Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Debate between Matthew Offord and Aidan Burley

Monday 13th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Burley]

I share the concerns of my hon. Friend, who makes a good point about the timing of this legislation and the effect or otherwise it will have on the royal wedding. We all heard the Prime Minister say that he hoped the encampment would be gone by April, so I look forward to seeing how this progresses. I understand that my hon. Friend has some ideas of his own, and he will no doubt inform the House of them at a later date.

I would like to focus my remarks on the provisions around police and crime commissioners, the direct election of whom will, I believe, mark one of the most significant and positive changes to policing in our country. The Jack Daniel’ s adverts currently on the tube billboards read: “No one built a monument to a committee”—and if they were intended to refer to police authority committees, it is not hard to imagine why. They are possibly the least effective, least visible bureaucracies in the public sector that I can think of—visible to just 7% of the UK public. I believe that the bold changes in the Bill will finally end governance by committee and instead enable transparent and accountable policing in this country.

Opposition Members—not that there are many of them left in their places—have advanced a few arguments against police and crime commissioners today, and I would like to address, in order, the three main criticisms that have come out of the debate. First, the Opposition have argued that commissioners will cost more than police authorities; secondly, they have alleged that PCCs will interfere with the operational independence of chief constables; and, finally, they have said PCCs will do nothing to bring the police closer to the communities they serve. Indeed, the shadow Home Secretary has said that this Bill

“goes against a 150 year tradition of keeping politics out of policing.”

The Opposition are mistaken on every single one of those counts, and I welcome the opportunity to explain why.

Let me first turn my attention to the issue of cost. Implementation costs, which are the price of shifting from police authorities to police and crime commissioners, are expected to be £5 million. The forecast cost of holding elections every four years is £50 million, but the running costs of the police and crime commissioners and their panels are predicted to be the same as for the current police authorities. Opposition Members would do well to remember that when Labour was in power, increased spending of any kind was slavishly hailed as a sign of automatic improvement in public services. They would be well advised to think carefully before voting against this investment, which, contrary to most of the Labour Government’s spending, will promote democracy, accountability and thrift.

I cannot recall many Labour Members arguing against the price of democracy when introducing elections for regional assemblies or indeed when it came to Lord Prescott’s proposals for regional government, which fortunately never made it through to the ballot box—although if they had, I am sure there would have been a price attached to them.

Where police authorities are invisible, police and crime commissioners will be high profile; where police authorities fly below the radar of public scrutiny, PCCs will be held accountable; and where police authorities are divided, wasteful, bureaucratic and inefficient, PCCs will be firm of purpose and leaner in expense. The reality is that police authorities are a costly collection of committees that are simply no longer fit for purpose. They cost £65 million and taxpayers fund all the generous expenses and allowances that individual members claim. In the light of the rising costs, we simply cannot ignore the value of bodies that fail to hold police properly to account and are invisible to the people they claim to represent.

Government Members need to counter the “scaremongering” myth peddled by some that election costs for these commissioners will come out of already stretched local authority budgets. This is unfounded and inaccurate: they will be funded by the Home Office budget and, as I said earlier, it is not the intention that PCCs should cost more than existing police authorities. In fact, it is quite the opposite: the intention is to give much better value for money.

Let me move on to the issue of independence. I agree with the Opposition’s stance on maintaining the importance of operational independence. For this reason, I was pleased to hear my right hon. Friend the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice emphasise in September the need to maintain the operational independence of policing. He said that

“someone has to hold the police to account. In my view that should be an elected politician. We cannot have the police answering to no one. Therefore what we are discussing is simply the nature of that accountability; but politicians will be involved in one way or another.”—[Official Report, 14 September 2010; Vol. 515, c. 241WH.]

I believe that, far from interfering with operational independence and duty to act without restraint, I believe that this Bill will serve to improve it. Chief constables will have greater professional freedom to take operational decisions without fear or favour to meet the priorities set for them by their local community through their commissioner.

