Policing and Crime Bill

Amendments 19 and 21 are the first of many amendments to deal with issues of collaboration. Their aim is to make collaboration effective. To do that, we have to make clear where the responsibility needs to lie to ensure that there is collaboration and that it does not undermine existing accountabilities. Ever since the Police Act was passed in 1996, each police authority has had a statutory duty to ensure that the police force for its area is efficient and effective. In addition, new arrangements were brought in three years ago under the Police and Justice Act, which gave a police authority the statutory duty to ensure that its force collaborates where this improves efficiency and effectiveness in policing for a wider area, not just for the area of its own force. Amendment 19 is therefore consistent with a police authority’s existing duties. Against this, it is not currently the primary duty of chief officers to determine what is efficient and effective, which the amendment makes clear. The Bill allows room for confusion to be created about who should determine efficiency and effectiveness in the context of collaboration. One would hope that disagreements about whether to collaborate would rarely, if ever, arise between a police authority and its chief officer, but if this were to happen the Bill’s wording would simply result in deadlock. Potentially, this could be fully resolved only by the police authority firing the chief officer, which would be a rather unsatisfactory resolution, not least for the chief officer. The legislation therefore needs to be clear about who has the ultimate accountability for ensuring collaboration. The amendment would achieve this by removing the reference to the chief officer’s judgment about efficiency and effectiveness. The key driver would then become the provision in the clause that follows: that a chief officer may make a collaboration agreement only with the approval of the police authority. That is consistent with current legislation. The second amendment in the group—Amendment 21, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Harris, will speak—reinforces this approach and the overarching role of the police authority to determine what is efficient and effective. I beg to move.