Police and Justice Bill

My Lords, I must first declare an interest as a former chair and now president of the Association of Police Authorities. I was thus fully involved in the consultations arising from the Green Paper Building Safer Communities Together and from the White Paper Building Communities, Beating Crime, which were the precursors of this Bill. This Bill takes the process of police reform further forward, in directions that I warmly welcome. The emphasis on delivering neighbourhood policing across the country, increasing local accountability and the involvement of local people in policing issues, and progressing workforce modernisation will surely be welcomed by all members of this House. I strongly support the Government’s avowed aims of community empowerment, combating anti-social behaviour and seeking to embed in the delivery of policing a culture of continuous improvement, although I am not fully convinced that the means, as set out in some of the proposed legislation, will contribute as effectively to those outcomes as they could do, for reasons that I shall explain shortly. First, however, I would like to welcome the establishment of the National Policing Improvement Agency. It is always a good sign when different agencies all claim the parentage of an original idea. In this case, both ACPO and the APA can show that they began pressing for such a body at least a couple of years ago. The establishment of a genuinely tripartite body, at arm’s length from the Home Office, whose primary aims are to promote good practice and steadily to improve the quality of the police service, is an important step in the ongoing police reform programme. Government Ministers and their departments—particularly the Home Office in the case of policing, as hinted earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Hurd—cannot themselves deliver improved services. They can establish strategic frameworks and set priorities, but delivery takes place at street level, in local neighbourhoods or across police boundaries. Operating within the Government’s strategic remit, the NPIA has the chance to establish itself as a powerful body, provided that it is owned and driven by forces and police authorities, as the noble Lord, Lord Harris, argued earlier, and provided that it generates a culture of strong professionalism, diversity and continuous improvement. If it achieves success, it will serve as a powerful model for other service providers in the public sector. I want to move on to the crucial issue of accountability, and in particular local accountability. I have always had a passionate belief that policing must be locally accountable, and must be seen to be so in our democratic and pluralist society. I have no problem with the Home Secretary formulating an annual community safety plan and setting strategic priorities for policing. However, within that strategic framework, each force and each senior officer team should be able to tailor their delivery to meet local needs and objectives, and should be held locally to account for their performance. I welcome the provisions in this Bill that strengthen that local accountability, by underlining the managerial role of police authorities not only in maintaining an efficient and effective police force, but additionally in holding their chief officer to account for the exercise of his or her functions and thus for the overall performance of the force. Police authorities have been one of the unsung success stories of the past 11 years, and it has always surprised me that the Conservative Party, which brought them into being, has never claimed any credit for the undoubted step change that has taken place in the performance of police authorities since 1995. The addition of independent members with particular financial, IT or human resources skills, one-fifth of whom are now drawn from ethnic minority communities, has given police authorities much greater effectiveness and focus. They should now be required to operate at force level, not just to hold their chief officer team to account on behalf of local people, as the Bill proposes, but to promote diversity and good community relations, to secure co-operation with neighbouring forces to tackle level 2 crime, to set strategic direction, and to consult local people about local policing priorities. At present, as the noble Lord, Lord Harris, pointed out, these last four functions are not spelt out on the face of the Bill, although interestingly they are for the Northern Ireland Policing Board. They are to be covered in secondary legislation, as are a whole host of matters relating to the composition and running of police authorities. I know that this is of great concern to many members of the APA and of ACPO, who believe that proceeding in this way is seriously undermining the tripartite nature of policing and moving away from the localism agenda by concentrating too much power in the Secretary of State. I understand the need to enable the Government to have the flexibility to respond to anticipated structural changes, but I am also mindful of the fact that, 12 years ago, I and large numbers of others, including some in this Chamber today, argued strongly against the proposals of the then Home Secretary, Michael Howard, that he should appoint all chairs of police authorities. I believed then, and continue to believe, that police authorities should appoint their own chairs and vice-chairs. I believe that this should be written into Schedule 2 to the Bill, alongside the