Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

I give strong support to this group of amendments. I regard them as particularly important. The reason why they are important will become clear if we think about our recent history, by which I mean policing in the 1970s and 1980s, and not just in London. My noble friend Lord Harris referred to Broadwater Farm. I went to Broadwater Farm. I saw the late Bernie Grant there before he was an MP and afterwards. I went to Brixton when the town hall there was virtually surrounded and the fires were burning; the councillors were trapped and almost prisoners. But it was not just in London. I went to the Meadowell Estate in Newcastle, where Lord Scarman also went. It was not about racism there. Clearly, racism in the police force was a particularly serious problem at that time, but Meadowell had no black people. The Meadowell Estate system had broken down. There were different problems there. When I went to speak to one of the groups there, they were all women; not a man was there. When I asked where the men were, they became defensive and said, ““Remember, there are no jobs here; there is nothing for them””. The women had taken over running the locality in that sense. At the time, I had an involvement in policing generally and was at one stage the shadow policing spokesman for the Labour Party. The message I got from going to many such areas, leaving aside the issue of police racism, was that there was an almost total breakdown between local authorities and the police. That had happened not just in London or other areas of high ethnic diversity but other areas. If we go back to newspapers of that era, we read stories about concern among the police and the Conservative Party that if police and local authorities were forced to get together, there would be the very danger that we have been talking about under the Bill: that local authorities would somehow exert political control. That was the worry and the debate. As I said when the noble Lord, Lord Howard, was in the Chamber, that was when the Labour Party took the view that there ought to be elected police commissioners. I was very doubtful about that theory, and I still am, but it came about because of the breakdown between the local political structures and the police. We found in various areas, including mine at the time, that the police were very reluctant to talk to local authorities and, when the local authorities talked to them, it was often done in a conflictual way. The local authority would say, ““Why don’t you do this?””, and the police would say, ““This is our business, not yours””. We will come later in the Bill to the other area that troubles me greatly, which is the lack of clarity about crime prevention. The key here is that we must never again go back to the situation that we had in the 1970s and 1980s—indeed, even in the 1960s, if we consider Notting Hill—where the relationship between the police and local authorities was, at best, non-existent and, at worst, hostile. If we go back to that system or that situation, we will get big problems again. It may be, as it was in Meadowell, a rundown out-of-town estate which has no jobs or it may be on the basis of ethnicity, but something will be the trigger for a breakdown. The lack of co-ordination between the police and local authorities will aggravate that, or indeed almost create it at times. It did create it in certain areas. What is being asked for in this group of amendments, very wisely, is that we ensure that there is close co-operation between the police and local authorities and close consultation. In the 1970s and 1980s you were just trying to persuade people, including local authorities, that they ought to talk to the police. That is what the problem was then. Now we have got to a stage, which took many years and a lot of persuasion of both police and local authorities, where we can say, ““Unless you co-operate, you cannot deal with crime prevention””. The argument at the time was strongly that crime prevention will work only if police and local authorities work together. It was a political argument on all sides, among academics and others, but on the street it was slightly different: ““The police don’t represent us. What is the local authority doing about it? Nothing””. We ended up with conflict, hostility and a lack of understanding of the various roles. It is profoundly important that we never allow that situation to arise again. There are a number of dangers in this Bill, but I emphasise that there is a danger that we will create a separate structure that marginalises local authorities. Those local authorities will then become at best distant and at worst alienated from the police, and similarly the police from them. We must not allow that to happen. There have been two great improvements in policing in recent years, leaving aside some of the detail on numbers and so on. One is the serious attempt by the police to deal with racism. They have been very successful. We still have a long way to go but we have done that extremely well. The other one was the feeling within the police that they could not really work with local authorities because if they did they might lose their political independence. That argument has been dealt with now. We understand it much better and how we need to deal with it. The lessons from the 1970s and 1980s—and the 1960s as well for that matter—are profoundly important in that relationship. I strongly urge the Government to make sure that even if they do not accept any of these amendments, which are all basically along the same lines, they put something in the Bill to ensure that we do not drift back. It will be drift. There will be a drift back into a situation where the police and local authorities are looking the other way when the problems hit them.