Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Debate between Michael Ellis and Aidan Burley

Monday 13th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[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.

Housing Benefit

Debate between Michael Ellis and Aidan Burley

Tuesday 9th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Burley]

The hon. Lady should have listened to what I said. Our point is that it is not just about reducing the housing benefit bill, but the issue of fairness. We need to go back to the first principles in this debate and decide what is a fair amount for the working majority to pay towards those who do not, cannot or will not work. What is fair? The average annual earnings in my constituency is £25,279 a year.

[Michael Ellis (Northampton North) (Con)]

On the subject of fairness, is it not right that Opposition Members persistently forget one of the first principles of fairness, which is the juxtaposition between low-paid hard-working families and those on housing benefit? Housing benefit claimants should not be better off than those who are hard-working and low paid. Is that not a principle of fairness?

[Mr Burley]

That is precisely my point. People in Cannock Chase who earn £25,279 a year would frankly love to have £20,000 to spend on housing from an equivalent annual salary of £80,000, because that is what it equates to. That is dreamland for them. They have never earned £80,000 a year, so why should they be paying out of their hard-earned taxes for some people to have the equivalent of a salary of a quarter of a million pounds so that they can live in parts of London that have some of the most expensive postcodes on Earth.