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Sir Paul Beresford (Mole Valley) (Con): One aspect of part 5 has my entire support. As the Home Secretary knows, there has been close co-operation between some Conservative Members and some members of his team in dealing with sexual offences against children. In particular, there was co-operation during the passage of the Bill that became the Sexual Offices Act 2003. Subsequently, there has been discussion with at least one of the Home Secretary's Ministers and other members of his team on further measures that are necessary. One is contained in part 5, but there are also the issues of encryption and access to information on risk-assessed paedophiles. Would the Home Secretary be agreeable if the chief of the Metropolitan police paedophile unit, an academic known to his team, and I had further discussions with the appropriate Under-Secretary of State to see whether we can use this unique opportunity to deal with one or two outstanding issues?
Mr. Clarke: I am very agreeable to that proposal. I pay tribute to the way in which the hon. Gentleman and others have worked with the Government. As he says, in this international world a number of changes are needed to establish a legal framework in which international co-operation can deal with criminals who, increasingly, work internationally. We should be happy to co-operate.
Mr. Boris Johnson (Henley) (Con): Does the Home Secretary agree that amendments on extradition would offer a good opportunity to clear up the grotesque anomaly whereby citizens of the United Kingdom accused of crimes against British interests in the UK can be extradited to America on the say-so of the American authorities, without any corresponding right in this country to demand that Americans should come here, without producing due cause? Is not it time that that anomaly was cleared up?
Mr. Clarke: As is characteristic of the hon. Gentleman, his description of the state of affairs is wrong; it frequently is, I regret to say. However, the Bill offers opportunities to debate all those matters.
As a package, the Bill makes a vital contribution to policing and justice from the neighbourhood level all the way up to international level. I commend the Bill to the House.
4.10 pm
Nick Herbert (Arundel and South Downs) (Con): I apologise to the House for the absence of the shadow Home Secretary, who is detained in the north today.
This is a curious Bill. It contains a number of disparate measures, some of which are perfectly sensible. All of us will support the principle of new
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powers to tackle child pornography and increased sentences for computer hacking. Other provisions such as the extension of summary justice will need closer examination in Committee, but this Bill maintains an unfortunate trend of increasing Government direction of the police.
The Bill aims to prepare police authorities for the Government's proposed regional police forces. It does not itself propose police amalgamations. The Government are already proceeding with those using secondary legislation under the Police Act 1996, but the manner in which the Home Secretary is using the powers should make the House extremely cautious about conferring on him the Bill's proposed new powers to alter the role and shape of police authorities without proper parliamentary scrutiny.
When police force amalgamations were last considered in the 1960s, a royal commission was established and it took two years to report. Legislation was introduced a year later. It was recognised that the structure of police forces is a fundamental issue on which the public, forces themselves and their authorities need to be properly consulted.
The way in which the Government are proceeding could not be more different, but it is entirely in character. The Home Secretary's proposals to amalgamate forces were announced last September not to the House but in a letter to police authorities. He gave them just four months to respond. He attempted, in the words of the Labour chairman of the Association of Police Authorities, to "bully and bribe" authorities to agree to his proposals and to meet the deadline—a tactic that backfired spectacularly when not one authority submitted. The Government did all they could to avoid parliamentary debate on the proposals, only finally agreeing to a debate before Christmas on a motion for the Adjournment when we and a number of hon. Members protested to Mr. Speaker.
Last month, the Home Secretary again gave police authorities an ultimatum, this time to submit proposals for voluntary mergers within just three weeks. Again, almost all the authorities concerned refused. Cleveland said no, Cheshire said no, Merseyside said no, Dyfed-Powys said no, Gwent said no, North Wales said no, South Wales said no, Warwickshire said no, West Mercia said no, West Midlands said no. Even Staffordshire, whose chief constable is leading—
David Taylor (North-West Leicestershire) (Lab/Co-op): On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. The Second Reading debate seems to be going considerably wider than the printed Bill that we have in front of us. Is the speech of the hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) related to the thrust of the Bill?
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Alan Haselhurst): The hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) is about three minutes into his speech. Second Reading debates are customarily fairly broad. I am listening carefully to what he says and I trust that it will not be long before he more directly relates his remarks to the content of the Bill. However, he is allowed to give some background to his concerns.
Mark Pritchard
: Further to that point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I thought that I would try to help.
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The fact is that the Bill deals with local neighbourhood policing, and many of us on the Conservative Benches are concerned that strategic police authorities will detract from local neighbourhood policing. Therefore, it is completely in order that my hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) is making the points that he is making.
Mr. Deputy Speaker: I am always grateful for help from hon. Members. All I ask as guardian of the Standing Orders is that speeches be related to the measure that is before the House.
Nick Herbert: Even Staffordshire, whose chief constable is leading the Home Secretary's amalgamation "hit squad", said no. Every regional opinion poll conducted on this issue has said no. Yet just one week later, the Home Secretary announced that he would proceed with compulsory amalgamations, regardless. The report of Her Majesty's inspector of constabulary, Denis O'Connor, on which the Government are relying, said:
Yet this crucial decision was announced by way of a written statement, slipped into the Library of the House at 2.24 pm last Friday, just before the House rose.
