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Finally, I emphasise the importance of public consent in the process. The last time decisions of an equivalent scale were taken, back in the 1960s, there was a royal commission and full public discussion, and the process took a number of years. ACPO and the APA have expressed alarm about the general direction of policy as expressed in the Police and Justice Bill and shown by the increasing centralisation of policing. They make the point:
“Effective
policing is dependent on the consent and support of the public. This
support is conditional on the demonstrable
independence of policing from partisan political interests. It is
essential that the local nature of policing is preserved, as it is here
that policing has its roots, and that is why local accountability
between police authorities and chief constables is crucially important
and should not be undermined by greater central
control.”
Against a background of such increasing central control, developments such as the national policing plan, and the proposal, not yet formally announced in the House, to create a national policing board with the Home Secretary as chairman, concerns about the loss of local independence and accountability are particularly amplified. The Government should have pursued a different agenda, and I hope that the Home Secretary and the Minister will now pursue it. It is one of police reform, of ensuring that the police service is equipped to meet the challenges against the background of much tighter finance in the future, of work force modernisation, of driving forward the process of neighbourhood policing and of meeting the public demand for a visible police presence on the streets. Amalgamations will threaten that agenda and not meet public demand. That is why we have such concerns about amalgamations. I hope that the Minister responds constructively to all the points raised today.
10.45 am
The Minister for Policing, Security and Community Safety (Mr. Tony McNulty): I join those who congratulated the hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Mr. Crabb) on securing the debate. I cast no aspersions on hon. Members because of the lack of attendance at the debate, not least because, as has been said, the Committee considering the Commissioner for Older People (Wales) Bill is sitting at the same time. Apparently, there are some minor attractions down in Blaenau Gwent, which will also have taken away some of our Welsh colleagues. I do not come to the room and think, “Phew, there are only four hon. Members present; the subject of the debate cannot be much of an issue.” I do not take that view at all. I know that policing in Wales remains a very serious issue.
I also join those who congratulated the hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire on the way he introduced the debate. I shall come later to the substance of the debate. According to my minor bits of research, the hon. Gentleman is clearly a born optimist. Apparently, he joined the Conservative party in 1997, which is almost a definition of optimism. He then became an officer in the Southwark and Bermondsey Conservative association. That is not, by any means, an area where there are rich pickings for Conservatives, so I am glad to see him in his place now as a Welsh Tory. Being a Welsh Tory is still, happily, a minority pursuit. I had to ask a colleague how many there were. I thought that the hon. Gentleman was on his own, but apparently there are three of them, which I am sure makes for good company.
Nick Herbert: Soon there will be more.
Mr. McNulty: Perhaps, but with the greatest respect I do not suspect that that will be the case after Thursday.
I
commend the hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire on the non-partisan
way in which he introduced the debate. In making that point, I join the
hon. Member
for Brecon and Radnorshire (Mr. Williams), who, having made it, went on
to make some rather foolish partisan points, which detracted from our
debate, about Blaenau Gwent and about the supposed incompetence of the
Home Office.
It is clear to me—the hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) finished his remarks with this point—that there is a serious and detailed debate to be had. I do not think that I will pre-empt where we are going if I say that my view and that of my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary remains that the destination should be a strategic force. That is not to throw it down people’s throats, but it is our view. We have delayed things deliberately, in part because of the level of disquiet, but also because a range of issues remain to be answered fairly and because we want what I think everyone wants in the end—to render to Wales the policing and police force that it requires for the21st century.
I am pleased that most if not all colleagues have not challenged the notion that there are serious gaps at level 2. We are really talking about how they should be filled. It should not be inferred that somehow we are moving to an all-Wales strategic force and then the border will go up, preventing any co-operation between that force and its English counterparts on the other side. To suggest that is rather foolish. I commend the progress, as outlined by Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary, by all four forces and their co-operation not only with one another and with immediate border forces but, on specific issues, beyond that.
The hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire said at the start that this was an important matter, and I agree. He said also, which may be a reasonable criticism of where we have been for the past couple of months, that a proper, detailed and mature debate on policing in Wales for the 21st century should not get lost in administrative and bureaucratic arrangements. We should not be locked into existing arrangements for the sake of it—I cannot remember who said it, but someone said that only a fool would be wedded to those arrangements if they could see that they were not the main way forward. However, in our concerns about moving towards a strategic force, we have lost sight of the debate, the narrative and the argument on the relationship between neighbourhood policing, basic command units, strategic policing and how those elements serve our communities in Wales, as elsewhere.
The hon. Gentleman also agreed that there were a number of theoretical benefits. He was not opposed in principle and said that there was no credit in wedding oneself to certain structures, regardless of reality, and I agree. We have moved on. My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary said during Home Office questions that he would no longer be seeking to lay any Home Secretary-initiated amalgamation orders before Parliament before the summer recess. He also made it clear that we are still seeking to secure the voluntary merger between Lancashire and Cumbria constabularies, although that has not-dissimilar attendant issues that we are trying to deal with.
One minor point: Lancashire and
Cumbria were the only two forces that voluntarily declared that they
would merge with each other. It is not accurate to say that they were
the only two forces that agreed to a voluntary merger—a pedantic
point, but that claim is
simply not true. For some of the others, three of the four forces in an
area wanted to merge voluntarily but the fourth did not, whereas in
another area two forces wanted to merge but the third did not. It is
therefore not true to say that Lancashire and Cumbria were the only two
forces in the country that sought voluntary
merger.
