Policing and Crime Bill

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich, who always manages to hit the nail on the head about what is and is not good legislation. This is the 20th Bill involving policing on which I have had the pleasure of speaking in your Lordships’ House in the 10 years that I have been here. It seems that every time we have a new Queen’s Speech, we have a number of new Bills on policing to add to the pot of the many that have gone before. I sometimes wonder whether we could more usefully spend our time consolidating these Bills rather than adding to their number. The noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, touched on that at the beginning of her speech. It would, in many ways, be far more constructive. However, here we are again. At the beginning, I should once more declare my interest. It is some time ago now, but I was for 20 years a member of my county’s police authority and for about eight years was its chair, as well as being on a number of other policing bodies—the Police Negotiating Board and the National Crime Squad Service Authority—and a deputy chair of the Association of Police Authorities, of which I am currently a vice-president. I will be speaking almost entirely on Part 1, which deals with police reform, although I will also speak briefly about gang-related violence and injunctions and touch on the retention and destruction of samples. I apologise for my voice; I have a bit of an infection. One of my first impressions on reading the Bill was that it contains a large number of wide-ranging regulation and order-making powers for the Secretary of State. We have been here many times. I had fondly hoped that this Bill would be about reducing bureaucracy, not adding to it. Why does the Secretary of State need all these powers? Many of them seem so wide that it is not clear what they are trying to achieve. Clause 3 in Part 1, which pertains to regulations about senior officers, is a good example of what I have just been saying. This clause is not precise and could be interpreted in many ways. What are the limitations on these powers? How might they be used in future? Could they be used in ways that are not intended? How many of these powers are truly necessary and, if they are so important, why are they not placed in primary legislation? It is the police authority’s role to appoint senior officers of forces and I am very concerned that the wide-ranging powers proposed for the Secretary of State could be used to water down this role and/or to increase the influence of the centre, which would fatally unbalance the tripartite structure. Significant powers for the Secretary of State already exist in Section 50 of the Police Act 1996 to make regulations about, ""government, administration and conditions of service"," so why are new powers so necessary? Does not the Government’s own Green Paper suggest that there ought to be greater devolution in policing? Then why bring in powers that seem to be designed to increase central control and micromanagement? They appear throughout the Bill and I will address them in more detail in Committee. Clause 5 is on police collaboration. The Association of Police Authorities believes strongly that an incentive-driven approach to collaboration is likely to be more effective than the direction-driven approach set out in this clause. Specifically, I note the Secretary of State’s order-making powers—yet again—to be consulted on collaboration agreements involving more than six parties. What on earth is the point of that? Surely it is not beyond the wit of police authorities and their forces to enter into joint agreements. They have been doing this for a very long time. There is clearly a fundamental misunderstanding about how these work. Most collaboration, as the APA reminds us, will involve both operational and support services; trying to separate them out into two different parts would be virtually unworkable. The powers to direct, prevent, alter or terminate collaboration agreements are wide-ranging and open to abuse, with far-reaching consequences under future Secretaries of State or Governments. It is sensible, then, to limit these powers to guard against this. How much better it would be to define powers more tightly by reference to efficiency and effectiveness and then to make them capable of being exercised following advice from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary. I shall now touch on the thorny matter of best value, another area about which I appear to have been speaking almost exclusively to myself over the years. I hope most sincerely that the Home Office will now look carefully at the possibility of producing an amendment at some stage during the passage of this Bill to achieve greater clarity in this field. Legislation surrounding best value has been amended, counter-amended and partially disapplied and then reapplied, and I wonder whether anyone understands at all where we are. This would be a wonderful opportunity to streamline the reasoning behind best value. The original aims were entirely laudable but, as I have suggested, they have somehow got lost along the way. I am sure that working with the APA and the Local Government Association would produce the clarity that we now need and I urge the Government to seek an early opportunity to be the instigator of really useful legislation. A large number of organisations have a role in the policing landscape, which can lead to confusion about who is responsible for what. I will name some of these organisations, but I am sure that your Lordships will recall others. There is the Serious Organised Crime Agency; the National Policing Improvement Agency, two branches of which I visited recently and was extremely impressed with what I saw; the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre; the National Fraud Strategic Authority; and the Forensic Science Service. Overarching all this is the Home Office and HMIC. There is a lot of policing work going on all over the country and I worry that this rather piecemeal approach to police reform can lead to confused accountability and increased centralisation by stealth. I was therefore disappointed to see yet another statutory body proposed in the form of a senior appointments panel. I will leave detailed analysis of that until Committee. I was disappointed further when there was no reference at all to the policing powers in relation to protest and disorder; we may need to address that, too, in Committee. Using injunctions to control bad behaviour is a very bad idea. In the past, as we on these Benches have predicted, ASBOs have been used inappropriately, sometimes attempting to control the behaviour of people with mental illness or people whose lifestyle choices do not appeal to the majority of citizens. It is almost inevitable that injunctions will impact disproportionately on young black and minority ethnic communities—a very bad idea. Finally, I want to mention the retention and destruction of samples under Clauses 96 to 98. My noble friend Lady Miller and the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, have raised this as a matter of grave concern. Again, I fought a rearguard action over a number of years to persuade the Government that the taking of these samples needed to be treated with diligence and, above all, seriousness. These matters should not be dealt with by secondary legislation, especially as the DNA profiles of people not convicted of any offence could be held for up to 12 years. It is imperative that Parliament scrutinises this scheme and ensures that, if amendments need to be made, they will be. That is impossible under this proposal, which should be removed from the Bill. We have a chance to modernise policing for years to come. This Bill will in part enable some of that to happen, but it needs careful amending. I look forward to playing my part in proposing some of those amendments, which I hope will lead to the improvements that we seek.