My Lords, I have been trying to work out how this Bill was prepared and I can only assume that there was collective amnesia in the part of the Home Office that was preparing it about their other major piece of legislation, which created police and crime commissioners. The mentions of police and crime commissioners in this Bill are few and far between. Had it not been so vigorously resisted by the Minister in Committee, I would have assumed that it was a simple drafting error not to include that the police and crime commissioner should be informed or, better still, consulted—although today’s amendment possibly moves us away from that—about a possible direction or requirement for the use of resources in their area.
Has the Home Office really thought about the practical politics that will arise and the consequences that may flow from failing to put this very simple provision into the Bill? Put yourself into the position of someone who has been elected earlier this month to the position of police and crime commissioner. They sit there with all the majesty of their electoral mandate: many of them have had as much as 4% of the electorate in their areas voting for them, so they know that they have the people behind them. It is clear that they have a substantial, legislative obligation on behalf of the communities they represent, whether it is the 4% or all 100% of them, to hold the chief constable to account for the use of policing resources in that area. That is what the legislation that we spent so many happy hours debating a year or so back was all about. Yet here is a provision in the Bill which enables the director-general of the National Crime Agency to require the use, either by direction or agreement, of police forces in their area.
I can conceive of circumstances in which police and crime commissioners have been elected having said very clearly that their prime focus is going to be on
local crime concerns in their particular patch and that they want “zero tolerance”—a number of them did in fact say in their manifestos and websites that they wanted zero tolerance of crime on the streets of their particular area. However, they are suddenly told—or they find out, perhaps because their chief constables tell them, they read it in the newspapers or hear some gossip—that a substantial proportion of the local resources that they thought were going to be devoted to keeping street crime and burglary down in the areas of their mandate is being diverted to some, no doubt very important, serious crime operation. You are likely to then get precisely the sort of row about operational policing that we have said we do not wish to see between police and crime commissioners and chief constables, because police and crime commissioners will suddenly discover that the resources that they thought were being devoted to dealing with crime in their patch are being diverted to another—no doubt very worthy and important—area.
The very simple, practical and political—with a small “p”—way of doing this is to have an obligation on the director-general to at least inform, if not consult, the police and crime commissioner. That might perhaps ensure that, because they hear it first from the National Crime Agency—the people who are making the request—they have an understanding of it. That is much more likely to be acceptable to a police and crime commissioner than their hearing about it from some other source. I wonder why the Home Office, having devoted so much energy, effort and even money into having police and crime commissioners elected, has then excluded them from this part of the Bill. Unless my noble friend’s amendment is passed, you are going to have a situation in which you almost encourage conflict and a reaction from police and crime commissioners saying, “I do not wish the see the resources of my police force area being diverted for those national or other purposes”. You will have created a conflict, because the police and crime commissioner does not have the right to be informed by the National Crime Agency of what is being done.
Maybe the Minister will tell us in a couple of minutes that his expectation is that the chief constable will explain it to the police and crime commissioner. It looks as though that may well be what is in the Minister’s brief. Of course there will be discussion and dialogue, but the common courtesy of the director-general of the National Crime Agency going to the police and crime commissioner to say, “I am about to make this request”, or, “I am asking your chief constable for this”, and, “These are the reasons”, will smooth the passage and make this work better. I cannot understand why, for the sake of a simple telephone call or e-mail, this has been omitted from the legislation. The reality is that it would not delay things, but would make them less liable to create conflict between the police and crime commissioner and the chief constable who has accepted the request from the National Crime Agency director-general, with the police and crime commissioner grandstanding about how he or she is fighting for the people of his or her area and about not having police services diverted to other functions because those services are there for the people of his or her community.