Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

I am always prepared to defer to the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, because he is a much greater expert than I am on how police forces are run. I see the potential for constructive tension, if it has to be tension, between two finance officers carrying out different roles. I see them as providing a check and balance on one another and their roles as being markedly different in any event. That is something we can learn from the current situation in which, as I said, the chief finance officer of a police force carries out a major managerial role and the accounting officer of the police authority a very different function. Can the Minister confirm that the Government feel satisfied that we will not have a high degree of duplication and that the role of the finance officer in the force will be related to operational matters and that of the other finance officer to the rather different strategic matters? There, perhaps, we have the answer to the question of the noble Lord, Lord Harris, about Tasers. Tasers are the sort of thing which may well be strategic and one would expect to be discussed by the commissioner and those to whom he is accountable, whatever structure we end up with at the end of the Bill. The deployment of such Tasers as are purchased at any incident is plainly an operational matter, which must be left in the hands of the chief officer. That is an example of how different functions will deal with different aspects of police activity.