Police and Justice Bill

moved Amendment No. 56: Page 3, line 34, after ““4”” insert ““but excluding the powers contained under paragraph 2 of that Schedule”” The noble Baroness said: My Lords, I have received some excellent briefings on this amendment from the APA, the Metropolitan Police Service and HMIC. The amendment would limit the minimum powers of police community support officers to those which are below detention level. The Government are keen to standardise the powers of police community support officers so that people across the country know what common set of duties will be carried out by them and understand what to expect from them. This is a reasonable aim. The difficulty with the Government’s approach is that they are leaving themselves complete flexibility in what they might centrally prescribe by way of community support duties through secondary legislation. I expect the Minister will tell me that this flexibility is necessary to future-proof the legislation, but this is not standardisation, but centralisation. There are other practical difficulties with this approach. At present, it is the job of the chief officer of police to decide what range of duties PCSOs within his force will carry out. This means that their duties can be tailored to local policing style and that there is some variation between forces in what tasks they do or do not carry out, but that is the whole point of having local forces accountable to local people. The key roles that PCSOs play in all areas are: offering increased visibility to provide greater reassurance to the public, improving community engagement through getting to know communities and the issues that concern them, and gathering intelligence from local people about what is going on in their neighbourhoods. It is precisely because they are not quite police that they are more trusted by the sections of the community which react badly to the more authoritarian image of fully sworn police officers, yet standardising their powers in the way suggested by the Government will simply make them more like sworn officers. They risk losing these advantages and there is no clear distinction. If we are to give PCSOs standard powers, this standard should represent a set of minimum powers, with flexibility for chief officers to increase them if it is appropriate to their area. This means drawing a line in the sand about the limit of standard powers, which should be set below detention level for a number of reasons. First, if community support officers are to take on the more confrontational roles which detention powers would imply, their training will be very much longer and consequently more expensive. Secondly, if their role is expanded to include additional tasks, PCSOs could quite reasonably expect to be paid more. Both of these could add a significant additional burden to police budgets, which we know will already be under great pressure over the next few years. Thirdly, the distinction between community support officers and police officers will become more blurred, potentially leading to a loss of the trust they currently enjoy among sections of the population which feel alienated from the mainstream. This would be extremely unhelpful in the troubled times in which we live. Fourthly, having detention powers would mean that they would have to start completing more paperwork, making court appearances and so on. Time spent on this would be time they would not be on the front line providing a greater level of reassurance to, and engagement with, the public. Fifthly, expanding their role is likely to give the impression that forces are trying to recruit police on the cheap. This could have unwelcome implications both for public perception generally and for relationships with sworn officers and the organisations that represent them. Finally, we must ask what kind of people will be attracted to becoming community support officers if it is seen not to be a community-based post, but one that carries rather more authoritarian powers. Taken together, these represent a compelling set of arguments for ensuring that any standard powers are minimum powers, with the line drawn as I have described. Chief police officers will still have the ability to increase those powers if and when they feel it is necessary. For the reasons that I have outlined, it is unhelpful to prescribe greater powers for all areas. This is important for the confidence of the public in policing and deserves to be in primary legislation. I beg to move.