Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

My Lords, I will try to be extremely brief because I know the Minister is anxious to move matters forward. But Members of this House will be aware of my deep opposition to this Bill because it fatally undermines the principles on which policing has been delivered in this country for nearly 200 years. So the Minister will not be surprised to learn that I will be supporting the amendments that have been moved. First and foremost, as we have heard—although the Minister did not acknowledge this—we are politicising policing. It is pointless government Ministers trying to deny this and pointing to the embryonic protocol that will supposedly regulate relations between commissioners and chief constables because the reality is that commissioners will be elected on party-political platforms and chief constables will, of necessity, have to acknowledge this and temper their actions accordingly. If they do not, we know from London experience what will happen; the elected commissioner will cite loss of confidence and, as a result, yet another chief constable will bite the dust. The Minister argued that it would be key for independent candidates to contest these elections. But independents would have to be extremely wealthy to contest these elections. We are talking about very large, disparate police force areas. For an independent to make an impact across such an area, they would need to spend a lot of money. Inevitably, the reality is that there will be no more than a handful of independents contesting seats. Nor will there be many ethnic minority or female commissioner candidates because all the evidence from across the European Union on direct elections for mayors and similar positions is that the more power these positions carry, the more likely it is that white males between the ages of 35 and 65 will be chosen by their parties to contest winnable seats. So I must say to this House that this is not a reform that will promote diversity. Quite the contrary because it is a big step back in terms of the fact that in the past few years there have been many female and ethnic minority police authority chairs, who have spent their time not sniffing out cameras at 100 paces or speaking to every available journalist, but establishing close links with their local communities. I want to place on record at this point my thanks to all police authority members who have worked so hard in the past few years because I think they have been unfairly vilified in the course of this Bill. I actually think they have done a very good job and I would like to acknowledge that. We are taking a giant step towards an American model of policing, where—let us remind ourselves—police chiefs last on average two and a half years in office, where powers are wielded by ““machine”” party politicians, and where there are far higher levels of local corruption than we have so far experienced in this country. Bill Bratton, much admired by the Prime Minister, was sacked by Mayor Giuliani after two and a half years, not because his policing was a failure, but because it was so successful that it challenged the mayor, whom he was overshadowing in popularity. He had to go and he was sacked. I fear we are seeing the start of that in this country. The stated aims of reform are to drive down crime and secure value for money, but how can a stand-alone commissioner forge the essential local partnerships that would deliver that? At the moment, partnerships exist and have helped to bring crime down to historically low levels. But the examples of elected mayors we have seen so far in this country indicate the commissioner will want to run his own show, on his own terms, sometimes capriciously, occasionally irresponsibly, but always with an eye to the media and to journalists, and always weighing up what needs to be done to secure re-election. What of checks and balances? They barely exist. If I could say to the noble Baroness opposite, she had a very easy way out of her dilemma because the coalition agreement, as I recall, talked about strict checks and balances. But we have not got strict checks and balances in this Bill as it comes back to us from the Commons. The panel has no real power to rein in the commissioner and no ability to prevent the dismissal of a chief constable. There is, more crucially, little it can do to bring action against a commissioner who acts inappropriately, offensively or recklessly. There is neither any concept of a code of conduct to guide behaviour nor involvement of independent people in the area of standards to ensure the integrity of the system and a lack of political bias. The panel will have no sanctions against a misbehaving commissioner, so its role here, as elsewhere, is one with no teeth. It seems to me totally anomalous that local councillors on the panels will now, it is hoped, be covered by a standards regime under the Localism Bill, but police commissioners will not. This area of standards and ethics, crucial for public confidence, is one I have raised before. I know the Government keep telling us that they are intent on replacing bureaucratic accountability with democratic accountability, but the inadequate standards provision risks giving the impression that commissioners will not be accountable at all in relation to their conduct. I believe that some way still needs to be found to bring commissioners under a clear and explicit standards regime. We have already heard, particularly from the noble Lord, Lord Harris, that there are no proper governance arrangements in place in this Bill as it comes back to us. I find it deeply depressing that noble Lords in this House who would not for one moment tolerate such an absence of good governance in their private sector or charitable involvements, and many of whom I know have serious misgivings about the radical proposals in this Bill, will nevertheless support it out of party and coalition loyalty. I believe that upholding the principles on which policing has operated so successfully in this country for nearly two centuries is more important even than party loyalties, and I believe Sir Robert Peel would have felt the same way. Experts on policing practice and governance told the Committee members of the Bill in the other place that the provisions of this Bill constituted ““a unique constitutional experiment”” never before tried out in this country. To push this Bill through at this point in time, when police numbers and budgets are being cut, and when the public are already deeply cynical about politicians and their motivations, will be a grave mistake and one we will live to regret—just as MPs in the other place are belatedly discovering the dangers in one of the Bills we tried in vain to change six months or so ago. The consequences of this legislation will assuredly come back to bite us, and if we pass it in its unamended form, as it has come back to us, it will come back to bite us sooner rather than later.