Police and Justice Bill

moved Amendment No. 146: Page 107, line 1, leave out paragraph (a). The noble Baroness said: These amendmentsto page 107 would remove references to police authorities being subject to joint inspection with the Audit Commission so that they would be subject to inspection only by the new CJS Inspectorate. I argued the other day that the Audit Commission does not have the necessary skills or experience to inspect police authorities; it is the auditor of police authorities, and rightly expert in that role, which it does very well. We regard this, though, as a distinctly separate function and an essential safeguard on financial probity; we would not want these separate functions blurred. As we have said, we do not believe that Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary or the elements which will transfer to the new CJS Inspectorate have all the requisite expert knowledge to conduct police authority inspections either, as we have just been discussing, but they have a great deal more experience in this area than the Audit Commission. They have engaged in joint work with the APA and police authorities to develop and improve inspection frameworks, which have been extremely helpful. We agree that the audit activities of the Audit Commission could and should be better joined up with inspection activities to reduce duplication, but we do not think that joint inspection will necessarily achieve this. It could have the opposite effect if different sets of inspectors have different ideas about what should be inspected and how. That quite often happens. Once again, the Audit Commission should have no locus whatever in the inspection of police authorities. It is not competent to do this work. I beg to move.