their policing through the ballot box.”

That was the hon. Member for Gedling.

Some say that this visibility does not matter and, provided that a wise committee takes the right decisions, there is no need to refer to the people. That is the argument that favours rule by quangos over democratic decision making. The defenders of the current system of governance say that it works well, but I am afraid that I disagree. Only four of the 22 inspected police authorities were assessed by Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary and the Audit Commission as performing well in their most critical functions. I understand why police authorities oppose their own abolition, but there are few who believe that the authorities can remain in their current form. Even the Opposition do not share that view.

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[Nick Herbert]

I will come to that immediately. There will be a one-off additional cost for holding the elections in November next year, rather than in May, and the cost will indeed increase: it will increase from 0.1% of police spend to 0.15%, and then it will go back down to 0.1% again. So, this is apparently the full weight of the Opposition’s argument: a delay in holding an election will temporarily cost 0.05% of police spend. That is a risible case.

[Mark Tami]

But why is there a delay? The whole House knows why: it is because the Liberal Democrats do not want the elections on that day—despite the fact that the Liberal Democrat leader has previously said that the electorate are perfectly capable of understanding different elections on the same day.

[Nick Herbert]

Hon. Members have spent their whole time trying either to stop the reform or to delay it, and now, when an introduction is delayed for a few months, they apparently do not want that, either.

The central point is that, in any case, the cost of elections is not going to come from police budgets. It is just nonsense to claim that the money for elections could instead be spent on police officers. That is a poor argument. It ill behoves an elected politician to complain about the cost of democracy. It was Labour that made the police more accountable to a new Mayor of London. The referendum itself cost £3 million to conduct, and the elections still cost £18 million every four years. Did Labour then say that this money could be better spent on police officers? No, of course not. If greater democratic accountability is a price worth paying in London for a quarter of all policing, why not in the rest of the country?

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[Nick Herbert]

I am sorry to disappoint the right hon. Gentleman, but I am not going to make an announcement before it is confirmed to me that the name has been formally announced.

To prevent too much power from being vested in a single individual, we are putting in place strict checks and balances. This is an important part of the argument. The checks and balances include local police and crime panels with representatives from each local authority and independent members, which will have the power to scrutinise the commissioner’s actions. District councils will have a stake in police governance for the first time. They do not currently have that position in police authorities. The panels will have teeth. They will have the power of veto over excessive precepts and the appointment of chief constables, and they will have the weapon of transparency.

We have listened to concerns and have strengthened the safeguards in the other place. I will go into the detail of those changes when we discuss them later. However, I want to highlight three important areas where we have listened, not least to the professional advice of senior police officers, and acted. First, in response to the point made by the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee on the operational independence of the police, it is fundamental to the British system that the police remain operationally independent. No politician can tell a constable—a sworn officer of the Crown—who to arrest. Forces will continue to be under the legal direction and control of their chief constable. There is no change in those legal arrangements.

Since the Bill left this House, the Government have published a draft protocol that clearly sets out the roles of the chief constable and the police and crime commissioner, and how they and the other actors, including the police and crime panel, will interact. We did that partly in response to the recommendation of the Home Affairs Committee. Senior chief constables, including senior leaders of the Metropolitan police, welcomed the publication of the draft protocol. They have said that it provides clear direction on the future roles of chief constables, police and crime commissioners and the Home Secretary, and that it ensures the balance between operational independence and appropriate public accountability. I agree with chief constables that we must include in the protocol the fact that the police and crime commissioner must set the strategic direction and objectives of the force and decide the budget of the force, while being clear that chief constables remain operationally independent.

We also amended the Bill in the other place to make it a statutory requirement for the Home Secretary to issue the protocol. This work is not over. We will continue to work closely with the Association of Chief Police Officers and others to ensure that the protocol covers all the necessary issues in the necessary depth. It is vital that we get this right. We have made tangible progress in ensuring that the operational independence of police officers will be protected under this Bill.

[Mark Tami]

rose—

[Nick Herbert]

I give way one last time to the hon. Gentleman.

[Mark Tami]

Does the Minister not accept that somebody standing in an election may well have a programme that will impact on operational independence? Does he not recognise that there could be such a clash?

[Nick Herbert]

The protocol is intended to govern the relationship and it will be issued by the Home Secretary. The legal control and direction of the force will remain, as I said, with the chief constable. The protocol describes the appropriate legal arrangements. I have no doubt that, as we have seen in London, those who stand for election will understand that.

