Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Michael Ellis Excerpts

Monday 13th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I am grateful for the right hon. Gentleman’s point. I think it is fair to say that the whole of Parliament thought that previous attempts to deal with the matter had succeeded and that people were disappointed when we discovered that that was not the case. I can confirm that the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (James Brokenshire), who deals with crime prevention, has been working very closely on the matter with the Metropolitan police, the Greater London authority, Westminster city council and, indeed, with the House authorities where relevant. Those parties are willing to work together to ensure that we keep Parliament square clear of encampments. The Bill does not deal with the problem of permanent encampments by restricting protests across the board; it bans the use of tents, other equipment and the unauthorised use of loudhailers in Parliament square.

[Michael Ellis (Northampton North) (Con)]

The Bill must go through the relevant parliamentary procedures and will probably not receive Royal Assent until the end of July. Is my right hon. Friend conscious of the fact that the royal wedding is in April and that there will be pressure to remove the encampment before that auspicious occasion?

[Mrs May]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that issue. The Prime Minister made it clear at Prime Minister’s questions, and I have made it clear separately, that we need to ensure that we can clear Parliament square for the royal wedding on 29 April.

The Bill addresses another important area of law that is not currently working—the whole issue of how we apply universal jurisdiction, which is a key principle of international justice that enables some of the gravest offences to be prosecuted here, regardless of the state in which the offences were committed.

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[Ed Balls]

The hon. Gentleman knows the answer to his own question. He can wave his arms around in a histrionic way, but the reality is that the previous Home Secretary said that he could not guarantee the individual decision of every chief constable of the 43 forces. However, he said that on the basis of a 12% reduction over four years, there would be no need for any reduction in police numbers. Under the coalition, the Police Federation estimates that 20,000 officers will be cut. We know that 1,100 officers will be cut in Birmingham and that 1,400 will be cut in Greater Manchester. The difference is that under our proposals there would have been no cuts to police numbers, and under the coalition proposals there will be cuts in every constituency and in every police force in the country. Those cuts will be made worse by the additional expenditure on the ridiculous and flawed proposals before us.

[Michael Ellis]

Am I correct to say that the shadow Home Secretary admitted that £1 billion of police budget cuts had to be made? If so, where would he make those cuts?

[Ed Balls]

If, rather than framing his intervention, the hon. Gentleman had listened to the previous one, he would have known the answer to his question and would not have had to bother asking it. HMIC said that a 12% reduction in the central Government grant over four years was deliverable without cuts to front-line policing. That advice has not been taken by the Government: they have gone not for 12% but for 20%, and it will be front-loaded on the first two years. The coalition policy will mean not 3,000 more police officers, but visible, front-line police officer cuts in police forces up and down the country. That is not the manifesto on which Government Members were elected, and they will be held to account.

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[Mr Aidan Burley (Cannock Chase) (Con)]

Thus far in today’s debate, we have heard some interesting comments about a wide-ranging Bill that covers increasing licensing powers, banning legal highs and ending the disgraceful occupation and vandalism of Parliament square—a situation that it is hard to conceive would have been allowed to develop had people decided they wanted to set up a campsite on any other pavement or public square in the United Kingdom.

[Michael Ellis]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way so early in his remarks. Is he concerned, as I am, that the provisions to deal with the Parliament square encampment will not receive Royal Assent until the end of July, which means that the royal wedding in April could still be subjected to the awful sight of this encampment in Parliament square?

[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.

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[Michael Ellis]

Does the right hon. Lady not accept that many countries with similar legal systems to our own—Canada, for example—have established a similar system? In the Canadian context, the Attorney-General or deputy Attorney-General has to give leave before the exercise of their universal jurisdiction power. Many other countries have similarly fettered the misuse of universal jurisdiction, which has often taken the course of party political or other politically biased purposes, and they have not had any difficulties in respect of the point the right hon. Lady is making. Where Lord Diplock and others refer to interference of the state, they did not apply it to this test.

[Ann Clwyd]

I hope the hon. Gentleman will seek to catch Mr Speaker’s eye, as he obviously has a speech in the making. I have experience of trying to get an indictment against some of the Iraqi war criminals in other countries such as Sweden, Norway, Switzerland and Belgium. The closest we came to getting an indictment was in Belgium, but that was thwarted at the last moment because somebody brought an indictment against Sharon, and the Belgian Government changed the law. Sometimes the pressures can be very different, but we do not have time to go into the details of this now.

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[Michael Ellis (Northampton North) (Con)]

I am delighted to follow the speakers who have recently been addressing the House. I completely support and commend the Bill. I intend to refer in the few minutes available to a couple of its clauses, but it strikes me very much that the Bill as a whole tremendously empowers people in our country, drawing power away from the state. As such, it is to be highly commended, and I congratulate the Minister on that.

The handful of Opposition speakers—and it is a small number—who have spoken on the issue of universal jurisdiction and the safeguard in the Bill have confirmed why it is so necessary to improve the law on universal jurisdiction as it stands. This issue is not just about Israel: the Chinese Trade Minister has apparently been threatened with arrest because of the current provision, as has Henry Kissinger. There have been difficulties in Europe with Donald Rumsfeld’s freedom of movement, and I believe that White House staffers have been threatened with arrest in Spain because of the principle of universal jurisdiction. I am given to understand that even the former Prime Minister Tony Blair has had a large number of petitions levied against him in the International Criminal Court, so this issue is not unique to the United Kingdom or Israel. It is an area that has needed reform for some considerable time.