My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary made that announcement because, in the few weeks that he and I have been in our new posts, we have been engaging with stakeholders and listening to concerns. As with the tone of this debate, time and time again people have said that, whatever the respective merits, there should be discussion about alternatives and more time in which to have those discussions, and we have responded to that.
If I may make a picky little comment about some of the remarks that we have heard today—rather like what my right hon. Friend said to the hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs—it is that half the speeches were written as though last Monday’s announcement did not happen. However, I forgive people for that; they have their points to make and that is entirely fair.
The effect of the announcement is to extend the period for objection, thereby allowing us to work closely with the wider community on developing answers to some of the issues. If we are to have a proper and honest process, I cannot give a definitive response about what that will do to the time scale, because that would pre-empt all that we are seeking to do with that engagement. However, let me say in passing that, as I understand it, if whatever we end up with for each area is significantly different—that is an important phrase—from where we are now, there will have to be a new period of objection, consultation and all those assorted elements.
So I can say, with a degree of confidence, that the process is not about either kicking the proposal into the long grass for ever—“Closing the Gap” remains terribly important to level 2 services and other elements—or some sort of flim-flam to get ourselves out of a hole until September or October and then doing exactly what we said we were going to do now. I assure hon. Members that neither scenario is the reality that will prevail, but there is a lot distance between those two points and that is why I want serious discussion .
I want those who suggest that a federated model might work in Wales to tell me, in substance and detail, how they think it will work. I want people whose main objection has been to the timetable to tell me what would be a better timetable for Wales. I freely admit that more work remains to be done—although most it was laid out in the business case, save for the point about protected services. More work needs to be done on finance, council tax precepts and all the other elements. I freely admit that, but that is the work that we are seeking to engage in now.
I have already
met the four Welsh chief constables and the relevant Minister from the
Welsh Assembly to discuss those points. I have also met a group of
north Wales Labour MPs—I was going to say “north
London”, so apologies for being metro-centric—and I
extend the invitation to come and talk to me about the issue in detail
to the Liberals, Plaid Cymru and the Tories. As was said, the
Front-Bench spokespeople are going to see the Home Secretary to discuss
the issue,
and I am more than happy to pursue that. I will have the pleasure, I
hope, of appearing before the Welsh Affairs Committee on 4 July to
discuss my relative independence, rather than that of the Americans.
That is as it should be, because the Committee has done good work on
the matter.
On 13 July, I am going to Cardiff to meet the four police authority chairs, whom I have not yet met. I hope that the Under-Secretary of State for Wales, my hon. Friend the Member for Carmarthen, West and South Pembrokeshire (Nick Ainger), and our friend the Minister in the Welsh Assembly Government will accompany me, and that it will be more successful and productive than my last visit to Cardiff, which was entirely enjoyable until we lost on penalties and Gerrard scored that fantastic goal just as I was dozing off, waiting for the celebrations and for West Ham to lift the cup. None the less, it was an enjoyable day out. Because I popped in and out, I did not see all the glory of the development around Cardiff bay. I hope to see it, at least in passing, when I return.
We are serious about that engagement and about the future of Wales. Let me scotch another conspiracy theory. It is not the case that the all-Wales force is the only thing on the agenda because we want in the end to devolve all policing matters to the Welsh Assembly Government. Policing is and should remain a national, UK matter, and as far as I know, it will do so for the foreseeable future. Of course we must engage with the Welsh Assembly Government—as hon. Members have suggested, they have a locus and a stake in the matter—but this is not some elaborate ruse to devolve all such matters to them in the end, and they know that.
We must give more consideration to how the national dimension—the hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs mentioned a national policing board—the strategic dimension of every part of the country, the basic command unit areas and the neighbourhood policing areas interact and relate to each other in terms of governance and accountability. Those points are entirely fair, and I am not a million miles away from what the hon. Gentleman said about work force modernisation, police reform and all the other elements that should perhaps be bundled up together.
The hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire made three fair points about the questions that need to be answered. Is this destination the right one, or are there alternatives? I feel passionately that it is the right direction. There is time and scope to consider that now. He is right about not using it as a breathing space or a hiatus in which we do not think about the matter but hope that it goes away.
We need to engage properly. If there are alternatives, we should talk about them. The destination may well be the right one in the end, but to link to the hon. Gentleman’s next point about the pace of reform, some kind of confederation on the way to a potential all-Wales force may be the way to go. I simply do not know, and everyone here gets nervous when people start speculating what the direction might be.
Is the destination the right one? That is an entirely fair point that we need to address now. The pace of reform is also a fair point. Another question is whether the merger will have consequences for policing in Wales which we have not thought through. That was an allusion to financing, policing and governance. There is also the point about council tax precept equalisation. All those points made by the hon. Gentleman were fair. Whether in the Welsh context or the wider context, we must consider them in some detail. However, I do not accept the point—it cannot be right—that all this is about is eradicating all the advances that have been made in policing in Wales and elsewhere at other levels.
The strategic policing model that we are discussing, rather than undermining neighbourhood policing, will root it far more readily in communities. We will not have, as people know that we do now, abstraction any time there is a major incident or issues that go wider that the locality, when people lose their community policing focus.
Everyone agrees that community policing and neighbourhood policing are the right way to go and should be our focus. We have found that in our campaign in Blaenau Gwent, and I am sure that, if they were honest, others would say that they find that too. We are not creating strategic police forces to destroy interaction between police and their local communities. Such interaction must be central to all that we seek to do in 21st-century policing in Wales and everywhere else. I repeat that I am serious about discussing such things in detail. Now that we have the time and space, let us talk.
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