Secondly, we will ensure that policing in this country is able to deal with national threats. It has been suggested that police and crime commissioners will be focused on local issues to the exclusion of those that require a strategic response, making them too parochial. I disagree. PCCs will be responsible and accountable to the public for the totality of policing. However, the fight against terrorism and against serious and organised crime is an area in which the central Government have a legitimate role.

The new national crime agency, working with police forces, will transform the fight against organised crime. The Home Secretary will issue a strategic policing requirement, which will guide forces on their responsibilities for serious and cross-boundary policing challenges such as terrorism, organised crime, public order and responding to major incidents and emergencies. Police and crime commissioners and chief constables will be under strong duties to have regard to that requirement. This is not about addressing a problem created by the introduction of police and crime commissioners. The strategic policing requirement, alongside the national crime agency, is a critical refocusing of the Government’s role to address an existing set of policing challenges for which the response to date has been lacking. We continue to work closely with the police service to ensure that that happens. The passing of the Bill will by no means be the end of the conversation, but let me be clear: ensuring that police forces can continue to deliver on national and strategic issues, and meet national threats, remains a priority for me and for this Government.

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[Vernon Coaker]

I do not think there has ever been any disagreement, either in Committee or in any of our other debates on police governance, about the need to make police authorities more visible and find ways of helping them to work more successfully in their neighbourhoods. That has never been in doubt. However, people have certain concerns relating to the introduction of direct elections—whether using the model involving a directly elected police authority, or the one involving a directly elected individual—and I will discuss those worries in due course.

The Minister has failed to provide the House with the evidence for why the Government are taking forward these reforms. He says that there is support for them, but he has failed to put any evidence for that before the House. Let us look at the detail of the Bill. Interestingly, when the Minister argues against the points that have been made on this matter, he simply says that people are wrong, and that he does not agree with them. However, we all know that there are serious issues involved that need to be addressed. He and the Liberal Democrats might have sorted out a way of getting the Bill through, but that does not negate the real concerns that were mentioned by Members on both sides in Committee and that have been mentioned again since.

The Minister says that there is no way in which a police and crime commissioner would be able to influence a chief constable or interfere with the operational independence of the police. He dismisses the politicisation argument with a sweep of his hand, but he knows that real concerns have been expressed about operational independence and politicisation. It is worth repeating some of the points that have been made. Let us imagine that, if the Bill is passed, an election will take place at some time in the distant future, perhaps on 15 November 2012 or on the first Thursday in May 2013. What are the manifesto commitments that the candidates for police and crime commissioner are going to stand on? They are not going to stand on the promise of a better counter-terrorism policy or a decent fraud policy for the pensioners of their area. What they are going to stand on is something like, “We want to see police stations kept open in our community,” or “We want to see more visible police officers going up and down our streets every single day.” That is the sort of manifesto on which police and crime commissioners will stand.

By putting these provisions back into the Bill, the Minister makes it difficult for us to believe that there will not be a conflict between someone elected on a manifesto like that and a chief constable who says, “Hang on a minute. I don’t think that is the right policing priority for this area. The right policing priority for this area is not having police in that neighbourhood. My professional judgment says that they should be placed here, and there. I am going to take some officers from their duty in that neighbourhood and put them into a domestic or sexual violence unit or a fraud unit. These will be front-line officers, but not in the sense of being visible uniformed officers on the street.”

[Mark Tami]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Vernon Coaker]

I said that I would give way to the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Mr Burley) first.

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[Vernon Coaker]

Because the person will have a specific local democratic mandate and will have been elected on certain pledges, it is different from a Prime Minister or other national politicians responding to a problem that has arisen and working with the police to try to deal with it. The context is totally different.

[Mark Tami]

Before my hon. Friend moves away from specialist units, their work is very important, but the general public might not see what those officers are doing in the local area. Such units are often set up because of the failings of traditional policing after tragic events like the Soham murders or other instances when the police forces might have failed to work effectively together.

[Vernon Coaker]

That is the point I am making. Front-line officers are not just uniformed officers visible on the street; they might include officers in the specialist units to which my hon. Friend refers. I agree that they are particularly important.

