Police and Justice Bill

My Lords, I start by apologising very humbly to the House and the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, in case I am unable to stay until the very end. I have a long-standing family commitment, which I cannot really get out of. This 52nd Bill is perhaps different from the others in being the first to be produced from the Home Office against the astonishing backdrop of the remarks of the Secretary of State, Dr John Reid, to the Home Affairs Committee on 23 May. He referred to the Home Office as ““dysfunctional,””““probably needing wholesale transformation”” and"““having inadequate leadership and management systems””." He ended with ““not fit for purpose””, a phrase which will join the lexicon of catalytic political phrases such as ““a week is a long time in politics”” and ““the unacceptable face of capitalism”” which echo down the decades. On Thursday we will have a debate, put forward by my noble friend Lord Fowler, which will enable some of us to make practical offerings as to how the Home Office might be able to improve its performance. I want to make only two basic points. First, I want to say a word about this astonishing proposal to amalgamate the five inspectorates. Both sides of the House have gone into this in considerable detail, with no points of praise whatever. But, in a way, it is not astonishing—in my view, it is quite explicable—because the Home Office has always disliked criticism. Perhaps we all dislike criticism, but what the Home Office really dislikes is public criticism—and the whole function of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons must be, and has always been, to be able to publicly criticise the Home Office, the Government and the Prison Service for what is done. That is why, of course, in accordance with the best practice of ““Yes Minister””—a skill which the Home Office has in spades—the Government have decided to dilute the possibility of future criticism by putting in five different inspectors-general. So, in future, the space occupied by the inspector-general of the Prison Service will be very much diluted. I believe that this House is likely to reject the proposals for amalgamation in the Bill. If it does so, I suspect that it will be inclined to play ping-pong with the Bill and, from the way in which he has at least started, I have sufficient confidence in the new Home Secretary to believe that he will not be inclined to use the Parliament Act to force it through. I therefore think it is rather unlikely that this amalgamation will reach the statute book. The only other thing I wish to do is to give the Minister notice that I intend to bring back, after Clause 10, my earlier proposal to give the police powers to close areas and to search for guns where they think they might be found. It will be the third time that I have brought forward the proposal. The Home Office argued against it in the past but its judgment is perhaps not quite so almighty nowadays. The Home Office says that it does not like it and the police say that they do not like it, but the police do not always get it right. For a long time they opposed identity cards but have now changed their minds. The Minister said that one of the objects of the Bill is to update the existing powers of the police to ensure that they can operate successfully. On the earlier occasions on which I brought forward the proposal, it had the support of both my own party and the Liberal Democrats, and the Liberal Democrat Front Bench made some very convincing interventions. The real point of the proposal is to give a very clear public mandate for the police to do something about which the public mind enormously—that is, to control gun crime. I believe that if this power is in the Bill the public will have confidence that it can be used and will expect it to be used. This will help the police to use it, which will mean there will be less gun crime. The fact that it could also, to some extent, apply to knife crime is an added advantage. With that brief intervention in the debate, I hope the House will make substantial changes to the Bill so that when it eventually reaches the statute book it will have more credit and more success than many of its 51 predecessors.