Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

My Lords, in moving Amendment 50, I wish to speak to an extremely long list of amendments which, because of the lateness of the hour, I will not proceed to go through individually and in detail. The purpose of this amendment is to try to bring some of the arrangements in Greater London more into line with the Government’s original intentions in the Bill. The principle of the Bill was that there would be greater visible accountability of the police service through the election of a police and crime commissioner. That is what the Government have proposed everywhere in the country apart from London. However, it is proposed that because we already have a directly elected Mayor of London, the processes will not be the same in London as they will be elsewhere. Instead, there will be created the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, which will be a functional body of the Greater London Authority. There is recognition of the very wide range of duties of the Mayor of London. Therefore, it is understood that he might not be able to fulfil the office of Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime—there is a very strange use of language in the Bill—but might appoint a deputy mayor of London to fulfil that role. There are clauses in the Bill that describe the functions of the deputy mayor for policing and crime; how they relate to the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime and to the Mayor of London; the arrangements for the appointment of that person who might or might not be an elected member of the London Assembly; the arrangements that would occur in the event of a vacancy in that office; what would happen if that person were disqualified or incapacitated; and so on. However, the real gap in those proposals is that if the Government believe, as they do, that the single act of election and the visibility of the person fulfilling the role of holding the police to account is the key element, why does it not apply in London? The purpose of the amendment is to try and achieve for the Government what they see as their objective elsewhere in the country. It proposes that on the same day that Londoners elect their mayor, they would also vote for the deputy mayor for policing and crime. The ballot paper would include two posts, and people would vote accordingly. The process of election would be the same as those adopted for the police and crime commissioners, if that is the direction in which Parliament were to choose to go, following your Lordships’ decision on the first day of Committee. The elections would be held at the same time and Londoners would be choosing the person who would visibly be responsible for holding the Metropolitan Police Service to account. My amendments also provide for arrangements in the event of a vacancy. The amendments do not have the problems that were described earlier as to what happens if a policing and crime commissioner is incapacitated or disqualified for whatever reason. My proposal is that in the event of the deputy mayor for policing and crime being temporarily unavailable for whatever reason, the Mayor of London would act as his or her own deputy in respect of that function. While I do not think that it is possible for the Mayor of London to fulfil the role of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime for a full four-year term, the role could be managed during the period of a vacancy or while a new election was held. The remaining amendments are designed to bring into place an exactly parallel structure as that which the Government originally envisaged for the policing and crime commissioners. The principle is simple—Londoners should also have what the Government wanted to extend to everyone else in the country, which is the right to elect the person to be responsible for policing and crime. That person would be the deputy mayor for policing and crime. Why am I not proposing the creation of a separate police and crime commissioner for London? It is because I recognise that we have a Greater London Authority and the Mayor of London. In the same way that we have a transport commissioner, we would have someone in charge of policing. Indeed, if I were rewriting the Greater London Authority Act—although that would be inappropriate in terms of the Bill or at this stage—I would have looked to creating at the same time as the elected mayor a number of directly elected posts that would have been responsible for a number of different functions, because that system of direct democracy and accountability would have worked well. People raise the horrid spectre of what would happen if the Mayor of London were of one party and the person elected as deputy mayor for policing and crime were of another party. If that were what the people of London wanted, the elected politicians concerned would have to find a way of managing that.