Policing and Crime Bill

Mike Penning Excerpts

Monday 7th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[James Morris]

We have a very close relationship.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne has pointed out, in my role as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on mental health I very much welcome the parts of the Bill that relate to sections 135 and 136 of the Mental Health Act 1983. It is an issue in which I have long taken an interest in this House, and I had an Adjournment debate on it in Westminster Hall in 2013.

A number of people have influenced my thinking about the importance of the changes in the Bill, particularly as regards some of the work that has been done by West Midlands police. In particular, I want to mention Inspector Michael Brown, who has an interesting blog that other hon. Members might wish to look at. He is a mental health blogger and came to see me in my constituency office four or five years ago to talk about how the nature of policing was changing in society, the importance of dealing with mental health on the ground, and how the nature of policing meant that police officers were putting themselves in situations in which they were essentially having to make decisions about whether or not to use the powers under the Mental Health Act, as well as about whether they had the ability, knowledge and training to make such decisions.

If we look at the history of the Mental Health Act, we can see that it was initially conceived to cope with people who were absconding from asylums. It was updated in 1983, including through the section 135 and 136 provisions, and today’s changes are very important as the Mental Health Act needs to reflect the more modern experience of policing and of working with health professionals. Sometimes, we need to question whether we should go further in changing the Mental Health Act, because one downside of police officers specifically being given powers to detain people is that that raises issues to do with liberty and whether somebody is capable of making their own decisions, even when they are in mental health crisis. The fundamental point, which my hon. Friend also made, is that I do not think that any civilised person would say that there should be any circumstances in which a child suffering a mental health crisis ends up in a police cell. I welcome the changes to section 136.

The Bill also confers regulation-making powers on the Secretary of State to define when an adult should legitimately be placed in a police cell.

[The Minister for Policing, Crime and Criminal Justice (Mike Penning)]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way, and particularly commend the speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker). Through the Bill we are trying to say—including to the other agencies to which the shadow Home Secretary referred—that a police cell or a police vehicle is not the place for someone in a mental health crisis. As the Ministers responsible for policing, we have to say that we are the port of last resort, not the port of first resort, which, I am afraid, is a situation that the section 135 and 136 legislation has got us into in some parts of the country. We need to get away from that.

[James Morris]

I thank the Minister for that intervention. He makes a powerful point. I have been a strong advocate of the street triage schemes that have been rolled out across the country. I was taken out by the street triage team in Birmingham and sped on a blue light to the centre of Birmingham, where a man was threatening to throw himself off the new Birmingham library. As the Minister knows, street triage is an effective combination of a police officer and a trained psychiatric nurse, both of whom present themselves at the point of crisis. That is the way we need to go, where we do more to get the police working with health professionals.

[Mike Penning]

I apologise for further delaying the House. Where it has not been possible for whatever reason to get the street triage team to the scene, we can have mental health professionals in custody suites. That point of entry gets around the data protection issues and people, who often know the mental health professionals, can be treated in a completely different, more civilised way, as we would expect our constituents to be treated.

[James Morris]

The Minister makes an excellent point. We need greater integration between policing and health. It should not be part of policing for police officers to make crucial decisions about an individual’s psychiatric state.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mike Penning]

When I took over the policing responsibility 18 months ago, I asked for the previous reports by the Home Affairs Committee—they had been gathering dust because there were quite a few. What has really and truly happened is that we have cherry-picked what was feasible and what we could deliver, and we have placed it in the Bill—with the help of the Home Secretary’s PPS.

[Keith Vaz]

I thank the Minister, and I say to him that he should carry on cherry-picking if that results in changes that find favour with both sides of the House.

On mental health, the Bill will ban the use of police cells as places of safety for under-18s, and the Committee has never believed that they are the right place for such people. I acknowledge the work done by my hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones), who has also campaigned on these issues over a number of years. He is one of those who have always said that people with such illnesses should be in police cells only in exceptional cases. That applies, of course, to children, but also to adults.

The Committee likes the idea of police officers consulting members of the medical profession before removing a person to a place of safety, and we think it is right that there should be a maximum period of detention.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mike Penning]

I wonder whether the Home Affairs Committee Chairman would agree that that does not need to be in statute. Surely it is simply common sense for the investigating officers to do such a thing, because this is not just about Paul Gambaccini—there were lots of others. The reason we have not put that in the Bill is that neither I nor the Home Secretary see the need for it to be on the statute book—it is just the common-decency way to treat people.

