Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

My Lords, I want to say a few words in support of this amendment. I find it completely incomprehensible that anyone would think that it was acceptable to put a politically restricted person in charge of making political decisions, which is the effect of the current proposals relating to deputy and acting PCCs in this Bill. Quite apart from the fact that this would give such a person an impossible technical conundrum to resolve—because a politically restricted person must be politically neutral, and therefore cannot by definition make political decisions—it completely undermines the Government’s own arguments about greater public accountability. It is particularly important that an acting PCC must be able to make decisions as if he or she were the PCC. This includes the key decision about what precept to set if the PCC is absent at that particular time of the year. The PCC’s office cannot not make a decision about this, whether or not the PCC is present, because the police service would be missing up to half its funding the following year if this was so. Not for the first time, I have thought that we were creating an Alice in Wonderland world in this Bill—it is all somehow upside-down. It is clear to me that an acting PCC cannot be politically restricted. That means that an acting PCC cannot be drawn from the members of the PCC’s staff—which bizarrely now include the deputy PCC, although that is another issue. The obvious place to look is therefore among the members of the police and crime panel, and particularly among the elected members of the panel, if we are serious about a commitment to democracy and accountability. This is exactly what the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, stipulates, and I am very happy to support it.