Police and Justice Bill

My Lords, another day, another Home Office Bill. The Violent Crime Reduction Bill has not even reached Report yet. The noble Lord, Lord Bassam of Brighton, who has been dealing with it, tells us to give it time. It sounds as though it will have until October. I am told by the Library that this is the 52nd Home Office Bill since the Government came to power in 1997. The noble Baroness gave a careful introduction. As always, she gives the House a very fair reflection of the Government’s view on these matters. A few of the Bill’s proposals will make some modest improvements, and noble Lords on the Conservative Benches will certainly support those, for example, the new powers to tackle child pornography, the increased sentences for computer hacking and the extension of provisions about parenting contracts. The latter will be dealt with from the Conservative Benches by my noble friend Lord Bridgeman. We felt that another place did not have time to give sufficient consideration to those matters. However, we have serious concerns about four issues in particular: police mergers; the increase in the Home Secretary’s powers to interfere in operational policing; the merging of the Inspectorate of Prisons with other criminal justice inspectorates; and our extradition arrangements with the United States. The Bill maintains an unfortunate trend of increasing government direction of the police. It aims to prepare police authorities for the Government’s proposed regional police forces. It does not itself propose police amalgamations; the Government have said that they will go ahead with those using secondary legislation under the Police Act 1996. We shall table amendments that will put the debate about the Home Secretary’s proposal for merging police forces at the very heart of our consideration of Part 1 of the Bill. I believe that the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, said in her opening remarks that it was right for the Home Secretary—after all, he has been in post for only a couple of weeks or so—to take a little time to consider the details. I hope that the new Home Secretary will delay laying any statutory instruments until full consideration has been given to these matters during the passage of the Bill. In her reply, I hope that the noble Baroness will be able to give an undertaking to that effect. In the 1960s, when police force amalgamations were last considered, a Royal Commission was established which took two years to report. Legislation was introduced a year later. It was recognised that the structure of police forces is a fundamental issue on which the public, the forces themselves and their authorities need to be properly consulted. Our worry is that the way in which the Government are proceeding could not be more different. The previous Home Secretary’s proposals to amalgamate forces were announced last September, and gave forces just four months in which to respond. In the words of the Labour chairman of the Association of Police Authorities, he attempted to ““bully and bribe”” authorities to agree to his proposals and to meet the deadline, a tactic that backfired spectacularly when not one authority submitted. In February, the Home Secretary again gave police authorities an ultimatum, this time to submit proposals for voluntary mergers within just three weeks. Again, almost all the authorities concerned refused, but the Home Secretary announced that he would proceed with compulsory amalgamations regardless. At that stage, he rejected the alternative proposals put forward by the police. The police were not against modernisation and they were not against improvements; for example, Bob Quick, who is the chief constable in my own area of Surrey, has argued that police forces could improve their efficiency by sharing services. I agree with him. That would be a better way forward. The report of Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary, Denis O’Connor, on which the Government are relying, said:"““The constitutional implications . . . are significant””." We are now being asked to agree that similar order-making powers be given to the Home Secretary through this Bill to allow him to alter the structure and functions of police authorities. It is hardly surprising that the chairman of the Association of Police Authorities, Mr Bob Jones, has expressed alarm at the provisions. He said:"““The Home Secretary is now proposing to give himself power to change the role and membership of local authorities . . . and the bodies which represent them. Only Parliament, not the Home Secretary, should be able to do this””." Earlier today, the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, said that the Government value the tripartite relationship and do not seek to unbalance it. We are concerned that the measures in the Bill will do just that, and we shall have to examine them extremely carefully. The Government have claimed that they have rejected the idea of a national police force, but the reorganisation is moving us steadily towards that model. Twelve police chiefs, rather than 43, would, effectively, answer to the Home Secretary and not to their local communities. The new national policing improvement agency, introduced by Clause 1, will not answer to police forces or to authorities; indeed, the Government have flatly rejected a proposal from police authorities that they should even part-fund the agency. We shall table