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Members on both sides of the House are guilty of bandying about statistics as if they were the only thing that matters. Perhaps we could be a little more circumspect when talking about the numbers of officers on the front line. That can have a very demoralising effect on those officers who provide a fantastic service across Britain and yet somehow feel that they are becoming the subject of criticism when we mention a figure of 12% for the front line. I think it behoves the Government—dare I say it—and Opposition Members to ensure that the statistics we use are meaningful and contextualised, rather than just used in throwaway comments, which can have a pretty debilitating effect on forces attempting to do difficult jobs in difficult circumstances. I am constantly concerned about how it sounds when we dismiss the role of back-office police staff.

[Mark Tami]

There are constant attacks on the back office, or the middle—a term introduced today—as if these people sit around doing nothing. I do not know what they do, but that is the image that the Government are trying to put across, as if we can sweep all those people away and service will be unaffected.

[Simon Hart]

I certainly do not think that that is the Government’s position. It might be the position taken by some of the media, but I do not believe for one minute that the Government are attempting to underplay the importance of some of those jobs. I just think that sometimes, in the interpretation, we attach less value to the back office than we do to the front line. That seems to be an interpretation of the tone in which Members from both sides of the House sometimes speak. For those doing vital back-office intelligence jobs, or even those providing relatively mundane services to support front-line officers, that can have a very debilitating effect. I think that the packaging, tone and messaging of this kind of debate is an area where we owe the recipients rather more care than perhaps we have been able to provide so far.

A police officer said to me only this morning that the House is sometimes guilty of basing this argument purely on efficiency. The expression “We’re all in it together” sometimes triggers a groan from Opposition Members, but for many officers who are looking with a pretty uncertain eye at what the future might hold for them and their families, it would be more helpful if we were to say that what is happening is part of rectifying a wider economic issue than we have perhaps been able to stress so far. I also think that there has been a fixation—I try to be balanced about these things, but Opposition Members sometimes test the patience of all of us, and on this particular point a little too far—that somehow there is always a correlation between police numbers and police efficiency. Whatever survey or piece of evidence we tend to look at these days, there is an increasing amount of information, which should enable us to come to the view that the two things are not always connected. They are some of the time, but the idea that an efficient police force is a big police force is a myth that this debate has to some extent helped to dispel.

In public opinion terms, however, we have to go quite a lot further, because that idea leads, unfortunately, to a problem whereby the public have confidence in their police force only so long as it is a bigger police force which is expanding its numbers, whereas we should be reassuring voters and, in particular, vulnerable members of society that an efficient police force, which finds ways of carrying out its work better for less and involving fewer people does not mean that they will not be safe in their beds at night. We exploit the fixation with numbers irresponsibly if the person listening happens to be a pensioner wondering whether they are going to be burgled.

[Mark Tami]

Developing that point, can the hon. Gentleman tell me when he has seen a Tory party leaflet that states, “We want fewer police,” and puts across that argument? I have never seen one.

[Simon Hart]

What emerges from that intervention is that the hon. Gentleman reads Tory leaflets and I do not, and he can keep reading as far as I am concerned, but the fact is that evidence now goes so far as to show even opposite trends. We do not have to go into that now, because I suspect that it is slightly outwith the amendment, but I am delighted that the hon. Gentleman uses his time so wisely.

Having started from the position of being a little sceptical about how a police commissioner covering such a vast area of urban and rural Wales could be effective, I have slowly but enthusiastically come to the conclusion that they will have an incentive to take into account public mood, public aspiration and public desire in a way that the current arrangements do not, and that it is a good thing, because it will therefore automatically lead to police priorities being more sensitive to a community’s requirements. If that happens, public satisfaction with and confidence in the police will, I trust, improve, and if that happens so will value for money in real terms and the perceived value for money of police forces, which are undoubtedly having to do some things that neither we nor they wanted them to do.

Although significant concerns have been well and reasonably articulated in the House, they in no way override the benefits to my constituents of proceeding with elected commissioners next year. We all know that they will not work perfectly everywhere all the time—no proposal that any of us has seen will do that—but one thing is certain: they will bring the community closer to their police force than is the case at the moment, and that is all the more to their credit.

I believe firmly that if we have good chief constables, which by and large we do, and if we have good police commissioners, which I have no doubt we will—let us face it, they are going to earn twice as much as a Member of Parliament, which probably means that they will be twice as good, and there is no reason to believe that they will not be extremely efficient and conscious of the impartial role that they have to play—that will lead to a vast improvement on the existing situation, recreate public confidence and trust in the police force and deliver value for money. As our friends in the Treasury remind us, that is never far away from such debates, but sometimes we lose sight of the fact that we have an economic mountain to climb.

