Police and Justice Bill

My Lords, my noble friend told us that this was the 52nd Home Office Bill since 1997 and one is tempted to say, rudely, a fat lot they seem to have done for us. One of the points that should be made in that regard is to ask what has happened to the sort of machinery that used to exist within Government that imposed some sort of discipline on departments and encouraged them to limit the amount of legislation that they were minded to introduce. My noble friend Lord Hurd of Westwell will remember as I do that a powerful Cabinet committee was mandated to keep some sort of check on the volume of legislation—powerful enough to say to a Home Secretary, ““You’ve had your share and it really is not to your advantage nor to the advantage of your department to introduce yet another Bill””. I can imagine nothing more calculated to restore the morale of a battered Home Office than a moratorium on Bills emanating from it. I put that forward as a realistic and sensible suggestion to the noble Baroness, who is always willing to listen with great care to suggestions, wherever they come from. The Bill contains lots of bits and pieces, many of which are pretty uncontroversial, but tucked away in Schedule 2, as was mentioned by the noble Baroness opposite, are big increases in the Home Office’s powers over policing. This is not just the updating of existing powers, as the Minister suggested, but significant new powers. Take for a start the National Policing Improvement Agency. What is the purpose of the agency? It is to support implementation of the Home Secretary’s key priorities for the police. That is not what I say but what the Home Office says. I have to say to the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, that the Home Office seems in no doubt as to who will own the agency. In its eyes it will be the Home Secretary’s enforcement arm to enable him to get the policing he wants. That is the agency’s aim and mandate. Schedule 2 hands to the Home Secretary sweeping powers to give directions to police authorities and to chief constables as to how to run their forces. Paragraph 24 of Schedule 2 gives the Secretary of State power to determine strategic priorities for policing. Paragraph 26 gives him power to direct a chief constable to take specific measures without reference even to the police authority, a matter referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Henig. The latter, I understand, was a proposal rejected by Parliament when it appeared in the Police Reform Bill in 2002. I am not certain about that, but I have a memory that it appeared then. Everyone said, ““What nonsense””, and that was the end of that. We must be very careful with this Government because, stealthily, they are inclined to reintroduce proposals dismissed with contempt only a few years before. We should be quite clear that what the Government are trying to thrust on us is not just regional forces but regional forces subject to greater control by the Home Office. The Bill fundamentally alters the present balance of the tripartite arrangement. As for police amalgamations, 12 years ago Mr Blair seems to have recognised the dangers of what the Government are now doing. He said:"““A wholesale amalgamation of the smaller police services will remove local policing further from local people””." He could see then, as we can see now, that if you create a police force that is responsible for an area twice or three times as big as the area covered by each of the forces that it replaces and you increase the membership of the police authority from 17 to, say, 23, many local communities, some of which may have special policing needs, will be completely unrepresented on the authority and there will be less public accountability. At the same time, it is obvious that a few regional forces will be far more easily controlled by the Home Office than the present 43. The Government have talked a great deal about community policing. I am certainly in favour of that. However, often what they call increased accountability at local level is not really accountability, but consultation. One should not confuse the two terms. Local officers will not be accountable in the true sense to local people. Rightly, they will remain accountable to their superiors. What needs reinforcing first and foremost is accountability at leadership level. Whether or not there will be effective accountability must depend on the structure and functions of police authorities. It is surely not right that the Secretary of State should seek the power under paragraphs 3, 10 and 11 of Schedule 2 to have those matters determined by order. I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, about that. How police authorities are composed and what powers they should have should remain a matter for primary legislation. I think that there is a strong case for their being directly elected, as the Government proposed in 2003, but that is another matter. The cost of the proposed amalgamations has been a great worry, not least because of the Home Office’s repeated changes of position. The Government’s original offer had a flavour of blackmail about it. Last December’s letter to the APA stated that only those police authorities volunteering to merge their forces by 23 December would get extra money to help them to do so. The extra money would be taken away from those who were not agreeable to mergers or not prepared to make decisions on the ridiculously tight timetable set by the then Secretary of State. The Government’s present stance is very different. They say that they will pay all the net set-up costs, but only after savings, which they will not or cannot specify. Small wonder that there are rumours of an increase in the number of community support officers to allow for savings as a result of a reduction in the number of constables. In the police and in the police authorities, there is widespread opposition to what is proposed. In fact, only one amalgamation, that of Cumbria and Lancashire, has been agreed by both police authorities concerned. There have been court proceedings to try to stop the Home Secretary’s plans and Labour Back-Benchers are, we are told, plotting rebellion when the order or orders come before the Commons. Judging by the polls, the public have no liking for the proposed amalgamations either. They want not new names for the forces responsible for their safety but a new war against violent crime, which has nearly doubled under Labour, and a new war against gun crime, which has almost doubled under Labour. It is no good the Minister trotting out the same old statistics about an overall reduction in crime. Some of the crime of which people are most frightened has increased the most. I have just cited two very good examples. Why should the public not be sceptical about the supposed advantages of larger forces? They read the papers and can see that some of the bigger forces apparently perform the worst. Dr Reid himself comes from a part of the country where the pressures are all for the break-up of large forces, such as Strathclyde, because they are inefficient and unresponsive to the public.  We are told by the Home Secretary that, after nine years of Labour government, a big chunk of the Home Office, the IND, has been rendered unfit for purpose. The IND, and with it firm and fair immigration controls, seems to have taken a beating from Labour. I will pass no comment on what is going on in the rest of the Home Office but, from what I hear, it is suffering strains and a loss of confidence that was not obvious when I was there, serving under my noble friend Lord Hurd and, later, as Secretary of State. Surely, in those circumstances, the new Home Secretary is entitled to say, ““I need time to sort out the mess that I have inherited and, for the moment, I will shelve new ventures””. The only other thing that I want to say about the Bill relates to extradition. The Bill gives us the opportunity to revisit the Extradition Act 2003. The position that the Government have got themselves into is truly extraordinary. The treaty signed with the United States was unfair, because it was not reciprocal, but even that unfair treaty has not been ratified by the US. Yet, in December 2003, the Government proceeded to implement the Act by designating the USA under Sections 71 and 84, thus relieving the American authorities of the need to show, in the case of a request for extradition, evidence sufficient to show a case to answer. What is worse, the new power given to the American authorities seems to have been used to extradite not terrorists, but British businessmen whose acts about which complaint is made were committed in Britain but have not attracted the adverse attention of the British authorities. The present position is quite unsustainable. I hope that the Bill does not leave this place without our concerns being properly addressed.