Policing and Crime Bill

My Lords, I can respond to the two points made by the noble Baroness. Continuous monitoring is an undertaking which we are happy to give. We will see how those arrangements work out and will keep them under review. On the issue of what one could loosely call gold-plating, the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Government have made it clear to everyone concerned with these arrangements that the proposals do not provide an opportunity to gold-plate policing services. We do not expect any more police to be deployed at airports than those the airport operator and the police agree are sufficient to mitigate the identified threats, and it could well be that the number of police should fall rather than increase as a result of these arrangements. If there is a dispute, as I indicated in my earlier speech, there is a dispute mechanism to sort it out. However, it is very much the Government’s intention that this will lead to more cost-effective rather than more expensive policing.