Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

My Lords, I am sure we would all agree that this has been a very good debate, and I am grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in it. The noble Lord, Lord Howard, and I would agree that there have been advances over the past 20 years. He said that he thought there was room for improvement. I agree with him, of course. However, I hesitate to agree with him that the need for improvement is such that the current government structure should be ripped up and that a potentially very dangerous option should be put in its place. I listened with great interest to the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, who talked about public appetite for change. I have seen no appetite whatever for party political police chiefs to come into the UK in the way in which I think this Bill will lead us. The noble Baroness has given us the good news that noble Lords can stand for election, and we have already speculated on the elections in Kent and Lancashire. Thinking of the West Midlands, if I were fortunate enough to stand, to be selected and to be elected, the idea that I would stay out of operational policing issues when faced with the legitimacy of being elected is naive. An elected police and crime commissioner will become the police chief of a force. Some noble Lords who support this have said openly that that is where they expect the journey to end. That is why we are so concerned about these proposals. This is rather like Lords reform; I am sorry to refer back to our debate last week. I support reform of your Lordships' House but I disagree with most of the noble Lords who have spoken in its favour, particularly from the Liberal Democrat Benches, because they and Mr Clegg seem to be proposing that an elected House of Lords will carry on in the same way as the appointed House of Lords. That is nonsense. The election of a House of Lords will change the dynamic of this place considerably, and that is what I would expect to happen with elected police and crime commissioners. After all, what is the point of proposing that unless it is to happen? Surely we are not seriously talking about simply taking the police authorities as they are, adding a dose of democracy and thinking things will be great. No. We are on a journey on which elected people will run police forces in the future. I am convinced that that is where we are going to end up, so I think there is merit in testing this out. The noble Lord, Lord Howard, said that democracy is the enemy of uniformity and that you cannot draw a general lesson. I follow that argument, and I understand that if you are looking at the relationship in, say, four areas between a police and crime commissioner and a chief constable, those are going to be distinctive areas and there are going to be distinct circumstances, but I would have thought that there are still lessons to be learnt that would enable the Government to take note and make adjustments so that if the system were then rolled out it would be in the light of experience. I am not proposing a wrecking amendment. I am not beholden to four years. I think that the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, tabled an amendment in Committee that proposed two years. I would always be open to discussion about this. The noble Lord, Lord Wasserman, is widely regarded as the architect of all this, and I am not surprised that he does not want pilots. He said that you cannot evaluate this in advance, but he then asked us to take this huge leap in the dark based on experience in some parts of the US. I have yet to hear any convincing argument about why this change is going to be made. Over the past few years, we have seen a dramatic reduction in crime levels in this country. We have seen huge improvement in the relationship between police forces and communities, particularly at the neighbourhood level. Why is this being ripped up to make this huge, potentially damaging change in our police forces and their relationship with the public? I have yet to understand what the party opposite has against police forces that it wants to do this or to hear a coherent argument in favour of the changes. The Minister said that the coalition agreement provides for this. It does not. The coalition agreement is an agreement between two political parties. It does not have the status of a manifesto. It is very important that noble Lords understand that. I echo the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and the noble Baroness because my understanding was that this reform was to be accompanied by strong checks and balances. So far, those checks and balances are very weak indeed. The Minister then said in relation to pilots that we would have different forms of police governance. What do we have in local government? Indeed, the Localism Bill gives us even more forms of governance. I am not an expert on it, but my understanding is that if councils want to, they can go back to the good old committee system—a blessed memory to those of us who remember the allotments sub-committee of Oxford City Council, on which I was not qualified to serve but I have always wished that I had been so appointed. We are well used to different forms of governance within the same structure. I do not see why that should differ in relation to police forces. I have been a serial culprit as a Minister in restructuring public services. I cannot remember how many NHS Bills I took through in restructuring the health service. The one thing I learnt from that is that it might be better to test ideas out before tearing things up by the roots. In the absence of pre-legislative scrutiny, the noble Baroness had to produce all those amendments on Monday night, after discussions with noble Lords, because this Bill has been constructed too hurriedly. It has not gone through pre-legislative scrutiny and I suspect that more amendments will be necessary when we are able to analyse the full effect of her amendment. There is a very convincing case for some trial and evaluation. I am not going to put this to the vote tonight, but as we move on to further stages of the Bill, I think that in order to resolve differences between this place and another place, pilots might have their place in the sun. Amendment 7A withdrawn. Schedule 2 : Chief constables Amendment 8 Schedule 2 : Chief constables Amendment 8 Moved by