Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

I apologise to my noble friend for missing the preamble to her remarks. However, I think that I heard the substance of her points in what followed. I declare an interest as a vice-president of both the Association of Police Authorities and the Local Government Association. My noble friend’s amendment is extremely sensible and I make three points on it. First, it is important to ensure that the inspection regime for police authorities is proportionate to the nature of police authorities. There are far more dissimilarities between police authorities and local authorities than the statute might lead one to believe. I am not always sure that the Audit Commission understands the very different status of police authorities and the fact that many of them operate with very small numbers of staff and very small directly controlled resources as opposed to those which are delegated to the chief officers of police in their area. So the lead role of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate—the ““gatekeeper”” capacity to which my noble friend referred—is extremely important in ensuring that inspection regimes are proportionate and effective and properly reflect the nature of police authority work. My second point relates to peer review and my experience of this both in local government and on the one occasion that this was tried in the police authority world. It is a valuable and important procedure in ensuring that the review process is relevant to the authorities concerned and conveys authenticity through being conducted by people with direct first-hand knowledge of the work. For that reason the peer review element of these proposals is particularly important. Finally, because of the complexities of the legislation, which has been amended over the years by different Acts on a piecemeal basis, it is by no means clear that we will automatically see joint inspection in future. We may well end up with separate inspections or separate processes, which seems to me deeply unhelpful. I believe that the amendment addresses those three points and I therefore hope that in responding the Minister will indicate that between now and later stages of the Bill the Government will look carefully at those issues.