[Keith Vaz]

What the Minister has said today is extremely powerful and important, and it will give great comfort to people such as Paul Gambaccini. That is a common-sense approach to the cases of people have been on bail continuously but where no evidence is then found. People should conduct these investigations in a timely fashion. What the Minister has said will be something we can use as an example of good practice.

The shadow Home Secretary, who is not in his place at the moment, mentioned the case of Siddhartha Dhar, whose sister came to give evidence to the Committee—it was an emotional time, but it was important evidence. We were concerned that his passport was not handed over when he became a suspect. The police actually sent him a letter asking him to come along and surrender it; of course, by then, he had left the country—he had booked his departure, got on a coach with his family and crossed the border, and he was gone. He is probably still in Syria, although we do not know for sure.

The Minister may think this is also a matter of common sense rather than statute, but it is important, where we have terrorist suspects, as the shadow Home Secretary said, that we insist on their passports being handed over when they are in the custody suite; we should not wait to write to them and say, “Please will you hand over your passport?” because they will have used the opportunity to leave the country, as Mr Dhar did.

This may be a matter of common sense rather than statute—this is not a criticism of individuals, but us looking at a system—but many years ago we said to the Justice Department, “Wouldn’t it be a good idea to ask a foreign national prisoner to surrender their passport to the court at the time of sentence?” The Prime Minister has now said that that is a very good idea and we must ensure that it happens.

Those are common-sense suggestions. I know it requires a whole inquiry by the Home Affairs Committee to come up with them, but why have they not been implemented before? That is my concern. I welcome absolutely what is being done on police bail—it is the right course of action—but the handover of passports is very important. The Committee has been trying for some time to get the new director general of the Passport Office in. He has so far eluded us, but we will write to him again and remind him that he needs to come in; otherwise, we will be writing a very stern letter. He has an important contribution to make to this debate. When the Prime Minister appeared before the Liaison Committee, he also said he would look at these issues.

I welcome what is being suggested with regard to the reform of the Police Federation. Its new management, if I can call them that, have made substantial changes. It is right that the federation’s core purpose should be amended to include a commitment to acting in the public interest. However, a recent letter from the chief executive and the chairman touched on some of the promises made about returning subscriptions to police officers because the federation had amassed huge reserves. I know the Policing Minister loves talking about reserves, and the federation had amassed quite a lot of reserves, so the Committee suggested that it hand some of them back to PCs, rather than collecting more subs. We also suggested that a smaller amount be spent on legal action, because the federation is spending quite a lot on supporting legal action. The Bill helps us along that road, and I hope that the other issues—the Bill does not mention reserves—will also be looked at.

The fifth area where the Bill implements recommendations by the Select Committee is police integrity. We are pleased that there will be a new statutory police barred list for officers and staff who have been dismissed, and that a police advisory list of those who are under investigation for matters amounting to gross misconduct is also included in the Bill. The Bill also places a duty on senior officers and policing bodies to check job applicants against the list before employing them and to report to the College of Policing.

Shortly the Committee will open up a review of the work of the College of Policing, and Alex Marshall will be coming before us. The Home Secretary talked about the massive changes she has made, and no Home Secretary has ever made such dramatic changes to the landscape of policing. However, I think we have neglected the College of Policing. I rate it very highly, and I think Alex Marshall is an excellent chief executive. We need to call it the Royal College of Policing. We need to make sure it stands on a par with some of the other royal colleges, such as the Royal College of Nursing, and with the British Medical Association and other organisations. I think we are getting there.

[Mike Penning]

Because the college was absolutely brand new, we first had to get it established, bedded down and gaining the confidence that the Chair of the Select Committee has referred to. There are more powers for the college in the Bill, and it will evolve, but it was brand new and it had to have confidence of people across the country, particularly that of the police.

[Keith Vaz]

I hope that we will look at some of these issues when we come to review the work of the college in the next Session.