We do not need to go into all that now, but this is one small part of the climb, so I will happily support the Government in opposing Lords amendments 1 to 4, and I hope that other Members will do likewise.

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[Nick Herbert]

The hon. Gentleman really must do better than that; he has been a policing Minister, as I now am. As far as I am aware, those consultants were commissioned by the Association of Police Authorities. They made a number of assumptions, including about the additional use of Home Office official time, and those assumptions are wrong. The figures that I gave the hon. Gentleman are the official figures produced by the Government, and it is our formal view—I am basing this on the advice that I am given by officials—that the estimate of the transition costs made by the Association of Police Authorities is wrong; I want to say that again.

The hon. Gentleman raised the issue of November elections. I am advised that, in the dim and distant past, elections have been held in this country in November and, in the more recent though still fairly distant past, in October. It is of course the case that the presidential elections in the United States are routinely held in November. The next such elections will be held in November next year. Indeed, it was thought possible at one time that the former leader of the Labour party and former Prime Minister was going to call an election in 2007. Presumably, that would have been held in late October or early November, but the right hon. Gentleman chickened out, as we all remember. So November elections are not such an unusual proposition.

I would like to pick up on something that the hon. Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami) said when he challenged my use of the term “middle office”. He said that I had just invented it, but in so doing, he betrayed his lack of knowledge on these issues, and the fact that he has not read Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary’s report, in which the inspectorate helpfully offers a definition of the front line. Indeed, “middle office” is a standard term in policing; it is one that the inspectorate uses. It denotes functions that are not directly public facing but nevertheless involve fighting crime.

I want to return to an important point that I made during questions earlier. A very considerable amount of police resource, and a third of all human resources, are not on the front line. That is what the inspectorate’s report said, and it is clear that the hon. Gentleman has not read it; otherwise, he would not have been so astonished at the term “middle office”. Hon. Members should read that report. If they did so, they would see the inspectorate’s assessment of the number of officers in the back and middle office—the figure is well over 20,000—and of the way in which chief constables should consider whether those officers are in appropriate roles. As the Opposition are making a great deal of the fact that 16,000 police officers must be lost, it behoves them to look more carefully at where police officers are actually employed. There is no need for the front line to be damaged, provided that the right decisions are taken and that policing is made more efficient and transformed in the right way.

The hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) paid tribute to the role of our police officers in dealing with the riots, and it was remiss of me not to have done so earlier, because that was the first opportunity that I have had to do so in the House. I certainly join him in paying tribute to everything that those officers did to protect the public and property, and to everything that they went through. I remind the House that a considerable number of officers were injured during that period. In my view, it is right that the justice system operated swiftly in order to deal with the perpetrators.

In the three minutes remaining to me, I should like to comment on the speech made by the right hon. Member for Torfaen (Paul Murphy) on the relationship between Cardiff and London and the significance of the reforms in Wales. I have been engaged in discussions with the Welsh Assembly Government, and specifically with Carl Thomas—

[Mark Tami]

Carl Sargeant.

[Nick Herbert]

I am sorry; I meant Carl Sargeant. I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman.

In those discussions, I tried hard to reach an agreement with Carl Sargeant that would respect the devolution settlement in Wales. I recognise that he did not support the reform, but I pointed out that policing was a reserved matter. We wished to go ahead with it, but we also wished to ensure that the arrangements, particularly those relating to local government—a devolved matter, as the right hon. Gentleman pointed out—reflected the wishes of the Welsh Assembly Government. We came up with the legislative consent motion.

I must put it on record, however, that, quite extraordinarily, Welsh Assembly Ministers then proceeded not to support their own motion, in spite of the fact that I had negotiated it with them in good faith. I said at the time that I thought that was a pity because, in doing so, they denied the special arrangements for Wales that this Government had tried hard to promote. It is important to understand that we tried very hard and will continue to try to respect the devolution settlement in Wales on this matter and, through constructive dialogue, to make the reform work in Wales.

Finally, I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Mr Burley), who cited Sir Robert Peel, who said:

“The police are the public and the public are the police.”

The reforms are about devolving power, giving it to the people, protecting the operational independence of the police while ensuring that the public have a right and proper say in how policing is delivered in their communities.

Question put, That this House disagrees with Lords amendment 1.