Policing and Crime Bill

There has been some confusion over separation in this legislation—in how it deals with the agreements between forces or police authorities. It has been suggested that such a separation indicates that police forces cannot engage with their authorities and come to agreements with them about the details of the collaborative work that they want to do. This divide is not new; it is also in the current legislation. Both the current and new provisions provide for separate agreements to preserve the important distinctions between the functions of forces and authorities. It would not have made sense to confer power on chief officers to agree matters relating to the exercise of functions by their police authority, and vice versa. Neither would it have made sense for two chief officers to decide how they are to be held to account. These two groups will be signing up to wholly different agreements, reflecting their own responsibilities. However, this is not to say that authorities and forces will not work together to ensure effective collaboration. In practice, a substantial collaborative enterprise normally involves both kinds of agreement in parallel. These new provisions continue to support agreements in which all the parties come together and sign up to an arrangement where each agrees to their specific role. The wording of the amendment is intended to ensure that police authorities will always be party to agreements by their forces when police force collaboration plans impose a legal liability on them. Under the provisions that we are bringing in, police authorities will have to be involved in all police force collaboration agreements. Under Section 23(6) they must approve all police force agreements. Therefore, they will need to approve any liability imposed upon them. They will also need to consider their own agreements to facilitate jointly the force collaboration. Under new Section 23D the authorities must agree on the arrangements to be followed to ensure that accountability for the force collaboration will be delivered, and must publish those arrangements alongside the details of the collaboration agreement. The agreement between the forces and the agreement between the authorities will most likely take the form of a single collaboration document that satisfies the legislation in both the current Section 23 and the new provisions. There is no need to specify that both sorts of agreement can be combined in a single document but this practice will no doubt continue and indeed will be provided for in example agreements that will be included with the supporting guidance that we intend to publish. On the basis of this assurance that the intention of the amendment is already served by the draft provisions, I ask that it be withdrawn.