I support what is being done on police complaints. As I have sometimes said to my hon. Friend the Member for North Durham, perhaps the police at a local level could adopt the John Lewis approach—“If there is a complaint, try and sort it out.” When members of the public complain about us, as I am sure they do very rarely [Interruption]—yes, it does happen—we take that more seriously than we do letters of praise, because we want to get the system right. If somebody complains that we did not spend enough time with them at a surgery or they are unhappy with a letter that we have sent, we spend a disproportionate amount of time on that—more than we do on other members of the public. Sometimes it is better to say, “Sorry, we got it wrong”, at a local level. Not everyone can have the privilege of coming before the House and saying sorry in such a public way, as the Minister did on the police funding formula, but he did it and he survived, and he has grown stronger as a result. The police should do this at a local level. I have a bit of an open mind about some of the suggestions, but a time limit is absolutely vital: we cannot have things going on for ever and ever.

I fully support what the Government are doing on firearms, although, to reiterate the Committee’s previous recommendations, we think that there are too many pieces of legislation relating to firearms and they should be consolidated in one Act of Parliament rather than be found in different places. I think that Opposition Front Benchers will be very open to a suggestion of consolidation, because it is quite difficult to find every single piece of information.

On collaboration with the fire service, I take a different view from the shadow Home Secretary. I have an open mind about this. Better collaboration between the emergency services might help local people. I suppose I am driven by the fact that, on 14 January, 10 ambulances were parked outside Leicester Royal Infirmary delivering patients and not collecting them. We have only 25 ambulances in the whole of Leicestershire, so to find 10 outside the infirmary made me worry about our emergency services system. I am open to persuasion. I am happy to look at this carefully, and I am sure the Committee will also want to look at it to see whether it will work. The hon. Member for Braintree (James Cleverly), who is here, is the former chairman of the fire authority for London, and perhaps we will call on him to give evidence, if he is free. We want a system that is going to work; we do not want to amalgamate and collaborate and then the whole thing collapses. We want the system to be better rather than worse.

I also have a bit of an open mind about volunteers. We do need a professional police service. We need to be careful about using volunteers, because there are issues of vetting and of who should be accepted. Of course, the idea that the public should be part of policing is very important—it is all about Neighbourhood Watch. I do not see as many of those signs in Leicester these days. There are lots of photographs of Vardy and Mahrez on lamp-posts, but not many signs about neighbourhood policing—I had to get that in somewhere, Mr Deputy Speaker. We need to tread carefully with regard to volunteers. If we do that, we can get a better police service.

I do not want to open up a new debate on the police funding formula, because that will only encourage the Minister to mention it again when he winds up, but we do need a timetable on police funding. The Minister said that he was waiting for the review from the National Police Chiefs Council. I have written to Sara Thornton to ask her whether she thinks her review will somehow stall what the Minister proposes to do. I will await her response and we will of course publish that letter. All this has to be paid for. We have new legislation—those of us who have been in this House for a number of years will have seen policing Bills before—but in the end it all costs. We need to sort out the issue of funding, because we do not want to end up being bitten by having good legislation that is supported by the whole House and being unable to pay for it. I hope that we will look at that in future.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Woodcock (Barrow and Furness) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is an honour to follow the considered speech of the hon. Member for Rossendale and Darwen (Jake Berry). He was brave and absolutely right to add to the calls to extend the 12-month period. I sincerely hope that the Government will agree to do that on Report.

The public put a huge amount of trust in the integrity and professionalism of the police, and rightly so, but nobody is infallible. When the police mess up, the public want to know that they will be held properly to account. Public confidence is vital for effective policing, and police accountability has come a long way in a relatively short space of time. It is easy to forget that it was only in 2002 that the last Labour Government set up the IPCC in response to the Stephen Lawrence case. That was a huge step forward, but compared with other public services the police remain under-scrutinised. Too many investigations are carried out behind closed doors. Too many reports are supressed. Too many officers take retirement rather than taking the rap for their mistakes.

Some clauses in the Bill will make real progress on a lot of those issues, and that is welcome. The widening of the definition of a complaint in clause 11 is sensible, and will, I hope, allow greater scrutiny. It is good to see that officers will no longer be able to dismiss complaints as fanciful without recording them. Most welcome is the beefed-up role of the IPCC in investigating complaints. The fact that it had to wait for a referral before acting was always perverse, and I am glad that it will now be able to act with greater freedom when it thinks that wrongdoing has occurred. The move from managed to directed investigations with more IPCC oversight is also a step in the right direction for transparency and accountability. It is right that the IPCC will now be required to investigate all cases that involve chief officers.

