Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

My Lords, I rise first to speak in support of the amendment moved by my noble friend Lord Rosser. To some extent, we touched on these matters at an earlier stage. The absence of a standards regime for these new bodies which are going to be responsible for the oversight of the police service in England and Wales is really rather extraordinary. In the previous day in Committee, I gave an example of the sorts of things that could happen where having a robust standards regime would be a better solution than one that says that, if these individuals step over the line and actually break the law, they can be investigated by the police—for whom they have a direct responsibility, of course, which raises some interesting questions—and, if necessary, prosecuted. A standards regime that is going to protect the integrity of those individuals and provide assurance to the public that they are acting properly and appropriately is clearly important. It will be interesting to hear from the Minister how the Government envisage that this will be dealt with. Grouped with this amendment—rather strangely, I have to say—is Amendment 234. Some of the groupings in this Committee stage have been rather strange, but a group of two amendments on two completely different topics is something that one should perhaps be surprised at. I am sure that the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, will want to speak to Amendment 234 in a moment, and I have also put my name to this amendment. Amendment 234 raises the very important, separate issue about how complaints against police officers are to be handled. I suspect that the unsatisfactory arrangement now contained in the Bill, whereby the chief officer of police or the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis will act as both the complaints authority and the appeals body for their own officers, will run contrary to principles of natural justice and cause problems in the way in which the police service operates. It will also produce a minefield of arguments, litigation, industrial tribunals and so on—all the sorts of things which the police services are already rife with, for one reason or another. This will actually make matters worse and it will not provide protection for chief officers of police who may be accused of not handling a complaint properly or an appeal properly because they will be seen as part of the same process. So it is really rather important that there is a separate and independent mechanism as part of that. The other element contained in the amendment which the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, has put forward and to which I have put my name is the question of information. This specifically refers to London but the same principle applies outside London. One of the very important functions of whoever is responsible for oversight of the police must be to know of, and have information about, the nature of complaints that are being made against police officers in a particular area. The second part of this amendment provides a requirement that that information is automatically provided, in this instance to the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, but I suspect the Government would want to ensure that it was also provided to elected police and crime commissioners, if that is what we have, or to police and crime commissions, or whatever the final model is. One of the very important functions of holding a police service to account is to know the nature of the complaints that are being received, to know what is being done about them, to monitor trends and perhaps to dip-sample some of them to make sure that those complaints are being handled properly. That is why this amendment is important. I hope that the Minister, in responding, will recognise that that function of monitoring complaints and understanding what is going on will be a critical and necessary part of any body that has oversight of the police service.