Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

My Lords, I understood the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, to say that our duty was to amend legislation where practicable. I did not hear her say that our other duty is to consider the need for that legislation, although I understood that she was not convinced of the need for this legislation. It is my view that our first job in any piece of legislation is to see whether the case for it has been made. There has been much attack on members of existing police authorities. They are not high-profile; people do not know who or where they are. I have spent time looking at all the issues that were raised with me and would be considered by a single populist candidate. I raised none of them in public. I raised them with my noble friend who was chair of the police authority, the chief constable, divisional officers and community police officers over a long period. To say that police authorities are ineffective because they are not in the press every week and the newspapers do not know who they are is, frankly, not borne out by my experience. The issues included car crime and many other things. The real issue facing policing by consent and our police service is that of those for whom the system is broken. They do not give consent; they are not part of the consent. Those are the issues, referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Condon, that need to be looked at by a royal commission and the groups that are studying this. That is where the system is breaking down—not with the chief constable, police officers or members of the existing police authorities. I suggest that the Minister should be awfully careful in using the argument that we ultimately have no right to intervene because the other place is democratically accountable. That does not appear to sit with her Government’s policy that, were we to be democratically accountable, we would still have to be quiet on issues that we did not agree with. I am deeply worried about this. As someone who has worked in local and county government, I believe an individual will not be able to stand unless they have a lot of money to fight a campaign across a whole police authority area. These areas will be bigger than the bishops’ areas and they have an army of people in their church to take their message out. It is a very worrying position. New registers will come in in November, when elderly people will not go out in the dark and people will not answer their door when candidates’ volunteers go around to campaign. I am worried that there will be a very small turnout and a limited populist campaign, resulting in the fracturing of a service of which I am proud. The noble Lord, Lord Wasserman, has been mentioned. I admire much in America, but I do not advise your Lordships’ to support our emulating the politicisation of its police service at the local level.