Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

My Lords, I will speak to an amendment that is in my name, to four other amendments to which I have added my name and to an amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee. The amendment in my name is Amendment 110. I have to confess that this is possibly a refugee from what should have been another group. However, it could stand on its own here. It essentially deletes Clause 19(4), which is about the power of the deputy mayor for policing and crime to, "““arrange for any other person to exercise any function of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime which is, in accordance with subsection (2), exercisable by the Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime””." This comes back to the issue that we keep raising in relation to policing and crime commissioners: their ability to delegate functions to people who are not accountable in the same way. The proposal is that, even though this is an activity which is specifically the responsibility of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, and specifically should be carried out by the deputy mayor, it should not be possible to delegate this to any other person in such a cavalier way. I also wanted to speak to Amendments 103 and 116, which essentially say that the deputy mayor for policing and crime shall be a Member of the London Assembly. If your Lordships and the Government are not minded to accept the principle of direct election, then the second best must be that the person delegated by the Mayor of London must themselves be an elected person, a Member of the London Assembly. It really is extraordinary that the Bill gives such latitude to the Mayor of London to appoint someone whom they have not met and may have no personal direct mandate. One could create a justification as to why it would be inappropriate to have a direct mandate, but it seems to me that the main thrust of this ought to be that that the person who is acting on behalf of the Mayor of London in this very important role should themselves have at least been subject to the electorate for at least part of London, if not the whole of London. It is important that the deputy mayor of London for policing and crime should be an elected Member of the London Assembly, and Amendments 103 and 116 deal with this. I have also put my name to Amendment 105, which enables the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime to delegate to any person the functions that would otherwise be carried out by the deputy mayor for policing and crime. The issue is the same: whether it should be possible for these functions so easily to be delegated to people who are not elected. Amendment 105 would at least require the mayor to delegate them to somebody who was part of the structure of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime rather than to someone completely different. What would be the point of having a Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime if the mayor could say, ““Well, one of these functions I am not having done by somebody who works for the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime; I’ll have it delegated somewhere else””? I suspect that this was an unintended consequence of something else when the drafting was done, but it seems to be a very strange arrangement. Amendment 180 would involve Members of the Assembly in the appointment of police officers of ACPO rank other than simply the commissioner and deputy commissioner. I spoke earlier today about the importance of that responsibility being shared. It is an important issue of governance. It is also important that senior officers of the Metropolitan Police not only see the line of accountability to the Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis but recognise the importance of democratic accountability. The involvement of Members in the appointments process would help facilitate that.