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11 Jun 2009 : Column 322WH—continued
3.41 pm
Mr. David Ruffley (Bury St. Edmunds) (Con): Her Majesty’s Opposition and I welcome this debate on the Home Affairs Committee’s report “Policing in the 21st Century”. The police in this country do a truly magnificent job, often in difficult and dangerous circumstances. That is brought home to those of us who work with the police service, and it was doubly brought home to me when I recently spent most of the week at the Police Federation conference in Bournemouth, where I saw dedicated men and women working very hard. In the mother of Parliaments, it is incumbent on us all to acknowledge that at the outset—such comments always bear repeating.
I welcome the Minister to his new post. I also had fruitful discussions with his predecessors. I am grateful to him for setting out the Government’s views on the Committee’s report. I particularly want to congratulate the right hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz), the Chairman of the Committee, on yet another thorough, illuminating, detailed and helpful report on the challenges facing police in the 21st century. He has a great reputation for producing, with the rest of his Committee, high quality reports—this is another in a long line.
I shall not scratch the surface of the subject too much—I endorse much of what the right hon. Gentleman has already said about his report—but I will pick out some of the issues that are particularly important to Her Majesty’s Opposition. The points in the report about police bureaucracy, redaction and countering risk aversion in the police service are very well made—in short, progress is not rapid enough and there is not enough of it.
The report uses the word “disappointment” in relation to the lack of progress made in reducing police bureaucracy. Since 1997, we have had at least four major reviews on reducing police bureaucracy and related subjects, but the fact remains that less than one fifth of patrol officers’ time is spent on patrol. That is not acceptable to the British public and I do not think that it is acceptable to hon. Members—no matter which political party they belong to.
The sort of things mentioned by the Flanagan review and in the glancing blows of Jan Berry’s more recent report show that lots of good ideas are flagged up, but that they are not followed through by Ministers. Let us take one example—forgive me if this seems to be a bit anoraky. The disclosure rules in the Manual of Guidance 6 form—the very long forms that police officers have to fill in as disclosure officers—are a huge bugbear. The
Police Federation and the Police Superintendents Association, in short, ask whether such work could be better done by Crown Prosecution Service lawyers, who have to review these long forms anyway. Why does an officer have to do it? Why does the legislation make disclosure a requirement on a police officer when it would be better and more quickly done with more of a legal eye by non-police officers?
Flanagan talks about that in his final report on disclosure, which, of course, has a read-across to wider parts of the criminal justice system. However, we have not heard anything about that matter. We have already said on the record that we would favour shifting the burden to CPS lawyers—although we would have to pilot that—as a practical, simple and explicit way of reducing some of the more burdensome forms, specifically the part of the MG6 suite of forms that refers to disclosure of evidence.
A further issue that crops up is the need to reform statutory charging, for which Her Majesty’s Opposition have been arguing for more than two years—well before Flanagan. The statutory charging regime was introduced in 2004 and, in simple terms, it required a bigger role for the CPS to make charging decisions and, in relation to large swathes of offences, it removed the discretion that a custody sergeant had to make a charge. The proposal that we made, Flanagan made and, I believe, Jan Berry is also looking at, is to try to return more charging discretion to custody sergeants.
Certainly, charging sergeants should be able to make a decision in relation to all summary offences and they should not have to make any reference to the CPS unless they particularly want to. A large number of triable-either-way offences need to be explicitly set down as being a matter on which custody sergeants can make the charging decision, without having an obligation to go to the CPS to authorise a charge. I do not think that anyone is suggesting that indictable-only offences should be a matter just for custody sergeants, but there certainly needs to be radical reform. We need to go back more to the pre-2004 position, which was before statutory charging came in, and give custody sergeants more discretion. That would mean less file and pre-charge file building and would save time. I would be grateful to hear what the Minister has to say about that, particularly considering his experience in a former life at the Ministry of Justice.
Another totemic form is the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 form—the authorisation for direct and other related forms of surveillance. No one pretends that the RIPA forms are used as frequently as some of the MG suite of forms. On average, police officers obtain between 20,000 and 25,000 authorisations a year under RIPA. However, the RIPA forms are a totemic example of unnecessary bureaucracy. Under a strict interpretation of RIPA, if a police officer wants to conduct a walk-by of the house of someone who is going to be arrested later in the day, they have to fill in a form. The Police Superintendents Association has given evidence in relation to the matter and has spoken to one of the Minister’s predecessors about it. We think that we should amend the RIPA codes—the statutory codes—to make it clear that, in certain situations, RIPA authorisation will not be necessary. Again, I would be grateful to hear from the Minister what progress has been made on that, in particular the Police Superintendents Association’s representation about two years ago to the right hon.
