Fighting Crime (Public Engagement)

I am glad that the right hon. Gentleman asked me that, because I was coming to that point. All three parties in this House are now in favour of some decentralised model. We go a little further than other parties in wanting to give police authorities stronger powers to hire and fire and to set priorities and budgets. However, we have been getting into trouble with our local councillors about this. We all need to say clearly that if we are to have genuine decentralisation—if we are to give real power locally to hire and fire a chief constable and to set a budget—then there is a quid pro quo, which is that voters must be able to hold to account the people who are exercising those powers. The indirect form of election does not work. For example, we do not have in Eastleigh a representative on Hampshire's police authority. If Hampshire's police authority is to have the power to sack a chief constable of whom it does not approve or to put up the council tax precept—in our case, of course, we would prefer it to be a local income tax—I want to be able to tell the people in my constituency that they have a buy-in, because they have been able to vote for somebody who has such powers, but at the moment they do not have that buy-in. We have to be united in telling local councils that the indirect system does not have adequate accountability to make the new devolved powers work. That brings me to the point that the right hon. Member for Leicester, East asked about. We do not approve of the Conservative proposal for a single, directly elected commissioner. If one person is elected to represent a complete and complex force area, such as the west midlands, London, Merseyside or Greater Manchester, where there are substantial minorities who each have their own view, we will not get the sort of accountability that will take care of the important and sometimes fragile relationship between the police and minority communities. That is a recipe for situations such as the Brixton riots and the sort of problems we saw in Bristol. We must not go back there. Although I agree entirely with the hon. Member for Hornchurch about the need to decentralise, for heaven's sake we need to be careful how we decentralise. We need to ensure that the system that decentralises represents the whole community, which will be policed in a natural way, and we need to ensure that the police know that they have a sounding board for their ideas and where the community's views will be genuinely represented.