Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Nigel Mills Excerpts

Monday 13th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this important debate on a Bill that will fulfil many Conservative manifesto commitments, namely electing police commissioners and tackling the antisocial behaviour that is caused by excessive drinking in some of our towns. It is a pleasure to follow the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee for the second time in a week. I found myself losing concentration thinking how wonderful it would be to be able to summon Batman to tackle the crime in our towns, but I sense that that solution is not possible.

I will start with the less high-profile measures in the Bill and leave police commissioners for the end of my small amount of time. Even areas such as mine, which lack a large city and its attendant problems, face the problems of alcohol-induced antisocial behaviour in the early mornings; people finding back routes home from the pub that take them past people’s houses, where they disturb people with their noise; and people’s frustration when they are not allowed to object to a licence because a vicinity test does not quite work. The reforms on those matters are greatly to be welcomed.

We must be careful that in the well-meaning attempt to tackle these problems, we do not create a different problem or use the proverbial sledgehammer to crack the nut. An example is the late-night levy, which is an important measure and a great tool for councils. My understanding of the Bill is that if a council such as mine introduces the late-night levy, it has to do so for the whole borough. My seat contains three towns, so all three towns would be included and not just the one where there might be a problem. We could therefore end up imposing a provision that is not required on establishments that are completely responsible and in areas where there is no issue to be tackled. Perhaps that point can be addressed in Committee so that the words achieve what we want them to.

[Andrew Griffiths]

rose—

[Nigel Mills]

I am sorry, time is too limited.

Police commissioners, as the hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard) said, are not something that one reads about and at once thinks, “Oh, marvellous.” People do not come to our surgeries and say that they want a police commissioner by May 2012. However, when one works through the ideas and looks at the problems that we are trying to tackle, it is clear that constituents feel divorced from the police. Perhaps unfairly, they think that the police are not accountable to them and are not doing what people want. In comparison, people are usually quite happy with the safer neighbourhood team with which they associate. There is a general view that the police are happily sitting behind desks or racing around in cars, rather than doing policing. That is a real problem that we need to tackle, because we all believe in policing by consent.

No one is arguing that we do not need some kind of authority or body to hold the police to account. We would not want to leave it to the chief constable to do whatever he felt like. We all accept that there have to be policing priorities. We cannot have police everywhere doing everything on every issue all the time. It is right that when difficult choices have to be made, there is some democratic accountability.

No Member has argued tonight that police authorities are a great success. I imagine that most of my constituents would struggle to name a single member of their police authority, and I do not recall an election leaflet saying, “This guy’s been on the police authority for the past four years. Hasn’t it been terrible? You should vote him out because of his record on that”. It just does not happen.

Nobody appreciates or values what police authorities do, and despite the costly newspaper that appears through my door every so often, nobody really understands what on earth they are for. There is a vacuum, and I cannot imagine that the way to fill it is through each district electing its own commissioner and all of them coming together to try to agree on something. I cannot see that working. The right answer has to be to elect an individual whom the public will recognise. People will understand that that is the person who is there to be accountable and to whom they can complain. That is the person to blame, who can set the strategy that the police force will follow. People will know that if it does not work, they can vote that person out four years later. That has to be the right way forward.

I do have some concerns about the electoral system for police commissioners included in the Bill. It is a bit strange that we will have a referendum next year to decide how we elect our MPs, yet we have jumped almost to the other side of that debate in the Bill. I might have preferred us to use the same electoral system for commissioners as for MPs. That would be far more understandable for the public.

I understand the argument that the method proposed will ensure that we do not end up with an extremist person having a commissioner’s power by mistake on a flukily low vote, but frankly, I would trust the people of Derbyshire not to end up in that situation. Those of us who represent a seat where there are British National party councillors can be a little nervous about that, but we can trust the people to elect a responsible person as commissioner. They will see that it is a very important job, and it will be valued, so I do not think people will do unfortunate things with their vote.

I wholeheartedly welcome the Bill. It meets a whole load of the promises that we made at the election, and it will be a great step forward in bringing the police back closer to the people. We should all welcome that wholeheartedly.