My Lords, I must apologise to the Committee for not being here when Clause 5, on the requirement on the police and crime commissioners to issue police and crime plans, was discussed. Had I been here, I would have referred to Clause 79, on the strategic policing requirement. The police and crime plans, whoever draws them up, must always be an amalgam of national, international and local policing requirements. It is always going to be a difficult balance to decide which of those has priority and how the resources are to be allocated to them. That is one of the reasons why I have always been a supporter of the dissenting comments of Dr Goodhart in the 1962 police commission on the need for a national police force to cover the fact that crime does not observe local boundaries.
The time has come to look nationally at these issues and then to make certain that they are covered properly. The question is who will cover them. You could be forgiven for thinking that the proposal for elected police commissioners in areas around the country is putting the local policing issue at the top of the pack. Is that actually so? The Home Secretary, quite rightly, will insist that international terrorism or international drug dealing, for example, are given due recognition. What worries me is that I do not see this issue being resolved by the Bill as drafted or the guidance. I had hoped that I might have found it in the draft protocol. It states that local police commissioners have the, "““legal power and duty to … set the strategic direction and objectives of the force through the Police and Crime Plan … which must have regard to the Strategic Policing Requirement set by the Home Secretary””."
That does not resolve the issue, either.
My concern is that the person who will lose out, if we are not careful, is the person who will have to carry the can through the heat of the day—the chief officer of police or the chief constable. To my mind, there is only one person in an area who should draw up these plans—the chief constable. It should be done necessarily in draft and then it should be cleared with those who have to provide the resources. However, it should also be cleared with those with responsibility for influencing the balance between the international, national and local requirements of policing in that area. We will be doing a great disservice to the chief constables and chief officers of police if we do not make that clear and if we set them the problem of having to resolve something that is not resolvable, with a whole lot of competing people around them who may not necessarily come together in a way that will resolve the matter. This issue is too important for the public to be left not properly resolved.
Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill
Proceeding contribution from
Lord Ramsbotham
(Crossbench)
in the House of Lords on Thursday, 9 June 2011.
It occurred during Committee of the Whole House (HL)
and
Debate on bills on Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill.
Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
728 c390-1 
Session
2010-12
Chamber / Committee
House of Lords chamber
Subjects
Librarians' tools
Timestamp
2023-12-15 16:14:50 +0000
URI
http://data.parliament.uk/pimsdata/hansard/CONTRIBUTION_747418
In Indexing
http://indexing.parliament.uk/Content/Edit/1?uri=http://data.parliament.uk/pimsdata/hansard/CONTRIBUTION_747418
In Solr
https://search.parliament.uk/claw/solr/?id=http://data.parliament.uk/pimsdata/hansard/CONTRIBUTION_747418