Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

I support the points made so forcefully and eloquently by my noble colleague Lady Harris of Richmond. First, I must declare my interests; I chaired Lancashire Police Authority for 16 years up to 2005, and I chaired the Association of Police Authorities for eight years and am currently its president. I begin by joining those who have welcomed the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Browning, to her new role. I am sure that the whole House will look forward to working with her. In the short time since her appointment was announced on Monday, I have talked to many people who worked with her. They told me that she had considerable abilities and many accomplishments—too many for me to mention here today. I was not told specifically, but I am sure that one of those will be the ability to learn very rapidly on the job, which will be a great asset to her in his new role. I am quite sure that she has been extremely well briefed by the Home Office, but she will this afternoon have the opportunity to hear at first hand the views of those with first-hand experience of local policing and its governance and those who understand how their local communities work across England and Wales. This will, I hope, give the noble Baroness a different perspective on this proposed legislation and help her to understand the serious nature and extent of our concerns. My greatest concern is that the major changes outlined in Part 1 of the Bill are not based on very much tangible evidence, as far as I can see. I have listened carefully to all the arguments that have been put forward to justify the changes, but I find a lot of the arguments pitifully thin and some of them are out of date. The first argument was put forward at Second Reading; it was necessary to reconnect people to policing. That assumes that in some way the public are not presently involved at all. That is patently not the case. Neighbourhood policing is doing an excellent job working with local people at ward level to address their concerns and to work with them in their localities to address complaints and problems. The police usually do that by way of monthly meetings, and this is happening all over the country. That is what the public want. What the public do not want is one individual elected to cover the 23 parliamentary constituencies of West Yorkshire or a massive police area such as Thames Valley, which does not actually exist in local government terms. In a recent survey in Lancashire, over 70 per cent of the more than 1,000 people surveyed said that one person could not possibly represent the diverse communities of Lancashire. Of more concern, the figure was much higher among those from ethnic communities, who believe that their concerns would be marginalised under the new arrangements. The Lancashire Police Authority has always had direct representation on it from its ethnic communities since its inception in 1995. That, together with other policies, has considerably boosted confidence in policies across the ethnic minority communities in Lancashire. To lose that direct link would be a serious step backwards. That worries me greatly. The second argument for change was put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Howard, at Second Reading. He said that local people did not know the name of the chair of their local police authority. He said that that had apparently helped to change his view that direct elections to police authorities would be dangerous because they would politicise policing, which was certainly the view that he held in the 1990s. I am willing to say to the House that I believe that that is probably true because, in the recent audit of political engagement carried out by the Hansard Society, more than half the people surveyed said that they knew nothing or not very much about how things worked in their local areas. As a result, police authorities have been innovative in combating that problem. For example, Lancashire police have held 14 roadshows since last April, meeting more than 5,000 residents and gaining the views of more than 10,000 people in surveys. Similarly, in south Wales, roadshows are held in each of the seven local authority areas every year, and in the past year there have been more than 18,000 visitors to the police website. South Yorkshire Police are in regular e-mail contact with 4,000 people. The Minister may be interested in the fact that in Devon and Cornwall, part of which she represented in the other place, held 37 public meetings in the past year, engaging up to 1,000 people. There is much greater awareness of police authorities now even than in 2005, partly because of the development of new technology and innovative computer communication and partly because of recent newspaper coverage. That all leads to a third argument. We have been told that police authorities lack visibility and that they are weak. Again, I remind the House that police authorities were reconstituted by Kenneth Clarke in the early 1990s to operate in a more businesslike and focused way. They were reconstituted to hold the force to account, rather like a non-executive board of directors, and worked very effectively across party lines. They have not gone eyeball to eyeball with chief constables or acted in a high profile way but have gone about their business very effectively, and as a consequence they have not attracted headlines. I see this as a good thing—as a measure of success, not of failure. However, I assure the House that they are assuredly not weak. Every month in public meetings up and down the country, police authorities question their chief constables very robustly and vigorously on a whole range of issues, many of them quite sensitive, and they demand clear answers and assurances. I am sure that many noble Lords might well have been at such occasions. Certainly in London, those meetings often attract publicity and are very well known about. It shows that police authorities are not invisible and are not weak. Fourthly, another reason came forward. We were told that police authorities did not do very well in recent HMIC inspections and therefore there was an urgent need for change. However, only 22 authorities out of 43, or half, were inspected: of which four were deemed good—which on my maths is 17 per cent, which seems to be reasonable—the rest were satisfactory and none failed. The Government were particularly worried that police authorities were not scoring well in securing value for money from forces in these difficult economic times, and I understand the concern. However, where is the concern then for securing value for money in terms of these current proposals? Where is the value-for-money argument in terms of the cost of elections and regarding the considerable additional cost of introducing this new system? If we are going to consider value for money, we should consider it across the board. What equally concerns me is what we have not heard. We have not heard arguments in some very important areas. For example, what is the extent to which this change will continue to drive down crime and how this will happen? Surely one of the major things we want to see is crime being driven down. Police authorities and forces have been extremely effective in the past 20 years in driving down crime. That has to continue. How will these new arrangements work? Will they continue to do that? My fear is that the opposite will happen and crime will go up. I would like somebody to tell me why my fears are misplaced and that crime will continue to go down under this arrangement. How will these new arrangements work with local partnerships, which have been so instrumental in helping to reduce crime? How will local partnerships be affected? Will they be enhanced? I think that local partnerships will be quite seriously undermined by the election of police and crime commissioners. How will the new arrangements ensure that a full range of local and national strategic police initiatives will continue to be fully scrutinised? That point was made by the noble Baroness, Lady Harris, and it is a very important one. How will these new arrangements facilitate collaboration between forces, which is really important? I fear again that the election of commissioners will have the opposite effect of keeping forces separate rather than helping them to collaborate. I have a problem, because I have heard no evidence that the delivery of policing, or its accountability to local people, will be more effective in practice under this new system than under current arrangements; and there is a real danger it could be less effective. Two eminent policing experts who gave evidence in the other place at the beginning of the Committee stage of this Bill both said they would not have gone with a commissioner model. They both said it was the most radical and untried option of the directly elected models that had been suggested. What really concerned me was that one described it as ““a unique constitutional experiment”” never before tried in this country. I find that quite worrying. If we are going to have a unique constitutional experiment, I do think we need to do it on a stronger basis than where we are at the moment. The public are also quite opposed and sceptical about what it will achieve and are adamantly opposed to any suggestion of the politicisation of policing. Yet this danger—that party politics will be at the heart of these new arrangements—is the one we all fear the most. Nothing I have heard or seen so far, including the draft protocol, comes close to dealing with that threat. So, as the noble Baroness, Lady Harris, said, should we not be pausing and asking ourselves: what is the problem here; what are we trying to achieve; and what might we lose in the process? I am an historian by profession, and one of my criticisms of many politicians is that they refuse to learn from history. One lesson that we surely should have learnt by now is that incremental change has a better chance of succeeding than very radical reforms. That was why Kenneth Clarke’s reforms of the early 1990s were so effective—they built on what was there already and improved it. There are times when radical reforms are needed, but as far as policing is concerned I have seen no evidence that this is such a time. For all those reasons, I support the noble Baroness, Lady Harris, in raising considerable concerns about this proposal.