Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

My Lords, I hope that I will be forgiven the discourtesy of absence from some parts of this debate because of a commitment in a Committee Room upstairs. I join others in welcoming my noble friend the new Minister. I learnt the other day—indeed, I am bound to say that she told me herself—that she is an extremely good cook. In this Bill, she has as ingredients the meat of police commissioners, the wine of the licensing provisions and the hot spice of universal jurisdiction, but it may be difficult for her to produce a dish that is up to her usual culinary standard at the end of our discussions. Having been a Member in the other place with her, I can confirm her reputation for being doughty, determined and, above all, dangerously disarming. I pay tribute to my noble friend Lady Harris for the way in which she moved the amendment. She was very persuasive, but I am bound to say that, with great respect, I disagree with her profoundly. I would like to remind the House of one or two things that have happened. Before the coalition, the Liberal Democrats were solidly in favour of democratic accountability for the police service through elected police authorities, to which we will return later today. The Conservative Party, the larger partner in the coalition, has been consistently in favour of the election of police commissioners. Both parts of the coalition have been solidly in favour of democratic accountability for the police through some kind of elected person or body through which the police service for a police area should be accountable. The amendments proposed by my noble friend Lady Harris would destroy that determination. I do not think that we have reached the point in coalition politics at which we should distance ourselves from the strongly held views of both parties because we are wedded to some old practices, which, in my view, do not stand the tests of scrutiny that have been relied upon by my noble friend. Indeed, what we should be discussing, if we are to discuss this at all, is the form of democratic accountability rather than whether there should be democratic accountability. These amendments would wreck the first Part of the Bill completely, for which reason I am opposed to them. On police authorities, we will have a debate later about Welsh police authorities. With great respect to my very distinguished colleagues in this House who will speak in favour of basically no change in Welsh police authorities, I do not think that they could be more wrong, and I do not think that anybody could be more wrong than to say that what we have at present is a democratically accountable system that does the business really well. If one were just to stray into Wales for a moment and walk down the streets of Llanfair Caereinion, Llanfyllin or Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant and ask people on those streets to name a single member of the police authority for their police area, unless one had happened to bump into a member or one of his or her nearest or dearest, they probably would not have a clue that a police authority existed, let alone who those members were. In a professional capacity as a barrister, I have worked for and with police authorities and I have seen them in operation—I have seen very good and I have seen much less good. As a Member of the other place for a constituency in rural Powys, I had dealings with the police force and the police authority for those 14 years, and I can say very clearly that if anybody was concerned about the police they did not go to the police authority or any member of it, because they had no idea where to go. By and large, they went to their local Member of Parliament, who then processed the issue or complaint for them. If one looks at some police authorities—it would be invidious to name names or issues, particularly as some of my experience is shrouded in professional confidentiality—one can be far from confident that every issue has been dealt with in a way that the public would regard as properly accountable and transparent. Indeed, there has been an issue involving a chief officer this week which has been well publicised and which raises many issues about the performance of that police authority and the relationship between that police officer and the public that he supposedly serves as the paragon of policing. This amendment is going far too far. We should carry out the examination of police authorities that the Bill predicates and should not waver one bit from a form of democratic accountability, whatever that form be.