Member for Harrow, East (Mr. McNulty), who was then a Minister of State at the Home Office, on the specific point about reforming the RIPA codes.
I shall not detain the House with detail about stop-and account and stop and search, save to say that Her Majesty’s Opposition as long ago as 2005 believed that the stop-and-account form should be abolished in totality—but not the stop-and-search. That now seems to be a mainstream view. It would save hundreds of thousands of police hours each year. Also, we suggested finding a way to record the key information that will always be necessary for an intrusive procedure such as stop-and-search in a more user-friendly way. Digitised recordings are an obvious way of doing that, and we welcome the signs that progress is being made along those lines.
To reduce police bureaucracy, we really must get to grips with the Staffordshire pilot. There were also pilots in the west midlands, Leicestershire and Surrey, which were spoken about eloquently earlier. To crystallise the point, we all know of examples from many police forces of two 16-year-olds having a scuffle in a playground. The police are called and an offence of common assault might be disclosed by the facts—two young people shoving each other in the playground. Typically, in the past few years, that would have given rise to a requirement on the officer to start filling in forms and to record a crime. The four pilots suggested that a police officer could use his or her discretion and look for a solution that did not involve recording a crime. In the example that I gave, an apology could be offered, or the parents could be called in. Such solutions do not require treating the incident as a crime, with the full panoply of forms that are required.
What has not been said in this debate but which I think is important is that using discretion, as in the Staffordshire and other pilots, has its risks. Some of the officers who were involved in the pilots said that if they did not write down the details of the action that they took when called to an alleged incident and something went wrong subsequently, they would not have any back-up or paperwork if all they did was give a verbal dispensation or come to an agreement not to take the matter further. That is a real issue that police representative bodies have discussed with me.
Of course the main thrust should be to allow more discretion and less paperwork, but let us also understand that officers will need to be trained in the use of discretion. It is not just a question of saying to them, “Go out and use your discretion,” because it is not quite as simple as that. Some officers feel that filling in the forms gives them the necessary protection if something goes wrong a week or a month later. We should not play party politics or pretend that there is a simple answer. We must be sensitive to what the police representative bodies are saying on the matter.
Yes, Her Majesty’s Opposition unambiguously want a national roll-out of the Staffordshire model—we do not want pilots—and I would like to hear from the Minister what he, his colleagues and his predecessors have been doing to ensure that the model is more widely adopted, but also, having regard to my point, understanding that officers, many of whom might be quite young, need to be inculcated in the use of discretion when for so long they have always had the crutch of paperwork, if I can put it that way, to protect them in the event of
someone challenging their exercise of discretion. Not enough has been said about that, which is why I particularly wanted to flag it up. The model is great, but extra work needs to be done to ensure that police officers’ careers are protected and that they are not accused of using discretion wrongly or in a way that gives rise to problems later on.
I close my remarks on reducing police bureaucracy, in which we all have an interest, by saying that it is not clear that we have cracked the nut of national targets, which are routinely complained about by all parties. The dreaded police performance assessment framework league tables have been superseded by the new analysis of policing and community safety framework. It is not immediately clear to me that the APACS framework is cutting the targetry and target-chasing that constabularies have to engage in. The chief constable of Greater Manchester police, Peter Fahy, without specifically referring to APACS, said that the national targetry burden on his and other forces is still there.
I would like to hear from the Minister what progress has been made on APACS. My understanding is that the PPAF and APACS frameworks will run in tandem this year as a dual system, and then APACS will kick in. How much time will the new system save the average force, compared with the PPAF system, given all the data collection that is implicit in both systems? Why is APACS better? Is it better? Can he tell us how it is better in terms of less targetry?
Having given a flavour of the need for some answers on police bureaucracy, which was admirably dealt with by the Home Affairs Committee, my next point is about the policing costs of dealing with immigration, which is touched on in the report. I shall not detain the House too long, except to say that a report by KPMG in September 2007 on the Cambridge constabulary concluded that Cambridgeshire required an additional 100 police officers to cover the additional work load generated by policing foreign nationals. That is from the report “The changing demography of Cambridgeshire”. There are strains on police resources for all kinds of reasons, but the issues raised by the chief constable of Cambridgeshire were correctly identified. The Minister should tell us what the position is on that, and also on translation services, interpreter services and so on.
