Policing and Crime Bill

My Lords, I return to this topic having taken careful note of what the Minister said in Committee. I have considered carefully his view that a duty on local partners to co-operate with the police in delivering the Government’s confidence target for policing is not necessary. He believed that it would merely duplicate the existing arrangements to co-ordinate public service agreements across government departments. I think that he was also saying by implication that it might skew wider public service agreement targets. However, I am not convinced by this. The poor take-up of the confidence target by local authorities under their local area agreement arrangements indicates to me a continuing problem. I am not alone in coming to this conclusion; it is widely shared by colleagues across the police service. My amendment would not impose any targets on local government and, without there being targets to fulfil, I am unsure how it would duplicate or skew other, wider targets. What it would do is impose a responsibility to co-operate, which seems a rather different matter. Most public organisations are already under a duty to co-operate with local authorities in helping them to deliver their local area agreement targets, which does not seem to have raised concern in government about duplication or distortion of public service agreement priorities. I am not sure why a duty to co-operate with policing organisations should be viewed as problematic while a duty to co-operate with local authorities is not. Let us not forget that the target imposed on policing to improve confidence is doubly difficult, because it is expressed as a joint measure of confidence in police and local authorities. One understands how this has come about: it is based on the recognition that public confidence relies not just on what the police deliver but on wider social and community safety concerns. However, it seems strange that only one half of the equation must be assessed on what is a joint measure, while the other half may choose whether they are measured on it or not. It remains a concern that a joint measure of confidence that is mandatory for the police but not for local authorities could diminish the enthusiasm with which one half of the partnership approaches this matter. Councils can sign up to the target as one of a suite of targets that they may choose to adopt with their local area agreements, but they do not have to do so. Not surprisingly, police chiefs have protested that their work to meet the confidence targets is very likely to be hampered, if not undermined, if partner bodies are not going to be under any duty to co-operate in dealing with anti-social behaviour issues or petty crime in their local area. After some consideration, I have changed my original amendment to recognise that the key players in relation to aligning local area agreement targets and policing targets are the local strategic partnerships. The original amendment would have placed a duty on the wider crime and disorder reduction partnership, but most of these partners are not responsible for local area agreements. This amendment instead would place a duty to co-operate on local strategic partnerships in a rather roundabout way. This has been necessary because local strategic partnerships are not statutory concepts but are owned by the top-tier local authorities. It is the same top-tier authorities that nominate councillor members to police authorities, so I have defined the main partners in my amendment by reference to this. As discussed in the earlier debate on this topic, I am told that out of 350 local authorities only about 50 have signed up to the confidence target. On my calculation, this means that there are around 300 local authority areas where the police are being asked to deliver single-handedly a joint target that they cannot completely control and where their key partner may have little incentive to co-operate. This will become particularly problematic in the financial environment that we are all facing, where resources will be tight and have to be allocated to key priorities. Councils that have not adopted the target will have even less incentive to support it in these circumstances. It is obvious that this will have a detrimental effect on policing and on force performance, not necessarily through any fault of individual forces. This seems to me like an Alice in Wonderland situation. If, as I do, one supports greater devolution and a reduction in central targets, one believes that it is inappropriate to impose additional targets on local authorities; as I stressed earlier, this is not a target. However, I do not see why councils should not at least be put under a duty to co-operate in delivering a target that relies partly on a measure of their contribution and effectiveness. If I could limit this by specific reference to the confidence target in the Bill, I would, but of course the confidence target is not a statutory concept. However, confidence is one of the Home Secretary’s policing priorities, which are referred to in statute. The amendment has therefore been framed with reference to those priorities. The key aim is to ensure that local authorities co-operate with the police in improving confidence, because this is a joint measure. In any event, and in the bigger scheme of things, it cannot hurt to strengthen partnership arrangements by asking that councils also co-operate in delivering other key policing priorities. I stress again that this is not the same as asking them actually to deliver or to be measured on these targets; it is simply about working together effectively at the local level, not about duplicating the strategic alignment of targets. It has been said many times that the police cannot deliver community safety alone and in isolation from their wider local partners. My amendment acknowledges this and suggests a proportionate and co-operative solution. If this amendment is not accepted, we risk seriously undermining confidence in policing in the difficult financial climate that we will face. Not only are certain types of recession-related crime likely to rise, which is bound to impact on confidence levels, but the police will be left to firefight complex local social issues on which they will be measured but over which they have only limited influence. My fear is that this could have serious consequences for policing in future years. I beg to move.