provision that the majority of members of the police authority should be councillors. I would also like to see some reference to the need for the political balance of the authority councillor membership to reflect the police authority area as it has to do now, which has given authorities much greater political legitimacy in their areas. Managerial accountability at force level needs to be reinforced by local accountability or answerability at divisional level, which is why I strongly support the proposals in this Bill to enable local people to raise police issues with their councillor, and to have them considered by local overview and scrutiny committees and the CDRP, alongside scrutiny of divisional policing strategies and the work of the local crime and disorder reduction partnership. However, that will raise problems in two-tier areas such as mine, for which the Home Office’s review has suggested a separation of strategic and delivery functions for CDRPs, with strategy and funding going to the county level to deliver the safer and stronger communities element of local area agreements. If local community safety priorities and funding for local projects are not set and allocated at district level, what ability will council overview and scrutiny panels, and the people who bring issues to them, have to bring about any change? I must declare an interest here as vice-chair of my local community safety partnership. Stripping it of the ability to set strategic local priorities seems to me to undermine the locality agenda. Lancaster district, along with two or three other districts in Lancashire, was strongly supportive of community support officers and used CDRP funding to pay the constabulary to employ extra officers in its area. The county council left it to district councils to decide whether they were willing to do that, and many chose not to. We also spent a lot of money on an innovative one-stop domestic violence centre to help victims. I fear that in the future we shall lose the ability to exercise such local choice, unless in two-tier areas such as mine the local area agreements are administered in a more localised way. Finally, I would like to comment on the two issues of inspection and intervention. I am generally supportive of the Government’s aim to streamline the inspections framework and to join up inspection across the criminal justice sector. However, I take this opportunity to put the spotlight not on the prisons inspectorate but on the police inspectorate. I would like to place on record the appreciation of police authorities for all the encouragement, advice and help that Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Constabulary have given to them over the past few years. The wise counsel of successive HMIs was invaluable to me when I was chair of Lancashire Police Authority, and I thank them all. I hope that, in the new structure, this unfailing source of support will not be lost to police authorities and that HMIs can continue as impartial and dispassionate advisers to both authorities and forces. Not before time, this Bill proposes that police authorities should be inspected alongside forces. I think that the principle is right, but, in practical terms, alongside the criminal justice inspectors and the Audit Commission I would like to see on the inspection team one or two lay members who have served on police authorities and who can add value to the process. They may well play an important mediating role and be able to reconcile what might otherwise be the rather different approaches of the two professional bodies. In the rare cases where inspections of forces or of authorities reveal serious systemic weaknesses that are clearly not being addressed, I am supportive of the inspectorate having the power to trigger a direct intervention by the Secretary of State, via the police authority. However, the Bill goes much further than this and proposes to give the Home Secretary the unilateral right to intervene if he or she believes that there is a serious problem relating to a force or authority. The Bill does not specify the nature of the evidence on which the Home Secretary would come to his or her judgment, and does not provide that there should first be the need to consult HMI, or ACPO and the APA, which would at least be consistent with the spirit of the tripartite relationship. Such wide discretion on such a sensitive issue worries me greatly given that we will have the NPIA, an inspectorate, the Audit Commission, the standards unit in the Home Office, the APA and ACPO, all dedicated to the improvement of policing. In practice, as we saw even in the Humberside situation, the resolution of difficult issues can be carried out effectively only in partnership between local and national agencies, and the Bill’s provisions, if they are to improve matters and not make them worse, have to reflect that reality. I strongly support the Bill’s main thrust, but I believe that some of its detailed provisions will need to be carefully considered in Committee. I want to ensure two things above all else: that we maintain and strengthen the tripartite approach to policing that all partners say that they wish to support—I was pleased to hear my noble friend Lady Scotland reaffirm that point earlier in the debate—and that we enable forces, police, local authorities and the NPIA to have the freedom within the Government’s strategic framework to deliver the high quality, wide range and diversity of local services from which we will all benefit.