Policing and Crime Bill

In moving Amendment 28, I will speak also to Amendment 36A. Amendment 28 aims to put beyond doubt the arrangements about police accountability under the collaboration provisions set out in this section. It strengthens the other parts of the section, which I welcome as a genuine attempt to bring clarity to this tricky area, aiming to set out how chief officers will be held to account under collaboration arrangements. This has proved difficult in practice under existing arrangements, and it is crucially important to get this right under the new proposals. While I agree that the Bill makes a good start, I am not convinced that the existing wording adequately covers collaboration arrangements overseen by joint committees of the police authorities involved. The amendment is therefore specifically designed to address this situation. The existing wording in this clause seems merely to reiterate that a police authority holds its own chief officer to account, which is something that authorities do under existing legislation in any case. It does not seem to deal adequately with the complexities of holding to account for arrangements that extend beyond the boundary of the police authority concerned. This might occur when a force’s chief officer conducts operations in another force area under a collaboration agreement. There are difficulties in squaring this accountability circle at present. On the one hand, there is uncertainty as to whether the home authority can ask a chief officer to answer to it over conduct outside its area. On the other, there is doubt about whether the authority in whose area the officer is operating can hold him or her to account. This is generally overcome by those authorities forming a joint committee, but in the past some chief officers have questioned the authority of a joint committee to hold them to account. While joint arrangements are mentioned in subsection (3), these are oblique and do not seem explicitly to deal with accountability. Because accountability and answerability are fundamental in getting collaboration right, the arrangements to make this work in a joint context need to be clear and beyond doubt in the Bill. I beg to move.