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I accept the hon. Gentleman’s point—I said this in Cardiff—that apart from level 2 protective services, this is not about there being anything wrong in substance with any of the four Welsh forces. As he said, they have made huge advances over the last 10 or 15 years. None the less, a gap remains. We were trying to seek, in the Police and Justice Bill, any number of accommodations for the peculiarities of the Welsh situation—that is now
history, albeit recent—not least because of pressure from my Welsh colleagues. We tried to reflect concerns of geography by having an additional deputy chief constable in Wales should the merger proceed. We tried to reflect geographic disparity by providing scope for area committees.
I want to make two points about our starting premise now. First, for the sake of absolute clarity and accuracy about statute, forced mergers remain on the books. I will be urging the House, in October or November, to overturn the Lords amendment to which the hon. Gentleman referred which effectively says there will be no enforced mergers by the Home Secretary and that mergers must now start from an agreed position.
The situation is not terribly confusing, I hope. On 19 June, the Home Secretary said that we would withdraw enforced mergers, and we subsequently took the orders off the table. We are not proceeding with that timetable. For the foreseeable future there will be no enforced mergers. What I cannot do, which is why I shall be asking the House to resist the Lords amendment, is say that in all circumstances, in all our subsequent open discussions, to which I shall try to return if I have the time, every single force in the country will give me and the Home Secretary a 100 per cent. guarantee that they can fill the gaps in protective services and counter-terrorism by every other route except merger. There may be some forces that still have to merge. They may not choose to do so, but it may still be overwhelmingly in the interest of public safety that they merge. A year or 18 months or so down the line, if we come to that conclusion for any two, three or four forces, the Home Secretary will need to have the route of enforced mergers open to him. That is still on the books, and as I hope the House will agree, we will not accept the notion that there can no longer be enforced mergers by the Home Secretary.
In the current context, as I said clearly in Cardiff last week and have said previously, the starting premise must be that police forces and authorities in Wales are the very people who understand the challenges of policing in Wales and are best placed to set out how we can best improve protective services. I agree with the hon. Gentleman that there has been significant co-operation between the four forces. That is not a moot or tangential point. My hon. Friend the Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami) had a point in suggesting that there is scope for the four forces to share services, including many of the back-room ones. Members of the Welsh Affairs Committee made many points in that regard. I want to engage with colleagues in Wales as openly as possible to explore all those options.
In the first instance, it must be right that, having listened to the dissenting voices and those who did not want to merge voluntarily, we sit down and work out how to take this proposal forward, recognising the gaps. I promise to come to the discussion with the open mind that the hon. Gentleman suggests, but I would still prefer an all-Wales solution. I do not resile from the suggestion in the O’Connor report that a merged force is possibly the best option. Plenty of other people, however, have far more experience and expertise than me in police matters in Wales, and we are giving them the time and scope to present their case.
To be momentarily pedantic—I am not usually pedantic—the hon. Gentleman is entirely wrong to suggest that only two forces sought to merge voluntarily. Only two forces sought to merge with each other voluntarily, but invariably, in every other region, at least two out of three or three out of four forces wanted to merge voluntarily, but a third or fourth force did not. In the north-east, for instance, Cleveland sought not to do so, but Durham and Northumbria were perfectly happy to merge. It is a pedantic point, but I felt that I should make it none the less.
I also want to get to the stage in discussions with Welsh colleagues where we can restore—I think that that is the right word—the issue about filling the gap at level 2, counter-terrorism and serious organised crime, in relation to our overall collective vision for policing in Wales and everywhere else. We got slightly lost in an overtly structural debate on process that was devoid of discussion of how filling the gap at level 2 relates to all the points about area committees, governance, finance and council tax equalisation that the hon. Gentleman mentioned, as well as to the relationship between the region, areas, basic command units and neighbourhood policing.
In considering strategic forces in great detail and the preferred solution of mergers, part of the thrust was precisely to protect neighbourhood policing teams from abstraction every time that there was a serious event, incident or investigation. I still think that that is a model that works. I said to colleagues in Cardiff last week, and I say to the hon. Gentleman, that no element of the discussions with the four forces about shared services, collaboration, federation, back-office rationalisation or merger should preclude the fruitful cross-border co-operation with Cheshire and Merseyside, West Mercia and Avon and Somerset, which can be built on.
If we are considering lead force models, with one of the four forces leading on terrorism, one on serious and organised crime and so on—a sort of evolving
Association of Chief Police Officers model for everything short of merger—even that is better discussed in the context of an all-Wales solution. That does not preclude cross-border co-operation at all. With regard to the events mentioned by the hon. Gentleman, I congratulate forces such as Dyfed Powys and others on their co-operation. However, much can still be done, short of merger, with regard to the four forces.
As the hon. Gentleman’s colleagues may have told him, a tortuous analogy was going round in my head when I was down in Cardiff. In the morning, I got off at Newport and looked at some neighbourhood policing there. I thought, “Imagine a train journey from London. Everyone has told me that I need not go to Cardiff to enjoy all the richness of Wales: I can get off at Newport.” If Newport represents what we have been discussing—co-operation, collaboration and all those other models—and all the gaps in level 2 policing are filled in the way that I require, I am quite happy not to stay on the train to Cardiff, which, in my tortuous analogy, represents the full merger model.
That did not work terribly well during my meetings either, so I stopped eventually, but I think the hon. Gentleman gets the point.
I now want, across all parties and agencies—including the Welsh Assembly Government, of course, but this remains a non-devolved matter—serious, fruitful, productive discussion on the way forward for policing in Wales. I believe that last Thursday started that process. I am more than happy to meet the hon. Gentleman and his colleagues, as I have already met Labour colleagues and others. I think there can be a way forward. I await with interest the plans and solutions suggested—everything short of merger—to deal with these important issues over the coming months, and I hope that we end up at Newport rather than Cardiff.
Adjourned accordingly at twenty-one minutes past Twelve midnight.
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