Police and Justice Bill

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment No. 25 in my name and, in doing so, shall comment on the points that have just been made by the noble Baroness in respect of Amendment No. 24. If you believe in the principle that police authorities should be able to set the strategic direction of police forces, part of that should be about being able to hold the chief officer of police to account for the exercise of those functions. If you do not have that provision, essentially you are saying that chief officers of police are not accountable and that there is no transparency in the way in which they choose to exercise their functions. That is very different from saying that the police authority ““shall instruct”” or ““will require”” a police chief to operate in a particular way. It is saying that chief officers of police will be accountable for the decisions that they have made. Most of the chief officers of police that I have accounted for have usually been more than capable of giving an account of themselves and explaining the reasons for the actions that they took, but it is important that under the legislation they are required to do so and that they do so publicly and transparently. That is why I believe that Amendment No. 24 is not entirely helpful. Perhaps unlike the amendments that I put forward earlier, Amendment No. 25 is intended to be entirely helpful towards the Government, as ever. Here, I am seeking to place in the Bill a requirement—meaning that it is something that police authorities will have to take very seriously—for police forces and authorities to work together wherever necessary or expedient. It is important that police authorities ensure that their forces co-operate with other forces and their partners; that should be something that police authorities do. But I believe that, by stating it explicitly in the Bill, one gives it particular force and it will ensure that we see authorities working together better than has been the experience in the past. I note that when my right honourable friend the Home Secretary withdrew from some of the proposals to create strategic police forces and put them into the long grass—I am sure that he used a more elegant phrase than that—he said very clearly that there was an expectation that there would be better collaboration and working together between police forces in neighbouring areas, not only on matters concerning level 2 crime and the sorts of strategic issues that have been of concern but on other matters—for example, in trying to reduce back-office and joint procurement costs and so on. My amendment would provide a framework essentially requiring police authorities and police forces to work together. I believe that that is in the spirit of what the Government have been seeking to do, perhaps by going slower on the question of police service mergers, and it would be helpful to the objectives that my right honourable friend has set out. Therefore, I hope that my noble friend will feel able to support the amendment in my name.