The Opposition’s charge of politicisation is, I am afraid, based on a fundamental misconception. The governance of policing is rightly, and by its nature, political. Deciding where to deploy limited resources is a political decision. Deciding whether to put officers in cars or on the beat is a political choice. Deciding whether they patrol in pairs or singly, on the same side of the street or the opposite side, is a political decision. As I mentioned earlier—I would have reiterated it later if the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East (Karl Turner) had accepted my intervention—when Tony Blair summoned all 43 chief constables to Downing street for a summit on knife crime to put political pressure on them to do something about the explosion of that crime, that was political interference, to use the words of Labour Members, with the police. It was entirely legitimate, however, because Tony Blair as a politician democratically representing the people of this country wanted to put pressure on our police to do something about a problem. It is precisely the same principle in the Bill.

[Mr Offord]

Although my hon. Friend is right to mention the influence of the former Prime Minister Tony Blair in the context of the street crime initiative, I think that members of the shadow Cabinet are concerned about the fact that he intervened in other circumstances where we know he exerted influence. I am thinking of, for instance, the Serious Fraud Office and the investigation into British Aerospace. Will my hon. Friend confirm that Government Members will not accept such actions either?

[Mr Burley]

I agree. Operational independence is about, for example, decisions to arrest people. No one is suggesting that we should give police and crime commissioners the power that Winston Churchill had in the Essex street siege to order police officers to arrest people, but I think it democratically legitimate for a police and crime commissioner to be elected on a mandate of, for instance, putting more police on the streets where they are visible and accountable, because that is what the public want. Over the past 10 years—indeed, throughout the 1980s and 1990s—there has been a move to put police officers in cars and say to their chief constables and senior officers, “This is my democratic mandate. We want more police on the streets. Tell me how you will achieve it.” That does not strike me as interfering with operational independence.

Let me now say something about transparency and accountability, both of which have been criticised by Opposition Members under whose Government any hint of either was lost in the mire of sofa government. Despite costs of between £52 million and £78 million a year, there is scant awareness, and therefore scant accountability, in relation to the authorities themselves, let alone their expenditure. Public input is exceedingly low. A significant proportion of police authorities received a meagre average of three letters or e-mails per week between 2007 and 2010.

When asked by the Home Affairs Committee how one individual could improve police accountability, Kit Malthouse, London’s effective police and crime commissioner, replied:

“It allows there to be a kind of funnel for public concern. For instance, when I was appointed to this job in May 2008, and given the job title Deputy Mayor for Policing, the post bag at City Hall on community safety went from 20 or 30 letters a week up to 200 or 300. The letters just came and came.”

According to Louise Casey’s 2008 crime and communities review, only 7% of the public are even aware that police authorities exist. According to MORI, however, 68% of people agree that a single person should be elected by local people to hold the police to account on behalf of the community.

For too long the fight against crime has been caught up in red tape, which has created a gulf between law enforcement agencies and the communities that they serve. The shadow Home Secretary himself said in Cannock that the work of police authorities

“isn’t always as visible as it could be. Around police landscape, around accountability, there is more to do”.

If he opposes the Government’s police reforms, may I ask what he proposes to do about that? Surely he cannot attack our plan without having a plan himself.

Establishing commissioners will only serve to improve the alarming statistics that I have mentioned, and to raise the profile of the police force as a whole. It will enable us to turn our backs on a corrosive legacy that has done nothing to prevent the British public from being misinformed about, and unaware of, how to influence directly the strategy of policing in their areas. It is impossible to conceive that after just one term of police and crime commissioners, only 11% of police officers will still be visible and available, only 7% of the public will know how to contact their police and crime panels, and there will still be record dissatisfaction with the police despite the existence of a record number of them.

Locally elected police commissioners will be transformative. They will ensure that the police concentrate on the crimes that most affect local people’s quality of life. The existing top-down, target-ridden culture will be replaced by something altogether preferable: accountability to the public. The Home Affairs Committee’s report concludes with the words:

“Police and Crime Commissioners will be judged on whether they succeed in bringing the police closer to the public they serve.”

It is clear that the proposals for police and crime commissioners and their supporting panels will go a huge way towards achieving that aim.