Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Sarah Newton Excerpts

Monday 12th September 2011 Commons Chamber

I fully understand why my hon. Friends seek to promote the amendment and I fully understand that they do not wish the power of determination about who should be on the panels to be in the hands of another county, as they see it, but I hope they will be reassured by the important checks provided by the Home Secretary’s having to approve the amendments and by the geographical balance provision. I believe that we have acted in a way that will meet the concerns of people in Cornwall about being properly represented on the panels. On the basis of that reassurance and on the understanding that the Secretary of State will address these issues in the approval of schemes, I ask my hon. Friends to withdraw the amendments.

[Sarah Newton (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)]

I very much appreciate my right hon. Friend’s reassurance and his answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice) earlier. We like to have a lot of confidence that our colleagues in Devon will act in the honourable way that the Minister has described, but can we have an absolute assurance from him that if that were not the case, the Secretary of State would intervene to make sure that Cornwall had its fair representation on the panel?

[Nick Herbert]

I am happy to reassure my hon. Friend that were proposals brought forward that did not give that proper, balanced county representation on the panel, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State would not be happy with those proposals. It is quite clear that Parliament’s intention in promoting these amendments is to ensure a proper geographical balance. The changes are being made precisely and explicitly because there are situations in unitary authorities where that would not be achieved. If there were any attempt to subvert that by nominating members in a way that did not reflect the proper geographical balance, my right hon. Friend would not feel able to approve such a scheme. I hope that my hon. Friend is reassured by those comments, but the Government stand ready to meet her and other Members of Parliament from Cornwall, and the leader of Cornwall council if that is appropriate and he wishes it, to reassure them. Had the Bill not been amended, I would have fully understood the depth of their concerns, but I believe that the amendments address them.

On the Opposition’s amendments about the appointment and dismissal of chief officers, I have explained the changes that we have made and proposed on this issue. Important safeguards are being put in place and will be put in place through regulations. The Opposition suggest that even though the panel will already be required to scrutinise the proposed dismissal of a chief constable and even though the police and crime commissioner will be required to consider the panel’s recommendation, the panel should also be able to block the dismissal. I understand that that would be the force of their amendments, but that would give the police and crime panel the power to act as judge and jury on the police and crime commissioner’s electoral mandate to set the direction of the force and to hold the chief constable to account. It would also circumvent the governance structure of the chief constable, who is accountable to the police and crime commissioner, not to the panel. In establishing police and crime commissioners, we are giving the public a strong and powerful elected representative to hold their chief constable to account. Ultimately they should be able to appoint and dismiss that chief constable, subject—in relation to dismissal—to the proper safeguards. That power is available to police authorities. It is fundamental to the reform.

I repeat that chief constables should not be appointed or removed on a whim or for improper reasons. Police and crime commissioners must take these decisions fairly and reasonably. The amendments are not the right way forward. It would create an impossible situation if, in effect, a police and crime panel were able to veto the dismissal of a chief constable who would otherwise be properly dismissed under the arrangements that we are putting in place, as well as under the existing arrangements. That would produce an impasse. No doubt the hon. Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) tabled some of the amendments in order to probe the safeguards. I fully respect that, but I hope that on reflection he will recognise that the amendment goes too far and the Government would have to resist it.

The changes that we have made will all help to bring about the much-needed democratic accountability to the public, while ensuring that the strict checks and balances that we were committed to introducing are in place, and that concerns about operational independence have been fully addressed. I am grateful for the scrutiny of the Bill in another place, which enabled us to secure a number of important amendments. I commend to the House our amendments and the approach that I have set out.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dan Rogerson]

I defer to the right hon. Gentleman, who has lived and breathed the panels for a long time.

As we have heard, in neighbouring Devon, where they still have district councils, every council will get representation on the panel, as I understand it, regardless of the huge disparities in population between some of the smaller district councils in Devon and the Cornish unitary authority and the unitary authorities in Torbay and Plymouth—the major city on our peninsula. The message coming strongly from members of the public and elected representatives—in the form of Cornwall councillors—is that they are deeply dissatisfied that this issue has not been resolved to the point where they feel that all areas are getting equal representation. I am sympathetic to that.

