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Mrs. Moon: I would endorse virtually everything the hon. Gentleman said, other than his remarks about Government funding. Surely the Government hand out rate support grant to the local authorities and the local authorities decide how it is spent. The Conservative party has always and consistently argued that decisions should be made nearer to the point of service delivery.

My local authority calls itself a rainbow alliance of Liberal Democrats and Conservatives, but it will not fund leisure services that are critical to ensuring that youngsters realise that we adults value them, want them to engage with society, and want them to enjoy services of a quality that will offer them an alternative to hanging around on street corners, sitting on old ladies' front walls, throwing petrol into the street and setting fire it, and throwing flour bombs and ink bombs. Such low-level bad behaviour makes communities despair. I am glad that the hon. Member for The Wrekin (Mark Pritchard) also wants my local authority to support funding for youth services in Bridgend.
 
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I do not want young people to become part of the criminal justice system because of a lack of youth and leisure facilities or adequate children's social services departments. My local authority has been criticised in that regard. As my community safety partnership says, we must recognise that virtually every antisocial behaviour order represents a failure on the part of the statutory services to provide the support network and skills needed to show youngsters an alternative way of behaving.

I am reaching the end of my "buts", but I have a final "but" in regard to conditional cautions. I feel that they have a key role in presenting offenders with an immediate response to their actions—an immediate recognition of what they have done and what they need to do to make reparation. However, I question whether the policeman on the beat has the necessary skills base on which to construct a rehabilitative conditional caution. Somewhere along the line, we need to incorporate responsibility for a senior police officer and liaison with social services, community safety partnerships and youth justice teams, to establish what conditional cautions should contain.

The Bill's aim is justice, not punishment. Justice requires that people have alternatives, that there is rehabilitation, and that there are opportunities for those who will come within the purview of the police. I hope that in Committee the minor changes for which Members have called today will be possible. It has been pleasing to observe the common desire to find a constructive and effective solution, and that is what a Committee stage should be for. Apart from my few "buts", I support the Bill.

5.32 pm

Mr. Bernard Jenkin (North Essex) (Con): When the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs. Moon) welcomed the fact that every speaker so far had generally welcomed the Bill, my heart sank somewhat. I did not interpret those speeches in quite the same way. However, the hon. Lady's long row of "buts" then emerged, and she presented us with a considered and thoughtful response to many of the Bill's provisions. That applies not least to her description of parenting orders, which bring into question the Government's top-down approach to the respect agenda. She was right to say that judgments about parenting or antisocial behaviour cannot be imposed by formula by an office in Whitehall, although I fear that that is one of the aims of the Bill.

In one respect, I concur with most of the speeches made so far—indeed, all except the Home Secretary's speech. The Bill appears to be a very centralising measure. The Home Secretary tut-tutted at my hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert), suggesting that his facts were wrong, but we need only open the Bill to see that it gives the Secretary of State additional powers. How can a Bill that gives a Secretary of State additional powers be described as anything other than a centralising measure? Indeed, the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham), who is not in his place at the moment, expressed concern on behalf of the Select Committee on Home Affairs at the idea that this is a centralising measure.
 
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I draw the House's attention to one particular provision. Set out in schedule 2 is new section 40 of the Police Act 1996, which replaces with a very wide power the pretext for intervention in the 1996 Act, as amended by the Police Reform Act 2002. At the moment, any intervention by the Secretary of State in the running of a constabulary depends on a trigger from an inspectorate. There has to be a manifest failing in the performance of a constabulary before there can be an intervention. That is itself a stronger power than this Government inherited—and now it is to be replaced by the following, under the heading "Power to give directions in relation to police force":

(1) Where the Secretary of State is satisfied that the whole or any part of a police force is failing to discharge any of its functions in an effective manner, whether generally or in particular respects, he may direct—

(a) the chief officer of police of the force,

(b) the police authority responsible for maintaining the force, or

(c) both of them".

That is a far more general power to direct police forces than has ever existed in national legislation before. I therefore commend the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert), as well as many of the points made by the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Lynne Featherstone), about the centralising tendencies of the Bill. This is a further twist to the ratchet of centralisation of police forces. Therefore, I hope that my hon. Friends responsible for the policy of Her Majesty's official Opposition on the Bill will hold open the prospect of our voting against it on Third Reading, in protest at its centralising aspects.

It was utterly ridiculous for the Home Secretary to mutter that amalgamation and police force structures were irrelevant to the Bill. I am always wary of instructing the occupant of the Chair to rule things out    of order—the hon. Member for North-West Leicestershire (David Taylor) came a cropper, rightly, after raising a point of order. The amalgamation of constabularies is the most graphic feature of current Government centralisation policy.

The Government have yet to put up a serious concrete argument in favour of these force amalgamations. They have yet to justify the £500 million cost, the disruption to the operation of police forces, and the inevitable effect on police morale and performance as mergers take place. Inevitably, our police forces will become increasingly remote if their command structures are moved up to regional level, destroying historic local loyalties. The Government have yet to explain why bigger forces—which they call strategic forces—have any merit, except in the eyes of those sitting in offices in Whitehall, who will have fewer heads to order around, fewer units to manage and an easier job, at the expense of local policing. The Home Secretary continues to recite his mantra at every opportunity, although the actual effects of the policies that he is carrying out are in direct conflict with it.

How can the Home Secretary keep talking about the development of neighbourhood policing when, in Essex, for example, he is taking away the figurehead and symbol of law and order in Essex which, personified in one man, gives credibility and authority to everything
 
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that the Essex police do—the chief constable of Essex? If the Home Secretary abolishes the chief constable, to whom will Essex police belong? At the moment they are our police; they belong to the people of Essex. Under the Home Secretary's proposals, they will belong to some vague, remote and anonymous region or sub-region. This is an utterly destructive development, which certainly does not command the support of the people of Essex.

This Bill represents the disease of which the process of amalgamation is but one symptom. It is when the problems get too difficult that they seem to be easier to address by moving the deckchairs around on the Titanic, rather than by dealing with the water coming into the ship's hull. Indeed, under this Government, given the bureaucracy that has been piled on to our public services, there are now so many deckchairs stacked on the Titanic and being moved around that it is a wonder that this great ship ever floated in the first place.

The disease affects not just policing but local government. The hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs. Moon) said that local authorities had the freedom to spend their money as they saw fit, but let us be realistic. Every local authority in the land is struggling to make ends meet just to satisfy the statutory responsibilities that central Government have given it, yet central Government pile on more and more statutory responsibilities and impose yet more restrictions on local government's freedom to spend their money as they think fit.

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