Now, we are being asked to agree that similar order-making powers be given to the Home Secretary through this Bill, to allow him to alter police authorities' structure and functions. It is hardly surprising that the Association of Police Authorities has expressed alarm at the provisions. Its chairman, Bob Jones, said:
"The Home Secretary is now proposing to give himself power to change the role and membership of local authorities . . . and the bodies which represent them. Only Parliament, not the Home Secretary, should be able to do this".
The Home Secretary claims that he has rejected the idea of a national police force, but the Government's reorganisations are moving us steadily toward this model. Twelve police chiefs, rather than 43, will effectively answer to the Home Secretary, not their local communities. As Professor Tom Williamson observed in Jane's Police Review,
"Legislation has concentrated power in the Home Secretary, who sets the National Policing Plan and specifies outcomes. In this new public management paradigm, chief constables have an executive function only which is to deliver the plan . . . Following force amalgamations, a few chief constables, reporting to a senior Home Office official in regional Government offices, will be even more centrally influenced and controlled."
The new national policing improvement agency, introduced by clause 1, will not answer to police forces or to authorities; indeed, the Government have flatly rejected a proposal from police authorities that they should even part-fund the agency. The paymaster will call the tune and the paymaster is the Home Secretary. According to the Home Office, the agency will
"support national implementation of the Home Secretary's key priorities for the police, as set out in the annual National Community Safety Plan".
In other words, the agency will effectively be the Home Secretary's enforcement arm, used to get the policing that he wants. There is already a police standards unit in the Home Office—a development that the 2004 White Paper admitted
How will the national policing improvement agency work with the police standards unit? How will both work with the new inspectorate for justice, community safety and custody?
Police forces are besieged with agencies seeking to direct them. Such central direction has hardly been a success story in public services. The Government have introduced the Education and Inspections Bill to give schools more autonomy, and they introduced foundation hospitals for the same reason; yet, ironically, less autonomy for chief constables and instead, ever-closer direction by Ministers and their officials, is now the backbone of their approach to policing. Only a fig leaf of local accountability is to be maintained.
The Government claim that proposals in the Bill to align basic command unit and crime and disorder reduction partnership boundaries will strengthen local accountability, but the number of BCUs has reduced from around 400 when the Government came to power to 225 today. The Government are pressing CDRPs, which are currently based on district council areas, to merge. A Home Office report, slipped out in January, gave the game away. It stated that the Home Office
"will be working closely with ODPM as well as with regional and local partners to ensure that we do not end up with merged CDRP boundaries which are out of step with the likely future structure of local government."
What "likely future structure" of councils is this, exactly? Has Parliament been informed? Of course it has not. So far the Government's plans have been announced, in the usual manner, by leaks to the press.
The Government cannot credibly claim that police accountability will be achieved through local government scrutiny when the partnerships are being altered to make them more remote from the people. In West Sussex, for instance, the aim is to reduce the number of crime and disorder reduction partnerships from seven to just one. The real decisions will be taken not in the partnerships but in Whitehall and by chief officers in regional headquarters hundreds of miles from local communities. Inevitably, they will be less answerable to local people.
The Government's proposals for local police accountability are a mess. What happened to the Home Secretary's suggestion, repeated as recently as January, for local
If the much-vaunted "community call to action" in clause 15 gives residents a direct means of drawing issues to the attention of the police, where does that leave police authorities? What happens if the police simply ignore the community's view?
The Government do not appear to understand the difference between accountability and public relations. The Home Secretary enthusiastically tells us that the public will shortly have the email addresses or telephone numbers of their local police officers. Good. But what matters is that the public actually get the response they
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want. Bournemouth police recently informed local shopkeepers that they were unable and unwilling to respond to the shoplifting of goods to less than the value of £75. Having the email address of local police officers in Bournemouth will plainly be of little use to small shop owners there.
The Government claim that they remain faithful to the traditional tripartite arrangement under which the Home Secretary, police authorities and chief constables have balanced powers. The Home Office website claims that
"this three-way system prevents political interference in policing and avoids giving any single organisation power over the entire police service."
The previous Home Secretary put an end to that. He insisted on firing a chief constable against the will of the local police authority. He even threatened to take direct control of policing in London if the then Metropolitan Police Commissioner failed to comply with his demands.
This Bill will confer significant new powers on the Home Secretary to interfere with police forces and authorities. Clause 2 will give him wide powers to prescribe the membership of police authorities, and new powers to intervene in police forces. It will scrap the statutory duty on police authorities to determine local policing objectives, replacing it with additional powers for the Home Secretary. It will put basic command units on a statutory footing—an apparently unnecessary provision, but one that the Association of Police Authorities believes may be the precursor to more direct Home Office control. The association has warned:
"These provisions represent a fundamental constitutional change, and a significant shift in the balance of power within the tripartite relationship".
It is time to restore the balance and introduce proper local accountability to policing. First, where there are major reorganisations of a local force, there should be formal mechanisms to consult the public, including referendums where appropriate—something that the Government are signally failing to do.
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