Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

My Lords, I will come back to the noble Lord on that point, but my understanding is that the chief constable is the body corporate in the same way as a corporation would be. Although the chief constable or the PCC would be the corporation sole, they carry with them the corporate requirements that would apply in any other situation as far as a corporation was concerned. It is not personal to them; they are not personally legally obliged, for example, to issue contracts in their own name with their own personal liability, so the fact that they may be off the scene for some reason or other, such as the noble Lord has described, does not necessarily destroy the corporation sole as a legal institution. The legal personality—the legal institution—that the corporation sole brings about protects, obviously, the personal liability of the individual concerned, but that would not mean that everything would collapse in the event that the individual was not personally on the scene. I am looking to see whether the noble Lord perhaps knows where I am coming from on this, but I hope that he does.