Police and Justice Bill

I welcome much of the Bill. I just want to make a few remarks that I hope are helpful about some of the issues that are raised by different elements of the Bill and some of the fundamental questions that lie behind it. There is a fundamental dilemma for any Government who try to introduce legislation that is designed to improve police performance. That dilemma stems from the nature of the police service itself. Police officers exercise unique powers, so they need to have a unique constitutional position. We cannot consider police officers simply as we consider employees of other public services. That is equally true of the courts. To maintain public credibility, the people who take decisions in our courts also have to have their unique position recognised by Governments and legislation. That is where the dilemma comes in for Governments who try to improve police performance. If police officers, or judges and magistrates, are simply left to themselves, and their autonomy so completely respected that no one tries to set the framework in which they work, past experience is that the result is like that in other public services, namely, that services become slow and not sufficiently efficient or self-critical when it comes to performance. The challenge for the Government is to create legislation that puts sufficient of the right drivers for improved performance into the police service—and, indeed, the Courts Service—without overstepping the mark and beginning to take the decisions that it is fundamental to ensure taken by professional members of the service itself. Over the past few years, the Government have done a good job on improving police performance. When the Home Affairs Committee took evidence on police reform last year, we were told by all sides that the performance culture of the police service had been transformed at every level. Police authorities, police forces, basic command units and neighbourhood teams were much more focused on how well they were tackling crime and the fear of crime than they were five years previously, which is one of the most significant achievements to date of the Government’s reform process.