Police reform and social responsibility Bill

My understanding is that that is not in the Bill, but I envisage that the occasions on which a police and crime commissioner will wish to dismiss a chief constable will be few and far between. As we know, under the old legislation, police authorities had the power to dismiss chief constables, but it was rarely used. The right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett) intervened publicly to say that a police authority should exercise its power to dismiss an allegedly underperforming chief constable. Police authorities used the power extremely rarely, and I have no reason to suppose that an elected police and crime commissioner would be very different. I say to those who are not taking comfort from my exposition of the fact that many of the duties of police authorities are merely being passported to police and crime commissioners that the Government have bent over backwards to put in place a panoply of safeguards. We have already heard about the police and crime panel. I know that the hon. Member for Gedling thinks that it has only two significant vetoes on the appointment of chief constables and on the precept, but its third duty will be to create a vibrant debate and hold the police and crime commissioner him or herself to account. The hon. Member for Gedling spoke of a police and crime commissioner deciding to take beat officers or neighbourhood officers from their role and to put them into a rape crisis unit or domestic violence unit. I would fully expect the police and crime panel to pick up on that. I understand that there will be regular hearings at which the police and crime commissioner will be available to the police and crime panel to answer for such decisions. There will be a full and frank exchange of views in public. I hope that police and crime panels will hold hearings in the localities with witnesses, similar to those that take place in the Select Committees of this place, to put the police and crime commissioner through his or her paces on some of the strategic decisions he or she is making. The police and crime panel will be an important safeguard, on top of which there will be the protocol referred to by the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), the distinguished and eminent chair of the Select Committee on Home Affairs. Police authorities never overstepped the mark in discussing policing priorities with chief constables, partly because of the well understood convention enshrined in common law whereby the operational independence of a police officer is inviolable. I would expect the same restraint as we see exercised by elected politicians sitting indirectly on police authorities to operate in the case of police and crime commissioners. In case we are not happy with that, however, there is the protocol. The right hon. Member for Leicester East was right to say that it is an important document that must be scrutinised, but I do not have any concerns that it will not put on the record what a police and crime commissioner can and cannot do in relation to their strategic priorities. My word, if that police and crime commissioner were to overstep the mark, I would be staggered if the chief constable and the police and crime panel did not investigate that and draw it to public attention. What better set of safeguards than the panel and the protocol could there be for ensuring that the inviolable operational independence of our police is observed? I think the Government have probably gone further than many of their well-wishers would want them to go. We have put a great deal behind the argument that there should be openness and checks and balances; there should not be unfettered power in the hands of one elected commissioner. There is another check or balance that might be more nebulous but is worth pointing out for the benefit of Members—the new role that we envisage Her Majesty's inspectorate of constabulary taking, particularly since the appointment of Sir Denis O'Connor. He has done all of us in the House a huge service in changing HMIC reports into police forces, their shortcomings and where they could deliver efficiencies from being turgid, boring documents that few people read into customer-facing documents, to use his phrase. He told me that the reports are written in plain English for the public. I see a huge role for HMIC of going into forces and not just talking to chief constables but interacting with police and crime commissioners and putting out data that measure the performance of the commissioners. We need more sunlight to be shone into the corners of various police forces. It will not be just for the police and crime commissioners to do the awkward question-asking: it will also be for a wholly independent HMIC to tell the public in any given area how the police are doing and whether police and crime commissioners are making any difference—whether crime and the fear of it have gone up or down. It will also say whether enough attention is being paid to level-2 protective services and other things that are not so sexy, if I can put it that way, politically—things that will not necessarily be at the top of someone's manifesto when they are campaigning to be a police and crime commissioner. Some of those Cinderella services have been mentioned today. Examples include the shocking lack of attention that is paid to fraud in various forces and the way in which child protection, a specialist service that the police provide, does not get as much coverage as hooliganism, graffiti and antisocial behaviour. Those are all issues that the HMIC could address in its new-style reports. We should not forget that crime maps are another resource available to the average member of public to help determine whether standards of policing in a given area are improving and whether a police commissioner is contributing to that better fight against crime. Let me address one last point. I have been asked by various members of my police authority in Suffolk what difference this measure will make and what one person could do, if they were elected as the police and crime commissioner for Suffolk, that the police authority could not do. My answer is that in all police forces across the country, on average, there were two very worrying statistics earlier this year, according to HMIC. First, on average, only 12% of the police officers on duty at any one time are, to use the jargon, visibly available to the public. Secondly, there are more officers available for duty and visibly so on a Monday morning at 9 o'clock than on a Friday at 9 pm. Those two statistics tell me that we are not running the police service as efficiently as we could. So, that one elected person could go to a chief constable and ask, ““Hang on a minute—why have you got more uniformed officers on duty at 9 am on a Monday than at 9 pm on a Friday?”” I believe that 9 pm on a Friday is when, to use the parlance, things kick off; we know that that time is bound to be busier.