The House will be aware of the tragic case of Poppi Worthington in my constituency. I have raised it a number of times on the Floor of the House, and I know that the Ministers on the Front Bench are well aware of it. The failings of the police in Cumbria in the aftermath of Poppi’s death are deeply troubling. Not only has the case raised questions about the conduct of my local force, but it prompts wider questions about the overall system and structure by which the police are held to account. I am concerned that for all the positive steps they contain, the proposals represent a missed opportunity to deal with those issues.

I want to raise three specific issues: first, the information that is available to police and crime commissioners to allow them to perform their roles effectively; secondly, the disciplinary processes and the role of the IPCC; and, thirdly, new rules for officers who leave the force. In Cumbria, we have just welcomed back Jerry Graham as our chief constable following a leave of absence for ill health. In his absence, the deputy chief constable, Michelle Skeer, acted up in his position. That is normal procedure, and it meant that Ms Skeer was at the helm in recent months, during the revelations about Poppi’s death. The problem is that she was also one of the officers criticised by the IPCC in its report into police failures in the Poppi case. That report has still not been published, and I maintain that it should be made public immediately.

Not only was Ms Skeer criticised, but the police and crime commissioner was not made aware of the IPCC’s findings when he confirmed her appointment as the acting chief constable. I understand that it is often a formality for the deputy to act up when the chief constable is laid low, and in the vast majority of cases that will make sense, but it requires oversight and confirmation by the police and crime commissioner. Otherwise, what are they there for? Surely the Government must agree that in that case, it was inappropriate for Ms Skeer to act up without the commissioner being apprised of the findings of the case against her. It must be possible to address that problem in the Bill. That has not happened yet, but there is a clear opportunity to do so on Report if the Government have the will to act.

For an officer to head a force, and to have oversight of all disciplinary matters, when she has been heavily criticised by the IPCC is highly problematic. It looks wrong to the public, and it damages trust. That situation should never be allowed to occur again, but I see nothing in the Bill to correct that flaw in the original procedures. Should not police and crime commissioners be provided, as a matter of routine, with draft IPCC reports, even when the reports cannot be published for legal reasons? When the decision is made to appoint a chief constable or a deputy, or to allow people to act up in those roles, the IPCC ought to give the police and crime commissioner all the relevant information about as yet unpublished investigations into that individual, even if that information is available only in draft form. If commissioners are to be more than simply window dressing, sustained at considerable expense to the taxpayer, they need to be able to access the information that allows them to do their jobs properly.

On discipline, the Bill is surely an opportunity to improve the current processes.

[Mike Penning]

I thought it might be useful to say at this point that the Under-Secretary of State and I, having listened to the hon. Gentleman’s speech and the other contributions, will look carefully to see whether we can address in Committee or on Report the concerns that he has sensibly raised around that issue. One way or another, we will try as best we possibly can to address the matter in the Bill.

[John Woodcock]

I thank the Minister for intervening now, rather than waiting until his summation. What he has said is really welcome.

If I can find my place, I will continue what I was saying about discipline. One reason that I have been given for the continued suppression of the report in the Poppi case is that disciplinary action is still ongoing against two officers. However, the draft report was available to Cumbria constabulary exactly a year ago. The IPCC has said that it is “extremely surprised” at the delay, but it appears to have no ability to compel the force to get on with the process. We are left with a situation in which a force is in control of the disciplinary process, but by delaying that process it can hold up the publication of a report that is critical of that force. I am not saying necessarily that Cumbria constabulary is deliberately doing so, but that is clearly the effect. That cannot be right. Surely, the IPCC could appropriately be given more power to compel a force to complete disciplinary action in good time, rather than ending up with a situation such as we have in Cumbria.

Finally, I want to address what happens when officers retire or resign from the force when they are facing disciplinary action, as several hon. Members have mentioned. There has rightly been focus on the length of time for which a former officer can still face disciplinary proceedings after leaving, and whether 12 months is sufficient. The shadow Home Secretary has compellingly set out why it is not, and he has already been joined in expressing that view by one Conservative Member. I also want to focus on the suggested sanctions. Someone will correct me if I am wrong, but I have raised the matter with the shadow Home Secretary.

