Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

My Lords, I am enormously grateful to Members of the Committee for their consideration of the amendment. I am particularly grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, for his history lesson as it demonstrated the extraordinarily effective lobbying power of the Corporation of London over the past two and a bit centuries. Noble Lords have asked why the previous Labour Government did not address this issue. I was very engaged in the discussions that led to the creation of the Greater London Authority and I can let your Lordships into a secret: the then Prime Minister, who was renowned for his bravery in taking on international conflicts when other counsels might have prevailed, was not prepared to enter into a conflict with the massed troops of the Corporation of London. He did not wish to see tanks trundling down Ludgate Hill towards Westminster to try to suppress any uprising on the part of the unruly citizens of Westminster vis-à-vis the traditional powers and role of the Corporation of London. I am sure the Committee will recognise that my amendment is very modest. It does not propose subsuming the City of London Police into the Metropolitan Police. It merely suggests that the City of London Police should be accountable to the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime in the same way that the Metropolitan Police are. That would not necessarily mean any disruption of the City of London Police’s excellent work, particularly on economic crime. It may have been unfair of me to refer to the heavy load of traffic offences with which the force deals. I was talking to a colleague in the House earlier this evening who remarked that the City of London Police dealt with a particularly high number of cases of indecent exposure, and that that factor should be taken into account when arguing for a separate force. However, the argument has always been about economic crime, certainly during my involvement in this area. We are talking about 213 new investigations during the past year, which is a comparatively modest figure. This was intended to be a minimalist amendment to try to bring the City of London Police into line with some of the arrangements prevailing in the rest of the country. London is already an anomaly in the Bill, as we shall discuss further in a few minutes. The amendment is not intended to destroy the City of London Police or its work; it simply tries to create a system of accountability which would at least be parallel to that in the rest of London, if not in the rest of the country. I note that the Minister is as susceptible as all previous holders of that office and, indeed, all previous Ministers in every other department of government, when it comes to the lobbying power of the Corporation of London, to which I defer. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 49 withdrawn. Amendment 50 Moved by