The principle of amending the law on universal jurisdiction is in no way about stifling meritorious complaints. However, where jurisdiction is very wide, as it currently is in this country, it will tend to act as a magnet for complaints that are rooted in political vendettas, regardless of their merit. Universal jurisdiction has tended to mean that high-level consultations and meetings have been disrupted, and at times even cancelled. London has a long-established and important reputation as an effective venue for warring parties around the world—indeed, it has a cherished ability to act as such, serving as a diplomatic hot spot.

[Henry Smith]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. Ironically, universal jurisdiction is getting in the way of diplomatic efforts to engender peace and in the way of peace talks and discussions, particularly in this international venue that is London. The Bill’s provisions are thus absolutely correct.

[Michael Ellis]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. There have been literally dozens of examples in our recent history where London has been a centre for the negotiation and conclusion of important international agreements between warring factions, and we are in danger of losing that ability because universal jurisdiction has been misused, misapplied and inappropriately applied as a means of pursuing political vendettas. All that is required for the proposed changes is the consent of the Director of Public Prosecutions—it is, incidentally, already required in certain other routine prosecutions—which would enable the system to withstand attempts to exploit the law for settling political scores. I very much welcome that provision.

Other important provisions are designed to deal with the encampment on Parliament square. The Prime Minister has said that he would like to see that encampment done away with; the Bill will achieve that, although it will be some months before Royal Assent is granted. Having looked at the existing laws, I take the view that law is already available on the criminal statute book, which could be applied to remove the encampment in time for the royal wedding in April.

Members will be fascinated to know that I have in mind the Vagrancy Act 1824. As Members will obviously know, section 4(2) of the 1824 Act says:

“Every person wandering abroad and lodging in any barn or outhouse, or in any deserted or unoccupied building, or in the open air, or under a tent, or in any cart or wagon, and not giving a good account of himself or herself… commits an offence.”

Members might be interested to know that this Act is not as obsolete as its antiquity would tend to imply. It is, in fact, a piece of legislation that is used regularly around the country. I myself have prosecuted people for this offence in relatively recent times, in my former guise as a member of the Bar.

[Claire Perry (Devizes) (Con)]

I thought my hon. Friend was going to say that he had been moved on under the terms of the Act, so I was grateful that he finished his sentence. I am delighted that he has found a potential wrinkle to help us to clear the encampment outside this building, which I think disgraces the motherhood of democracy. Does he agree that although we all share the commitment to freedom of speech and the right to protest, this is simply an eyesore that we have tolerated for far too long? The provisions on this issue are important and should be welcomed.

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[Michael Ellis]

I very much agree. Of course we all recognise and cherish the right of people to protest in this country; we have an extremely liberal democracy that allows and, indeed, encourages it. It has however, reached a point of utter nonsense in Parliament square gardens.

The Vagrancy Act 1824 can be used to remove these people because they are either

“in the open air, or under a tent”,

and committing an offence under that provision. The maximum penalty for breaching it is a fine at level 1 of the standard scale, which is a maximum of £200. However, Members will be interested to know that if a person is prosecuted a second time for this offence, they can then be classified as “an incorrigible rogue”. The provision then allows the magistrates to remit the matter to the Crown court for sentence. Whereas on first prosecution the maximum sentence is a £200 fine, on second conviction for the same offence the maximum penalty would be up to 12 months’ imprisonment. That might well act as a disincentive to those encamping themselves on Parliament square, encouraging them to move on. The only requirements for prosecution are that the people concerned have been given an opportunity to take shelter elsewhere and have not availed themselves of that opportunity; that they have persistently ignored reasonably accessible alternatives; and that their remaining in situ would have offensive consequences or those consequences would appear likely to occur. I think that the House could well deal with the encampment by means of a prosecution before the Bill is given Royal Assent.

I have dealt with two clauses. I have only two minutes in which to cover several hundred more, but let me say a little about the proposal relating to police commissioners. It is a fundamentally democratic proposal, which I strongly support. Only a tiny number of people currently know that police authorities even exist.

[Andrew Bridgen]

Does my hon. Friend agree that in this country we police with consent—the consent of the people—and that there is no better way of securing the consent of the people than a democratic election?

[Michael Ellis]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It has been quite strange to observe Opposition members baulking at the suggestion that police and crime commissioners should be elected. One would have expected them to support the democratic process.

[Karl Turner]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Michael Ellis]

By all means. I have a minute left.

[Karl Turner]

Does the hon. Gentleman not accept that the proposal politicises the police?

[Michael Ellis]

I do not accept that at all. I remind the hon. Gentleman that the last Prime Minister but one, Tony Blair, summoned chief constables from around the country and put them under pressure to deal with knife crime. That was a form of politicisation of the police, and it is not something that police commissioners will be doing. Democratically electing police commissioners will, in fact, legitimise them.

I, for one, support all the provisions in the Bill, and commend it as an excellent and honourable measure that will increase the democratic process.