My clear reading of the legislation is that where an officer retires before disciplinary proceedings against them can be triggered, within the 12 months or whatever period is set out—they can now, for the first time, be found guilty of misconduct, which is a real step forward and should be welcomed—the only sanction currently proposed is to put them on a list that will prevent them from working in the police force again. However, as they have just retired, which was how they have sought to escape justice in relation to any misconduct, telling them that they cannot come out of retirement is surely no kind of deterrent whatever. I very much hope that can be reconsidered in Committee.

[John Woodcock]

The sanction would not be more extreme because there is no chance of any workplace sanction after that. In the hon. Gentleman’s speech, he can tell me what he thinks the effect on public confidence in the police would be if someone guilty of misconduct—at Hillsborough, Orgreave or in one of the many other cases—was merely put on a list preventing them from serving again, rather than having any other sanction imposed on them. My right hon. Friend the shadow Home Secretary mentioned the prospect of being able to reduce the pension entitlement of retired officers in certain circumstances, which I hope the Minister will consider carefully.

[Mike Penning]

One of my very sad but important duties is to remove a pension from an officer because they have committed certain types of offence. Sadly, I have to do that weekly. There is already such a sanction, and others, including criminal sanctions, can also be taken. The ability to remove a pension is already in statute.

[John Woodcock]

But what if they have retired?

I am getting into the rather unusual situation of wanting to ask questions of the Minister who has intervened on me. If my understanding is wrong, I hope he will point that out now or in his summation, but I understood that the only sanction available for an officer who had already retired was not to reduce their pension further, but simply to put them on a list to prevent them from going back to the job from which they had retired to escape accountability.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kit Malthouse]

My hon. Friend is exactly right. As he knows, a gold commander will be appointed, and more often than not it is the senior police officer in charge of the incident. Control is taken, certainly in London, through the control room, in tandem with the fire office and other emergency services required. The system already operates in emergencies, and the fact that we are having to outline that in legislation seems extraordinary, although nevertheless necessary.

When I was chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority, I was astonished by the sheer time involved in dealing with complaints. There were reams of paper and endless committee meetings. My hon. Friend the Member for Braintree (James Cleverly) sat through hours and hours of many of those complaints hearings, some of which were frivolous and some not, but all of which, hopefully, were taken seriously. Any measure that streamlines the complaints system should be welcomed by all, police officers included.

I think that the idea of super-complaints is a knockout. As chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority and deputy Mayor for policing, I would receive, endlessly, what were essentially super-complaints from charities and other organisations claiming that systematic problems involving the police needed to be addressed. If we could find a way of organising mini-inquiries into some of those issues—which is, essentially, what super-complaints would be—we might secure quicker resolutions.

One of the big issues, which the police themselves resolved in the end, was the investigation of rape. It became clear that the way in which the police investigated rape was seriously deficient, and that rape victims were not being dealt with properly at the front end—the inquiry desk at the police station. Once the mounting voices of complaints became so loud that the police had to do something, strangely enough, we secured change straight away. I think that if a charity involved in women’s welfare, or indeed men’s welfare, were able to lodge a super-complaint—rather like the Office of Fair Trading, or the Competition and Markets Authority—the issues could be resolved much more swiftly.

There is no doubt that one of the things that have undermined confidence in the police is the idea that someone can resign just before being subject to disciplinary action. We have seen police officers do that time and again, and they are often in collusion with a leadership that does not want to become involved in a significant inquiry into someone’s conduct. The extension by 12 months seems about right to me. There might be a case for 24 or 36 months, although I think that a lifetime might make matters more rather than less complicated. The extension beyond retirement is certainly welcome.