The Minister has set out, very helpfully, the possibility of using co-option. As my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh West (Mike Crockart) said, that has been pressed for a while, and I am delighted that the Government have responded by allowing this flexibility so that local circumstances can be accommodated. We are familiar with the police authority model—I accept that it is a different type of body—under which geographical areas are represented. We want to ensure a range of views on those bodies, and co-option has been used to ensure that people from different backgrounds, for example, are represented on those organisations. That is important. Before the census this year, people in Cornwall pressed for the opportunity to recognise their Cornish identity and for it to be enumerated in the census. I was delighted when a friend of mine sent me a picture of her son’s data-monitoring form in Hertfordshire, where they were able to circle “White, Cornish”.

I am departing from the point a little, but I am merely trying to make the point that those of us in Cornwall who are proud of our Cornish identity would not want to feel that we were being given less of an opportunity to put our point across than our neighbours in the most westerly English county, Devon. Amendment (a) would give a bit more of a steer on how the power of co-option could be used to ensure that such concerns are dealt with. I do not think that the amendment goes far enough to reassure everybody in Cornwall that there is equality of opportunity in seeking representation on the panel, but given where we are in the passage of the Bill, it is as far as we can go while still being in order, given what is in Lords amendment 80.

I want to ask the Minister about the Secretary of State’s discretion to approve or not to approve the pattern of co-option that members of a panel put to her. Clearly she could decide to reject a series of proposed co-options on the basis that they did not reflect adequately the geographical make-up of that policing area. The Minister pointed that out, helpfully, although I hope that it would not be necessary. As the hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton) said, we would hope that the members of the panel who were there as of right would seek automatically to use the power of co-option constructively to secure proper representation. Hypothetically, however, should they not do so but instead seek further to entrench the position of their communities with regard to the make-up of the panel, it would be reassuring to know that the Secretary of State could have regard to the need to secure equality and therefore reject the co-options.

However, it occurs to me that were such a panel happy not to alter the geographic balance, it might simply not put forward any co-options at all. That is the fear, although we are dealing with a hypothetical situation, and I imagine—indeed, I hope—that, as the hon. Lady said, those appointed under the Bill as it stands would not seek to do that, but would listen to our debate today and to the debate out there in the community, and would reassure people by using the power of co-option in the way that the Minister has suggested would be helpful. Therefore, my question for the Minister is: if those panels decided not to go down the co-option route, what message could be sent to say that the Secretary of State would be looking to them to act in that way? What discussions might the local authorities have among themselves prior to the constitution of the panel to address some of those concerns?

[Sarah Newton]

My hon. Friend is making a comprehensive and thorough argument for the depth of feeling of people in Cornwall. He is getting to the essence of the issue, which is that we would prefer to have our positions in Cornwall by right, along with our colleagues from Devon and the Isles of Scilly. Therefore, our great desire is to have it made crystal clear this evening—so far we have been unable to achieve this—that we will have our positions by right and that the Secretary of State will make every effort to ensure that we truly are represented fairly on that panel.

[Dan Rogerson]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. She is absolutely right, and that is the reassurance that people in Cornwall are looking for. Our amendment (a) to Lords amendment 80 is an attempt again to put on record the strength of feeling and the concerns that exist.

There is a wider point, which is that occasionally there are anomalies in legislation—this has applied to Governments historically—which, by their nature, will not apply to the vast majority of cases and are therefore not felt to be at the heart of what that piece of legislation is trying to do. However, as we—I hope—move as a country down the route of localism, where different authorities perhaps decide to take on different responsibilities and powers, it is important that we should have different ways of working locally and that legislation be drafted to take account of that. Perhaps that could be done through secondary legislation, to address specific examples such as Cornwall. I appreciate that there is a concern about time—the Minister will want to move towards the elections for police commissioners, and therefore the appointment of panels—but where only one or two specific areas are affected, following them up through such legislation might be a better approach. It might be too late to do that in this legislation, given how it is drafted, but the message for the Government generally is that, as we have different systems in different parts of the country, we should take the opportunity to pick that up and deal with them separately without holding back the overall thrust of legislation as it applies to the country as a whole.

I am grateful to the Minister for responding to that concern—he has corresponded with people back in Cornwall about the issue. However, I seek a reassurance from him that should the panel not to seek to co-opt, there will be a direction from the Secretary of State or some discussion with the local authorities involved to ensure that the debates that have taken place outside and inside this House—those that we have had this evening, as well as over previous months, in other stages of the Bill’s progress—are taken into account, so that people are reassured and we can proceed to a panel in which people can have every confidence.