Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

My Lords, I echo the remarks of my noble friend Lady Henig about how difficult it is to get our heads around some of these extremely complicated amendments in the very short time that we have had to look at them. I have a series of questions, which I am sure Ministers will be able to answer in the detail that I expect. However, I suspect that it will demonstrate that quite a lot of further work still needs to be done on the amendments put forward today and on the other proposals. I repeat what I said earlier, which may have appeared frivolous, about the advantage of Third Reading being in September: there is still an awful lot of work for Home Office officials to do to get some of the details of the Bill right. That is the case whether or not one agrees with the general direction of travel or whether one agrees about where we are going to end up. Some of the mechanics of the Bill are going to fall apart unless this detailed work is done. My questions relate, first, to the mammoth extension of powers for the PCPs, which enable them to have approval hearings of the chief executive, the PCC’s office, the chief financial officer and any deputy appointed. That, I am sure, is helpful. I have no problems with it as a principle and I think that it is good governance and useful. However, what I am not clear about—it may be here and I have just not found it, or it may not be here and has not been thought about, or it may have been thought about and is being rejected, but it would be useful to know—is what the role of the PCP will be in circumstances in which the PCC removes or dismisses the chief executive or the chief financial officer, or indeed a deputy. There is a more difficult point in this. One of the concerns is that newly elected PCCs may decide to dispense with the services of chief executives and chief financial officers. In those circumstances, what is the role of PCPs? I cannot find it, but it may be here. No doubt the Minister will enlighten us on that point. I assume that there are more government amendments to come, but we do not know. I had understood that there had been considerable discussions about the transfer schemes of staff from police authorities to police services, to chief officers of police and/or to PCCs. I had understood that there had been an acceptance that it might be necessary to have a two-stage process, simply because of the detailed work that needs to be done and simply because of the importance of enabling the newly elected PCCs, if that is what we end up with, as I suspect we might, to see how that will work, and giving them the opportunity of influencing that decision rather than having the outgoing police authorities determining which staff are transferred under what conditions. Such an amendment may be here and I have just missed it, but I am not clear that there is an amendment yet which specifies how that two-stage process will work. In any event, I think we are in some difficulties because Amendments 67 and 86 prevent PCCs or the MOPC or deputy PCCs—if that is what we get—and the deputy mayor for policing and crime, arranging for a member of staff from a police force to exercise any of its functions. I understand that the reasoning behind that is that Ministers want to separate completely the functions and staffing of forces and elected local policing bodies. That may be a perfectly good and sensible principle, but disentangling what existing staff, who are currently employed by police authorities and who are under the direction and control of chief officers of police, which is the current situation, provide what function, particularly in the absence of a two-stage transfer process, will be a very large piece of work. Currently, for example, the Metropolitan Police Authority delegates functions to the commissioner through the scheme of delegation. The commissioner has overall management responsibility for a large number of staff who are under his direction and control, although technically they are MPA employees. Under the first phase of the proposed two-phase transfer scheme, staff who are currently police authority employees, but under the direction and control of the commissioner, will transfer to the PCC or the MOPC, but will no longer be under the direction and control of the commissioner and chief constable. The legislation will allow the PCC and the MOPC to delegate to those staff who had previously been under the direction and control of the commissioner; however, as the MOPC and PCC and their deputies would not now be able to delegate to the commissioner and chief constable, it would appear that the current arrangements, whereby the police authority can delegate these functions, would no longer be lawful. Therefore, current delegations would need to be changed with the consequence that you would have very large numbers of staff, particularly in the areas of finance, property, communications, procurement and legal, for whom you will now have to decide whether they spend all their time working for the new structure under the PCC and the MOPC or working for the chief officer of police. Those are quite complicated decisions because at the moment they often split their time; some bits of work are very much police authority functions and some bits are very much for the chief officer of police. Under these two amendments you are essentially saying that it is unlawful to delegate those functions to such people, so a hard-and-fast set of decisions will have to be made for each individual about which side of the fence they are on and the Government wish all that to happen by May of next year, or possibly earlier in London. A two-stage system of delegation is needed to allow all those details to be sorted out and to allow the newly elected PCCs to have some influence over what staffing and support structures they will want. At the moment, in the absence of a government amendment on that—unless it is there and I just cannot find it—the Government are making that unlawful. I am sure that that is not their intention and I hope that the Minister will reassure me that I have completely misinterpreted what this means or perhaps give me some assurance that she will come back at Third Reading. I suspect she may need more than three weeks to sort this out.