There will be rejoicing across the land at the final abolition of the Association of Chief Police Officers, in word if not in deed. It is great to see ACPO finally erased from the statute book, for all sorts of reasons. However, there is one small tweak that I would quite like the Minister to consider. One of the duties that are to be transferred to the new Chief Officers Council, or whatever it is called, is the requirement to co-ordinate the national police response to national emergencies. I was on the eighth floor of Scotland Yard on the Monday night of the 2011 riots, listening to the present Metropolitan Police Commissioner—who was then acting Deputy Commissioner—ringing all his mates in the police forces and asking whether they had any spare coppers to deal with the riot as 22 of London’s 23 boroughs went up in flames. It became clear to me that the idea of voluntary co-ordination was never going to be entirely seamless. I think that devising some method of compelling police forces, in extremis, to send officers to the aid of cities, or other areas, that needed them—rather than that being done on the basis of an understanding between police forces—would be useful for future resilience.

I welcome the proposed changes in the treatment of 17-year-olds in police custody. I think we are slowly beginning to realise that 16 and 17-year-olds are in a particular position of vulnerability: that they are still children in the eyes of the law, but are being treated inconsistently with that. The changes in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 that will allow them to be treated as children, and given the protections that are afforded to children, are extremely welcome. They weave into a general theme, which is building up in the House and which has been mentioned earlier in the debate, concerning the status of 16 and 17-year-olds in the law generally. Like the Children’s Society, I believe that we should extend protections to that group.

I also think that we should consider extending child abduction warning notices to 17-year-olds, because they are often useful in that context. Either during the later stages of this Bill or during the stages of a sentencing Bill, if one is forthcoming, I shall be looking into the possibility of protecting those children through a general aggravated sentencing framework relating to offences against children, as well as the possibility of extending sentencing for child cruelty.

I greatly welcome the extension and strengthening of licensing conditions. I think that it is a fantastic move. As we all know, alcohol is an enormous driver of offending, and an enormous absorber of police time. The recent pilot trialling the alcohol abstinence monitoring orders in Croydon was so successful that the Minister has extended it to the whole of London, and we hope that it will subsequently be extended to the rest of the United Kingdom. However, there are a couple of tweaks that I would like the Minister to consider, because I think that they could make this tool really effective.

The first of those tweaks relates to police bail. Conditions apply to it, but, at present, none of them is a requirement to abstain from alcohol. I think that a huge volume of work that is currently dealt with in magistrates courts and beyond could be removed if the police could offer offenders the option of police bail on condition that they wore an alcohol monitoring bracelet for one, two or three months. If offenders breached that requirement, they would effectively be breaking the terms of their bail, and could end up in the criminal justice system as they did before. Vast swathes of paperwork in the magistrates courts would be reduced at a stroke. The police would have the power to manage alcohol on a real-time basis in their own communities.

[Mike Penning]

One of the privileges of being the Minister for Policing, Crime and Criminal Justice is being part of the Ministry of Justice as well as the Home Office. What my hon. Friend is talking about, essentially, are out-of-court disposals, and I think that we are moving in that direction rather than in the direction of police bail when it comes to such matters as sobriety bracelets.

[Kit Malthouse]

I welcome the Minister’s support. He has been a great proponent of the use of such bracelets, and I think that one of his first acts in office was to extend their use. I do not really mind how the bracelets get on to a person’s ankle. We know from the Croydon pilot that they are 92% effective. I do not mind whether this is done by means of out-of-court disposal or police bail, as long as it is done swiftly. We know that the best kind of criminal justice is swift and certain, and the bracelets are exactly that.

In the context of alcohol abstinence monitoring orders, there is another tweak that I should like the Minister to consider. In the United States, a system has been highly successful, and is spreading across the whole country like a virus. Authorities are allowed to charge for physical testing. People turn up twice a day to blow into bags to prove that they have not been drinking, and they pay a buck a test, which finances the whole project. It is self-financing: the polluter pays. That is a brilliant principle. We do not have such a power in this country, but it would be wonderful if we could insert it in the Bill. In the case of the pilot in London, the Mayor had to put in half a million quid and the Secretary of State for Justice had to put in another half a million. Instead, we could start this project and charge the criminals for their own disposal. Surely that makes sense. The money is money that those people would be spending on alcohol anyway, and they would be saving it because they would not be drinking: they would be wearing the bracelets. We know that the model works in the United States.