amendments to address that defect. The Government claim that proposals in the Bill to align basic command unit and crime and disorder reduction partnership boundaries will strengthen local accountability. But the number of BCUs has reduced from around 400, when the Government came into power, to 225 today. The Government are pressing partnerships, which are currently based on district council areas, to merge. They cannot credibly claim that police accountability will be achieved through local government scrutiny when the partnerships are being altered to make them more remote from the people. The real decisions will be taken, not in the partnerships, but in Whitehall and by chief officers in regional headquarters. Inevitably, they will be less answerable to local people. I turn now to the Government’s proposals to subsume the Inspectorate of Prisons into the new, combined inspectorate for justice, community safety and custody. We are persuaded that this will compromise the independence of the Inspectorate of Prisons and should not go ahead. I look forward to hearing the detail of the arguments on this matter from the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and from my noble friend Lord Hurd. They are experts in these matters so I certainly do not intend to take up the House’s time with my less expert comments. The Bill’s technical amendments to the Extradition Act 2003 appear to be acceptable, although of course we will want to submit them to scrutiny. I was interested in how they were introduced by the Minister, who said that after two years in operation minor lacunae had come to light in the Extradition Act. We remain deeply concerned about another aspect of our extradition arrangements: the consequences of the United Kingdom/US extradition treaty. It has not been ratified by Congress. Its one-sided operation is a serious cause for concern. The treaty was sold as being necessary to deal with terrorism and serious crime; but it is being used to require the extradition of offenders who have a minimal connection with the US. My noble friend Lord Kingsland will lead for us on all debates on extradition matters. He will table amendments to restrict extradition to the US under the Extradition Act to terrorism cases, until such time as full reciprocity is granted by the US, and to put in place safeguards to ensure that, in future, extradition will not happen if the alleged crime could be tried here under domestic jurisdictions and there is no clear causal link with the US. Although our main focus, of course, will be on police reorganisation, the inspectorates and extradition, we will, as always, scrutinise carefully all measures in the Bill. For example, a number of the Bill’s proposals rely on the extension of police summary power and summary justice. Clause 15 allows conditional cautions to include punitive conditions. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick, made an important intervention earlier. Schedule 4 will allow arresting officers to set bail conditions. However, those proposals raise a number of serious issues. First, under the new bail conditions, the police alone will be able to make significant restrictions on someone’s liberty, such as by tagging and with curfews, before they have even decided that there is enough evidence to bring a criminal prosecution. The power to impose punitive conditions in cautions effectively will allow the police to act as investigator, prosecutor and judge. We will need to consider whether that is the right way forward. The Minister was absolutely right to realise that that would arouse concern. I do not wish to disappoint her and I can assure her that I used last week’s wonderful Recess to work on some amendments with our marvellous researcher, Caroline Chamberlain. They are ready to be tabled tomorrow morning for the noble Baroness’s delectation. The closest that the Bill gets to police modernisation is in Clause 4, which would allow standardisation of the powers of community support officers. The balance of the exact powers involved will need discussion in Committee, but they seem to be promising proposals. The fight against terrorism will remain at the top of the police agenda, so we welcome the power in Clause 12 to extend police search powers in airports. For the same reason, we will be open-minded about the power in that clause to gather in bulk passenger information for ship and aircraft journeys in the UK. We will want to be persuaded that that is necessary and that it will contain adequate safeguards. In his Dimbleby lecture last year, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner called for a national debate on policing, and stated:"““It is time to decide what kind of police service we want””." He was right. This is the right time to have such a debate. Important issues are at stake: the independence of police forces, how they should be accountable and how they should be organised both to accommodate the demand for neighbourhood policing and to meet the renewed threat of domestic terrorism. The Bill is not much of an answer to those questions. It reflects the Government’s continuing preoccupation with the incessant reorganisation of, and intervention in, public services. We all want to see police forces that provide value for money, instil public confidence and are effective in the fight against crime. So we will work constructively to achieve those aims throughout our scrutiny of this Bill.