Policing and Crime Bill

My Lords, in speaking to this series of amendments about the senior appointments panel, I must first declare an interest as the president of the Association of Police Authorities and as the chair of the Security Industry Authority. I listened carefully to what my noble friend the Minister had to say about this part of the Bill when it was debated in Committee and I have considered the issues further since then. I have accepted some of the points that he made, at least in part, such as the need to ensure flexibility in the functions of the senior appointments panel. The Minister will see that I have also accepted his point that creating a statutory body for senior appointments will give a stronger, more strategic and more proactive influence to the panel in the appointment of senior officers. However, I do not agree with some of the other points that he made in Committee. My amendments today therefore deal with my remaining concerns, which are substantially about the composition and some of the functions of the panel. I start with the composition of the panel. I applaud what the Minister said about the Government’s intention to make it more independent, but I am not convinced that this is actually reflected in the Bill. It does not anywhere mention the word "independent" and seems to give the Home Secretary two bites at nominating members to the panel—first, by appointing the chair and, secondly, by appointing representative members. It is absolutely essential to success that the panel should be owned equally by its tripartite partners and should be seen to be so owned. Its membership must reflect that. If that tripartite balance is not built into its composition and the panel is skewed in a way that might be used to favour the centre to the detriment of local concerns and interests, that will undermine the credibility of British policing in one of its most important functions—that of appointing the most senior police leaders in the country. I know that the Minister will assure me that it is not the Government’s intention to act in this way, but legislation must have regard to the future and we must consider how it could be used in 10 or 20 years’ time. My amendment would ensure that an appropriate tripartite balance would be maintained in future on the senior appointments panel; I cannot think that the Minister would object to that. There is nothing to prevent the Home Secretary or, indeed, either of the other two bodies from appointing independent people as their representatives on the panel, suitably endorsed by the Office of the Commissioner for Public Appointments or a similar body. Indeed, I would be happy with that approach. However, the key and most fundamental point remains that, if this is to be a statutory body, the correct position for its governance—that it must be and must be seen to be tripartite—should be reflected in its statutory composition. Moving on, I have reiterated a small earlier amendment about the payment of fees of panel members. That is to overcome difficulties experienced in the past with similar bodies, where representatives are required to sit on national organisations but the national organisation will not reimburse its members unless they are government appointees. The bodies that appointed them are left to pick up the bill. In this context, the money ultimately comes out of the public purse, but in the first instance from the budgets of much smaller organisations where the burden can have a disproportionate impact on what they are then able to resource elsewhere. I move on to the functions of the panel. Although I have accepted the Minister’s point about flexibility in being able to confer additional functions, I still do not think that this section is transparent enough about what some of the obvious functions of the panel should be. I am unhappy about leaving this entirely to regulations about additional functions, when those are in fact core functions for the panel, on which its effectiveness will be judged. Let me remind the House of the panel’s remit. It effectively conducts a co-ordination and pre-appointment advisory and screening process for potential senior candidates to potential senior police posts. That then enables police authorities to screen a range of potential candidates; it enables the Home Secretary to screen which candidates he or she will approve; and it enables chief officers to gather information about senior officers who may soon be joining their team and come under their command. Although its duty to advise the Home Secretary is picked up in the Bill, most of the rest of its remit is not. It is crucial to make it clear that this is a pre-appointment screening process advising all the parties concerned, not just the Home Secretary. The vagueness of the Bill’s wording seems to blur that reality. At best, it is less than transparent about what the functions of the panel will be; at worst, the vagueness might be used to move into territory that could interfere with a local appointment itself. I am particularly concerned that the functions of the panel should not be tied back to facilitating the existing statutory functions of the key players under the current wording—the role of police authorities to appoint chief officers and the role of the Home Secretary to approve those appointments. I fear, given the focus on the national role that the proposals represent, that such an approach could be used to restrict the role of police authorities to make appointments locally rather than to facilitate it. The current wording also fails to acknowledge that a key function of the panel must be to preserve the delicate balancing act between national strategic considerations and local requirements in appointing senior officers. That goes back to earlier points about the importance of ensuring that tripartite governance is essential and central to what the panel does. We can all agree that the system for appointing senior officers needs to be improved to overcome existing problems and to make it more proactive and more strategic. My amendment about developing criteria for selection and prioritisation is intended to do that. I do not agree with the Minister’s criticism of my similar amendment in Committee, which he said would not allow the panel to undertake other functions, such as co-ordinating the appointment round. Co-ordination is certainly implicit in the need to prioritise appointments, but I point out that the existing wording does not mention co-ordination either. However, I accept the Minister’s point about additional functions and this might be one of the matters specifically included there. The important point is that my amendment would make it a core function of the panel to develop ways to overcome the problems that have beset the process for many years. These include issues such as difficulties over the batting order for authority chief officer appointments, bottlenecks, lack of transparency and lack of information. Those problems are getting worse and must be addressed. Last year, a police authority was given a late slot by the senior appointments panel for an important senior post and shortlisted all the six applications that it received, mindful that a number of nearby and adjacent authorities were allocated an earlier slot and that there could therefore be some withdrawals from the shortlist. Indeed, the authority found itself down to first three and then two applicants by the day of the appointment. After consultation with the chief constable and HMIC, it cancelled the process, made a temporary appointment and asked for an earlier slot in the timetable for this year. It is not just that police authority that feels that a choice of one from two is entirely unsatisfactory for a post at that level. There is a general view that, at present, the system for drawing up the timetable for senior appointments is not working effectively and that potential candidates are themselves being very selective and are not always willing to move around the country and uproot their families at short notice, thus compounding the problems that police authorities face. I am concerned that such problems should not be dealt with at the centre in a high-handed and pre-emptive way. The police service does not operate like the Armed Forces. Strong issues of locality are involved and solutions have to be found, and can best be approached, through a genuine three-way partnership operating through the senior appointments panel. That is what I am trying to achieve with these amendments. My final amendment deals with consultation about conferring additional functions on the panel. I acknowledge that the legislation currently allows for consultation with the panel and that its members will include representatives from the APA and ACPO, but an individual member of the panel may not have sufficient knowledge of some of the wider issues or developments in the policing landscape, or some of the local issues relevant to particular areas or regions, and may not therefore be able to make wholly informed decisions about them. Given the important effect that decisions about functions could have, and given that appointing senior officers is first and foremost the statutory role of police authorities, it is important that police authorities should have a separate voice about what they think the panel should do. I have therefore included wording to ensure that the APA is consulted on this important matter. I am still not entirely happy about some of the other provisions in this part. For instance, I am not convinced that only the Secretary of State should be able to refer HMIC reports to the panel. However, in the spirit of focusing on the most important matters at this stage, I have limited my amendments to those areas that I consider to be of central concern and I therefore beg to move.