Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, is using this group of amendments to seek to achieve, at a late hour and in Committee, the merger of the City of London Police with the Metropolitan Police, a matter that has been around not just since 1829 but goes back to 1785. The matter is frankly for the Minister to respond to, as the Minister in charge of the Bill, but I must put a small gloss on it, having been the Member of Parliament for the City of London for the third longest length of time since 1283. It goes back to 1785 because there was a genuine essay to secure a London police force that went wider than the City in the 1780s. William Pitt the Younger embarked on it because of the Gordon Riots, when he felt a police force was needed. The City of London Police—this is the one thing I concede to the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey—did actually scupper that idea by saying that they would not themselves have anything to do with it. Pitt himself confessed to the House of Commons that this was a subject of which he was himself insufficiently the master and therefore he would not press the point. Thereafter, it was decided to create a police force in the city of Dublin and it was the existence of that force that prompted Peel, who served as Chief Secretary for Ireland between 1812 and 1818, to pursue the idea when he became Home Secretary on his return to London in the 1820s. Of course, from 1829 onwards, everything is history. I will fast forward from 1829 to 1977, when I entered the House of Commons at a by-election as the Member of Parliament for the City. I recall that before I had made my maiden speech, the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham, had moved a 10 minute rule Bill in the House of Commons to abolish the City of London Police, to which I was not allowed to reply because it was a controversial subject and you should not make your maiden speech on a controversial subject. The late, lamented Lord Finsberg opposed it himself. I have to remark on the coincidence that these Bills always came forward in the spring of a GLC election, because they were quite clearly intended to provide further grist to the political mill. Your Lordships’ House will be glad to hear that I am not going to make a prolonged defence at this hour but I will say that I did think that the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, was a little selective in the observations that he made. There is no question at all that the City of London Police response to the terrorist outrages that occurred within the square mile was both prompt and efficient. I can recall long, long ago reporting to the House of Commons on the technology that the Corporation of London had developed so that any car approaching the ring of steel was photographed and, at the moment that it reached the ring of steel, the policeman on duty knew perfectly well who the driver was and who it was registered to et cetera. The noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, made no reference to the expertise developed by the City of London Police in the context of fraud or to the international implications of the City of London and its police force nor did he allude in general to the terrorist issue to which the ring of steel contributed as a defence, but he did refer to the City of London’s population, on which his figures were broadly right. The 8,000 residents do not all have votes, but I agree that that is approximately the right figure. He was certainly right about the number of commuters. The number of commuters is the reason why the European Commission says, erroneously, that the City of London, the City of Westminster and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea are the richest areas in the whole of the European Union. The reason why the European Commission’s statement is ill founded is that, in the context of the City, it is the 300,000 commuters who contribute to the area’s wealth rather than the 8,000 people who live there. However, in working out its calculations, the European Commission takes the GDP produced in those three local authority areas and divides the figure by the resident population rather than by the number who come in to work there, who make such an enormous contribution to the economy of this country. My noble friend Lord Eccles was present during our Committee stage debates on the Bill last week; I just want to allude briefly to his late father, who was the 1st Viscount Eccles, or David Eccles as was. In 1944, David Eccles moved an amendment to the Education Bill—no doubt it was also moved late at night—at a time when David Eccles had been in the House of Commons for a year. His amendment said that, once the war was over, all women teachers in the United Kingdom should receive equal salaries with all male teachers. The Division was the only one in the House of Commons throughout the war on which the Government were defeated. Rab Butler, who was the Minister in charge of the Bill, was not the fastest of movers and was actually not in the Chamber when the vote was taken, although he was proceeding towards it. The amendment was carried by 117 votes to 116. The next morning, Churchill sent for the Chief Whip and said that Herr Goebbels would make such an enormous profit out of this defeat for the Government that it had to be reversed on Report as a matter of confidence. The amendment was reversed by 417 votes to 25 and, thus, the Bill was restored to its original form. I tell that story in the context of the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, because, once all that had been done, the then Prime Minister sent for David Eccles and—I shall not put on a Churchillian accent at this late hour—said words to the effect, ““Young man, I have a great deal of personal sympathy with the underlying proposition and principle that you were advancing in your amendment, but to do so late at night on the Education Bill, in the midst of the greatest conflict the world has ever seen, is frankly the equivalent of putting an elephant in a perambulator””. If I may say so to the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, in my view that is what he is seeking to do tonight. I hope that he will be wholly convinced by the arguments advanced by my noble friend.