My Lords, I am grateful to noble Lords for explaining their amendments. Clause 4 already requires that the agency’s annual plan should be published
and must include the strategic priorities determined by the Home Secretary. My noble friend’s Amendment 15 proposes that, in addition to the normal publication of the strategic priorities in the annual plan, the Home Secretary should lay a report before Parliament if she should determine any variation in the NCA’s strategic priorities out of sync with the annual plan cycle. I understand that my noble friend is rightly concerned to ensure that Parliament is kept abreast of changes to the strategic priorities. However, in practice, I do not think that there is any need for this amendment. The strategic priorities are not going to be changed every other month. They will be informed by weighty assessment of the threats from serious and organised crime.
The timetable for that assessment process will be in sync with the development of the annual plan, which will itself inform the agency’s annual financial planning cycle determining how it allocates resources. The annual plan really is the right place for the strategic priorities to sit. Indeed, it is highly likely that in some years, as has been the case for SOCA, the strategic priorities will remain the same because the strategic threat picture remains consistent. The only reason for changing the priorities mid-year would be if there was a seismic shift in the organised crime landscape, such as the emergence of a totally new threat. If that were to happen, Parliament would undoubtedly already be well aware of it, and in any case the Home Secretary would, of course, notify Parliament, whether through an Oral or Written Statement or by some other established mechanism. The Bill also provides for the agency’s annual report to be laid before Parliament and for such reports to include an assessment of the extent to which the annual plan for the year has been carried out. Parliament will be well informed about the strategic priorities and how the agency is delivering against them.
I turn now to Amendments 16 and 17, spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Rosser. I understand the concerns expressed in Committee by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, that the provision requiring consent to the annual plan before issuing it invites potential political interference in the operational independence of the agency. Let me first be clear on the purpose of the annual plan. It is intended as the means by which the director-general sets out how he intends to deliver the NCA’s objectives for the coming year, chief among which will be the Home Secretary’s strategic priorities. Using his operational expertise and an informed picture of the threat, he crafts a high-level plan for the National Crime Agency’s operational response to serious and organised crime over the coming year. He still, of course, has independent operational responsibility for decisions throughout the year about which individual operations to mount and how they should be conducted, as is clearly set out in Clause 4. Equally, it is crucial that he gains agreement to the annual plan from those to whom he is ultimately accountable at the national level for delivery against the strategic priorities.
Let me seek to explain why. First, let us consider the consent of the Home Secretary. I do not at all see this as political interference, as the noble Lord has suggested, but as a common-sense approach to guarantee consistency between what the Home Secretary needs the National Crime Agency to deliver, as set out in the strategic priorities, and what the director-general intends to
deliver operationally in any given year. How can my right honourable friend be held truly accountable to Parliament for the agency’s performance in the fight against serious and organised crime if she has not publicly agreed the high-level direction set for the agency by the director-general in the annual plan?
Secondly, but no less importantly, let us consider the consent of the devolved Administrations. They will play an important role in shaping the fight against organised crime through consultation on the strategic priorities, ensuring that the priorities of the devolved Administrations in Scotland and Northern Ireland feed into the overall strategic priorities that the Home Secretary will set. Given their accountability for the fight against organised crime in Scotland and Northern Ireland, it therefore follows that the devolved Administrations should rightly have a role in agreeing those aspects of the annual plan which affect Scotland and Northern Ireland, not least to ensure that the agency’s operational priorities set out in the annual plan are consistent with the serious and organised crime priorities there.
I would go so far as to say that I am a little surprised that the noble Lord would want to water down this clear and important safeguard for the devolved Administrations. We will come to discuss Northern Ireland later, but I fully expect that the Northern Ireland Department of Justice will be stressing the important safeguards that we have included in the Bill to respect the devolution settlement in discussions in Northern Ireland, with this provision being a case in point. I know how strongly the noble Lord feels about securing arrangements in Northern Ireland that meet the needs of Northern Ireland but it rather seems that this amendment undermines that end.
In summary, given the clear mechanisms already in the Bill to ensure that the strategic priorities are published regularly, I am not persuaded that it is necessary to have a further procedure for laying the strategic priorities before Parliament “in-year”. Similarly, I am clear that the requirement of consent is an important level of assurance—for the Home Secretary, for the devolved Administrations, for Parliament and for the public—that the agency is heading in the right direction to spearhead the national response to serious and organised crime. I hope, therefore, that noble Lords will not press their amendments at the appropriate point.