Policing and Crime Bill

My Lords, I am happy to follow the noble Viscount and agree with him that many of the provisions in the Bill would be very difficult to enforce. Similarly, the noble Earl, Lord Rosslyn, pointed out in his most thought-provoking speech how difficult it will be for the police to enforce some of those measures where policing powers meet child protection powers. I hope that the whole House, including the Minister, listened very carefully to what the noble Earl, with his 29 years of experience in the Met, had to say about these issues. Even though the police are paid by us to deal with these difficult problems, I have great sympathy with them on this one in particular. That having been said, I have no declarations of interest, save in the subject itself, although I am interested in finding out just how much the many criminal justice-related measures pushed through your Lordships' House and another place, of which this is but the latest in a list that now reaches 66, have cost. Tens of millions of pounds of Civil Service and drafting time must have been spent in their preparation, money which might well have been spent on the front line in policing, or the front line in childcare and other social service and agency work. I suspect that if I put down a Question to this end, or tabled Written Questions concerning each individual Bill, Answers there would come back to me that the level of cost could be provided only at disproportionate cost, so I shall not trouble the Treasury. It would be the same if I asked for an evaluation of the effectiveness of each criminal justice measure. However, the Minister does owe it us to tell us how much the preparation of this Bill by hard-working Home Office civil servants, who have too often been too freely traduced, has cost in pounds sterling. I look to him to do that; it is a perfectly proper question. I spare him my follow-up question, however, regarding its likely effectiveness. I turn instead to just two examples of why the Bill will largely be ineffective—public accountability and alcohol misuse in public places. On the first point, in Part 1, on the duties now proposed for police authorities to have regard to public views of policing, we have a classic case before your Lordships of a great waste of public money and Civil Service time as the Bill has proceeded through Parliament thus far. I take as my text whatever Robert Peel more or less said to the effect that the police are the public and the public are the police. Police forces by definition have to take good account of the public and public views all the time, and doubtless would do so even more if they had any time left over from trying to digest the latest legislative offering in the blizzard of 66 Bills that has hit them around the head since 1997. The Inspectorate of Constabulary equally knows well that it must look to the public interest in that respect during its inspections. No police authority can be effective without taking into account public views. At least the Government have been forced to drop the idea of elected police authorities, originally proposed in this measure. A silver stake needs to be permanently driven into the political heart of that line of thinking. Such bodies, to cite but three of many points, would first of all have encouraged confrontational politics in an area in which—as in the running of our Armed Forces, as the noble Lord knows—they are not needed and would be damaging. At worst, they might have led to the taking over of police authorities by single-issue extremist groups—you know, "BNP for better policing", or whatever—which we would deplore. Finally, as elections tend to do, they might have produced local authorities in one form of political control and a police authority in another, when we need strong local co-operation not local conflict. Having an interest in these sorts of issues, I looked around me in the area where I live to try to find someone from the Labour Party to discuss this issue with in the pursuit of proper political dialogue and discourse. In my part of the West Country we have county council elections tomorrow. I can find Liberals all over the place, much to my regret, but there is absolutely no one who can be my counterpart in such a dialogue from the Labour Party. There are no Labour candidates of any sort on any ballot paper for hundreds of square miles around the area where I am seated, as they used to say in your Lordships' House, in the West Country. It is as though some party-selective neutron weapon had carefully targeted the Labour Party in the south-west. It is a terrible position to find that party in. All that we now have left of the original damaging proposal to have elected police authorities is a fig-leaf to cover the retreating idea originally coined by our equally retreating Home Secretary—that police authorities must now just have regard to the public reviews on policing. Either this is a mere pious exhortation—and the right reverend Prelate knows that pious exhortations do not do much good—that will be left lying dormant on the face of an eventual Act, perhaps subject to some time and money-consuming box-ticking exercise by the inspectorate; or, if that is not the case and this is actually going to be a live measure, do the Government expect full-bore consultation exercises to underpin this duty? If so, who is going to pay for them, and how much? What a diversion of police time and activity that would be in the process, in its turn, of the invariably costly displacement activity that such consultation processes turn out to be, as the same old so-called stakeholders are gathered around the same old meeting tables to discuss the design of the next paradigm shift, or whatever the impenetrable public service jargon turns out to be on that particular day. It would be much better if there were an elected police commissioner in each area—truly accountable—to whom people could complain directly; someone subject to rerun provisions, who could ensure the open and transparent publication of crime statistics ward by ward with the sort of regular