Policing and Crime Bill

My noble friend Lady Henig is entirely right that police authorities should be able to deliver their function of holding a chief officer to account for collaborations by way of a joint committee of police authorities, as proposed in Amendment 28. Subsection (3) of new Section 23D actually encourages consideration of joint committees for this purpose. However, the Local Government Act 1972, by virtue of Sections 101(1) and 107(1)(a), already allows police authorities to delegate the discharging of their functions to joint committees of police authorities. This amendment is therefore not needed. Amendment 36A also concerns the Local Government Act and its provisions regarding the exercise of the functions of police authorities. As already noted, this Act is useful in allowing joint police authority committees to deliver accountability functions under a collaboration agreement. In this way a police authority can already deliver some of its duties jointly under the Local Government Act, such as that of holding a chief constable who is leading a collaboration agreement to account for his work on that joint endeavour. However, the principle that the police authority is ultimately responsible for policing in its own area is sound and should remain at the core of what a police authority is all about, whether it exercises that responsibility collaboratively or independently. Even in those cases where collaboration takes a lead force approach, each police authority needs to continue to be involved as the body with overall responsibility for policing of its area. There may be some merit in the suggestion which has been put forward recently by the Association of Police Authorities that some employment and procurement difficulties in collaborations might be eased by the ability to delegate to each other some of the functions relating to those areas. These are complex areas and we would not want to make any such amendment before examining the detail and the extent of any such proposal, and giving it close consideration. But I beg to suggest that this amendment is too sweeping in its wording and would allow a police authority to divest itself of any or all of its core functions. I question whether this House would support enabling one police authority to delegate to another all responsibility for holding its chief officer to account for the delivery of policing on, say, counterterrorism, or its responsibility to promote equality and diversity. I know, however, that a number of police authorities are firmly of the opinion that an amendment of some kind to the police authority provisions in the Local Government Act would be of genuine benefit to collaborations on procurement in particular—procurement is an issue very close to my heart—and I would welcome further work between the Home Office and the association to examine such an approach. In the light of this, I request that the noble Baroness withdraws the amendment.