I am a great supporter of the Bill. I shall be monitoring its progress during all its stages over the next few weeks, and I hope that the small and helpful tweaks that I have suggested will somehow make it into a Bill which, as a result, would go from being good to being great.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Policing, Crime and Criminal Justice (Mike Penning)]

I say genuinely that this has been a really good and sensible debate, and it has been conducted in the correct tone, apart from some of the bits in the speech of the shadow Policing Minister, the hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey). Let us take the bits we agree on and work from there.

I was slightly surprised to hear the shadow Home Secretary say that we should do more. Anybody would think that this Government had been in power for 20 years—they probably will be—but his party had 13 years to modernise the police force and the other emergency services.

I thought there was a slightly critical tone about the fact that I used to be a firefighter. I am very proud of that and it is an obvious thing for me to mention, just as colleagues across the House mention specialist roles that they have held. When I was in the fire service, I wanted to protect the public better and to have the same skills, equipment and emergency services as other countries. This Bill will help address that. It will not be done on the cheap. We need to ask whether we need two chief executive officers, two finance directors and two health and safety officers. Do we need so much bureaucracy at the top of our emergency services taking money away from the frontline? We see examples around the country of collaboration taking place, but there are also examples of collaboration not taking place. That is why the Bill is very important.

The Chair of the Home Affairs Committee apologised to me for the fact that he would not be back for the wind-ups, but he said some very important things about the need for public confidence in the Independent Police Complaints Commission. Common sense is needed. It is clear that more complaints could be dealt with at constabulary level. That will often mean just saying, “Sorry, we got it wrong. We didn’t intend to get it wrong —that’s the last thing in the world we wanted to do.” It is important to say very early on that only serious offences should get to the IPCC. The Home Secretary and I were just telling each other that we will need to table a lot of amendments in Committee to remove the word “commission”. Further amendments will also be tabled.

The Bill is not perfect. I could accuse Labour Front Benchers of moaning, but I will not—I am trying to work collaboratively. The fire service needs to work more closely with the police, the ambulance service, the coastguard and other emergency services. We need to make sure that we get more for the taxpayers’ buck. [Interruption.] That is enough chuntering from Labour Front Benchers. Let us see what we can get.

Rather than address what is coming from Labour Front Benchers at the moment, I will address some of the points that were made during the sensible part of the debate. Mental illness is no different from any other illness, and it must be treated as such. For too many years, the police force has been used as the first, rather than last, point of call. Even though police officers are well trained and do good work on our behalf, they are not mental health professionals. They are also not experts on many other conditions, including learning difficulties. Sometimes we have to use them to provide a place of safety, but that should not be the case. Unless we actually put a stop to that and say, “Enough is enough,” we will not get the provision we need from other agencies. That is a really important part of the changes. The firearms changes have been needed for some considerable time, and we can work together on those.

I say to the Scottish National party that we will work closely with the Scottish Parliament. There was no consensus at all among political parties on the Silk commission, which is why we are in the position we are in. There was no consensus on the Silk commission between the Labour party in Wales and the Labour party in this House, so how could we have got consensus on the matter? As we go into Committee, let us work on what we can work on to try to make the Bill better. Let us not decry our emergency services and say that they cannot work together, because they can.

[Andy Burnham]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mike Penning]

No; I am going to conclude. On that point, in a debate that has been particularly important, let us make sure that we deliver what the public sent us to do, rather than sitting here and moaning at each other.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read a Second time.

Policing and Crime Bill (Programme)

Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 83A(7)),

That the following provisions shall apply to the Policing and Crime Bill:

Committal

(1) The Bill shall be committed to a Public Bill Committee.

Proceedings in Public Bill Committee

(2) Proceedings in the Public Bill Committee shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion on Thursday 14 April.

(3) The Public Bill Committee shall have leave to sit twice on the first day on which it meets.

Proceedings on Consideration and up to and including Third Reading

(4) Proceedings on Consideration and proceedings in legislative grand committee shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion one hour before the moment of interruption on the day on which proceedings on Consideration are commenced.

(5) Proceedings on Third Reading shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion at the moment of interruption on that day.

(6) Standing Order No. 83B (Programming committees) shall not apply to proceedings on Consideration and up to and including Third Reading.

Other proceedings

(7) Any other proceedings on the Bill (including any proceedings on consideration of Lords Amendments or on any further messages from the Lords) may be programmed.—(Jackie Doyle-Price.)

Question agreed to.