Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

I thank the Minister for her helpful comments and responses to what has been a wide-ranging and very full debate—a cornucopia indeed, as has already been mentioned. I think that essentially four issues have been raised, although not necessarily by everybody, as we have gone through the debate. The first issue concerns the duties of collaboration. As with the last point that has just been raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, I think that there would be room for the Minister to make the offer to write on that in a bit more detail. As my noble friend Lady Henig and the last speaker have pointed out, some of the details might skip out and not be caught properly, so I think that correspondence on those issues might help. The general concern is to flesh out some of the frameworks that are in the Bill so that we have a better understanding, when we go forward to Report stage, about how these things will work. In that context, there was an exchange between my noble friend Lord Beecham and the Minister on the rather subtle point—it may not have been given enough air to grow and flourish in the debate—about the difference between an individual dealing with a range of corporate bodies and a body corporate, should there be such, that was to have the same responsibilities. That is quite an important issue. Again, we would benefit from having a bit more flesh on why the Minister thinks that a single individual should have that capacity and would not get carried away as was suggested in the discussion. The point was made that, if elected persons such as mayors have a particular remit and take an aggressive stance on some issue, they tend to stray into areas that perhaps were not thought of when a democratic mandate was first given to them. We think here perhaps of the experience in Doncaster. The second point was about the direction of travel, on which there were also a number of exchanges. I think that we ended up at what is the right place to be, which is that the fact that the ““criminal justice system”” is explicitly mentioned in the Bill as an area with which the new structure will engage is not meant to mean anything other than is appropriate. On our side, we would like further clarification on that. The idea that there is some sort of creeping organism embedded in the Bill that will somehow express the Home Office’s territorial interests has been rightly rejected by the Minister, but I think that the sense on our side is that we would like a little bit more on that, either in correspondence or perhaps in Hansard, to explain why those particular groups, rather than others, are mentioned and why the Government think that it is appropriate for those groups to be there. In her concluding remarks, I think that the Minister said that nothing should be read into this other than that it makes good sense for these bodies to collaborate. The third point was on the British Transport Police. I am very grateful for the support that my amendment received from the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, and from my noble friend Lord Faulkner. As I said at the beginning of my remarks opening the debate, the British Transport Police has a long history in policing. This may not be well known to your Lordships, but the phrase ““the booking office”” comes from the British Transport Police because, in the early days of rail travel, you had to go and book in your travel with the British Transport Police-equivalent at the time before you were permitted to travel. It became known as ““the booking office”” because the journey was written down in a book—