open meetings that are real consultation and not phoney stakeholder consultation. What is Labour’s view on that? We do not know because the review commissioned last year by the outgoing Home Secretary from one of her predecessors, Mr David Blunkett, into police accountability has not yet appeared. I ask the Minister why the delay, because when it was announced in a blaze of publicity before Christmas, this review of police accountability by Mr Blunkett was promised to inform policy-making "before the next election". Had the new Home Secretary better not ask Mr Blunkett to get his reviewing skates on in case he misses the last chance to shine in this context? I turn to my second and last illustration. The Bill represents a waste of Civil Service and police time. I just look at one clause in Part 3, Clause 27 on alcohol abuse. We all know that there is an alcohol problem—at least outside your Lordships’ House. We know that alcohol is about two-thirds more affordable than it was when Labour came to power, with own-brand beer in some supermarkets being cheaper than imported French mineral water per litre sold. That is a remarkable state of affairs, both in terms of the availability of alcohol and in the curious cultural habit that makes people want to spend so much money on water. Alcohol is not just an issue for the city centres, where half the crimes of violence are very often alcohol-related; it is also so in some market towns and rural areas. Indeed, in my own part of the West Country when some local dwellers get well cidered up it can present a considerable problem for those living in the area. Against all this, just what good will the legislation do? I take one example: Clause 27—already highlighted so clearly by my noble friend Lady Hanham in her penetrating speech—increases the penalty for consuming alcohol in a designated public place. Will the Minister guarantee to me tonight that that provision will reduce alcohol-related crime? What is it intended to do? As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich said, what difference does upping the ante by so many thousand pounds actually do? It does nothing. It is just like provisions introduced with a fanfare, photo calls and all the rest of the spin-driven approach to law and order issues that has been the hallmark of this Administration since 1997. Does the Minister expect this provision to make a whit of difference? If so, how? He is always very straightforward in responding to noble Lords. I have asked him a direct question. I will happily give way now if he would like me to, so that he can explain to your Lordships—in the time for my speech—how this increase in a level of fines is going to stop drunkenness. No, he wishes to reflect on this issue and respond to me in his wind-up speech. I wait with pleasure for that. Will the Minister explain why—by January, this year at least—under earlier criminal justice legislation there has not yet been one designation of the alcohol disorder zones that the Home Office introduced not long ago? Here is alcohol disorder being a great problem—all that is in this Bill—and it is going to be got rid of by increasing a fine from this level to that level. Why has previous legislation that is on the statute book not even been used to deal with these issues? I am lost for an explanation, but I know that the noble Lord will explain it all to me with great clarity. This is a power to tackle anti-social behaviour that will be introduced with a fanfare and then briskly forgotten. Why? It is because the police have no time to use their panoply of powers. Despite five red-tape reviews, less than 20 per cent of police time is spent on front-line activities now. When the noble Lord was in the armed services, he did not have every operational decision of his smothered in red tape; he led people who were getting on with the job, and he led them well from all that I hear. I only wish that some who inhabit the fortified bunker—and it is fortified—of New Scotland Yard would leave its walls and share at night the walk home with me from your Lordships' House along Victoria Street. A few yards across the road, and also by the piazza in front of the cathedral, within sight of the windows of New Scotland Yard, there are to be found young and old rough sleepers, very often as much in need of help and preventive work as anything else, as the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, has taught over the years, including from the mental health world. On other occasions there is behaviour connected with alcohol abuse. But it is quite clear that, in this respect, unused provisions from earlier Acts will not help to clean up Victoria Street 20 yards away from New Scotland Yard—and it is pretty shaming on the Metropolitan Police that such conditions exist 20 yards away—nor will provisions such as Clause 27, which are a waste of legislative time and will by extra burdens reduce even further police effectiveness. Lastly, why does the noble Lord not say what he really thinks about all this legislation in his usual blunt-spoken way? He certainly would not be at any risk at all if he stood up and told your Lordships what I suspect he really thinks. He is perfectly safe in his post—after all, he is one of the last Ministers left standing in the Government and there seems to be no one to replace him here in your Lordships’ House. Indeed, I am sorry to say that with his commanding bearing, clarity of voice and clear-sightedness, he is in grave risk of becoming the next Home Secretary. I think that it would be much better, whether he or someone else is Home Secretary in the future, if they encouraged the police to apply such laws as are already on the statute book, did not introduce a further legislative avalanche and looked for ways of lifting the burdens preventing the police from putting the front line first. That could help to deal practically with some of the problems that the Bill tries to deal with in a theoretical, seminar-room, legislative way rather than the practical way that many noble Lords on all Benches have pointed out this afternoon.