Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

My Lords, I shall not detain the Committee for too long. I thought we were breaking at eight o’clock. I have tabled a clutch of amendments to Clauses 38 to 40 but they have been superseded by the eloquence and persuasiveness of my noble friends Lady Henig and Lord Harris, in particular, and so I will not touch on them. They relate to the questions of appointments and discipline. I shall instead confine myself to two further amendments. Amendment 214 deals with the question of eligibility, to which other noble Lords have referred. It suggests that it would be wrong for someone who had served in the relevant police area during the eight years prior to the election, or four years prior to the election in any other police area, to be eligible to stand for election as a police commissioner; or for any former chief constable or deputy chief constable who has served in any area to be eligible to stand. That is a reasonable position. Amendment 226C would allow the Secretary of State to require a police commission or commissioner to suspend from duty the police constable of the police force in the relevant area. This touches on a fear expressed by a number of your Lordships about the possibility, perhaps not of corruption but of a too close relationship between either a police commission or a police commissioner and a chief constable. There have been examples of this in the past, as we have heard. The Bill removes the capacity of the Home Secretary to intervene. It seems a necessary safeguard in those hopefully very exceptional cases that somebody outside can insist upon the replacement of a chief constable if the police authority, however constituted, declines to do so. I urge the Government to look again at that safeguard which is properly exercised by the Home Secretary.