Of course, pressure on police resources is caused not just by policing immigration. There is a tight budgetary settlement in this country for reasons that we do not really need to dilate on today. There will be pressures, whoever the Government are, on funding our great public services. Let us not forget that the police service is one of our great institutions. None of the chief constables to whom I speak or who gave evidence to the Select Committee could hide the fact that the police feel that their ability to do the job of keeping us safe, preventing crime and enforcing our laws is made more difficult in a tight budgetary environment.
Without arguing about how much will be put in budgets or freezes or any of that, I would like to flag up how, in a consensual way, we can get more bang for the existing buck. How can we make existing resources work better? Collaboration, which was touched on in the report, is so important. On page 4 the report states:
“Regional collaboration works well in some parts of England and Wales, but progress elsewhere is too slow.”
That is correct. Collaboration is the big game in town and will be for a long time, in the light of the fact that the strategic merger proposition of this Government failed and will not be revisited by Her Majesty’s Opposition. It will not, as far as I am aware, be revisited by Her Majesty’s Government, which is why there was some general agreement between the Opposition and the Minister’s predecessor about how we close the level 2 gap. That cannot be done by strategic merger, so collaboration is the way to do it.
In this context, it is important to mention clause 5 of the Policing and Crime Bill, which is going through Parliament this year and is important because it clearly gives new, unambiguous powers to Ministers, of whatever political persuasion, to mandate collaboration agreements. Without spelling out what has to be mandated in a collaboration agreement, there are some detailed provisions involved, which I took the Minister’s predecessor through in Committee.
We have already seen good, obvious examples where collaboration really should be taking place throughout the country and not in an ad hoc way. The Kent and Essex model, which is delivering huge recurrent savings, allowing new fully warranted officers to be hired and put on the front line, has been built around those counties sharing back-office services, including payroll, training and so on. The Policing and Crime Bill, which this Government are putting through Parliament and which we support, is important because it will give Ministers, potentially, the power to mandate these excellent efficiency-saving agreements. There has to be a huge debate about how that power in the Bill might be used in future. That is clearly the right way to go, but I should be interested to hear what the Minister and his Home Office colleagues are doing about mandating collaboration.
The Chairman of the Committee dealt thoroughly and in great detail with alcohol-related crime. The most recent British crime survey, published in July last year, showed that 45 per cent. of all victims of violence described their assailant as being under the influence of alcohol at the time. We have also heard in this debate—I agree with the sentiments expressed—about the preponderance of cheap alcohol and we know about the problems that this causes. More generally, the extended licensing hours that the Government brought in under the Licensing Act 2003 have probably compounded the problem of alcohol-related crime. It would be interesting to hear whether the Minister believes, finally, that there is a legal basis for banning the use of loss-leading alcohol sales by supermarkets. That specific point was raised in the Committee’s report and it would be useful to get a clear steer from the Minister on that. Her Majesty’s Opposition believe that there must be an urgent review the appropriateness of the law on extended licensing and 24-hour drinking in towns and cities.
The report also touches on the crucial importance of engaging the British public more widely in what the priorities are for their police and how policing is delivered. That goes to the heart of the points on local accountability that were raised earlier in this debate. The report says bluntly in its introduction:
“Public expectations of the police are not being met.”
The most recent British crime survey found that, across the country, only 48 per cent. of people had confidence
in the police and local authorities to deal with crime and antisocial behaviour. There are figures showing higher public confidence in various police forces, although there is no magical number, but let us just agree that there is always room for improvement. Lots of constabularies have high levels of confidence and respect emanating from the local populace, but it could be better.
The proposals to reform local police authorities advanced by the Government last year were dropped. I will not rehearse the reasons for that. Her Majesty’s Opposition believe that there must be a much clearer line of direct accountability that the British public can exercise when judging and directing how policing is done. It really is a case of power to the people in this respect. We have a proposal for a lay commissioner, not a police officer, to be elected for each constabulary force area. With regard to the events of the past few weeks in this place, the public expect the governing classes—in the most general sense—to be more responsive, transparent and open. That expectation might also extend to large parts of public service, including the health service and the police service. This debate needs to be had. We Conservatives have our own model, the Liberal Democrats have a separate model and the Labour Government have asked the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett) to do some work as well. In short, we all believe that the current police authority model, which is an indirectly-plus-nominated model of 17 men and women—with a slightly higher number in the London Metropolitan Police Authority—has to change, because it is not delivering the clear line of accountability that the public require. It is about not what we politicians and Members of Parliament think is needed, but what the public require. It is important that there is another report in the coming months showing what further evidence the Committee has taken on a more direct, accountable model for holding the police service locally to account.
This is an important debate and an important report. I have picked out some of the issues thrown up by this report that particularly exercise Her Majesty’s Opposition. I look forward to the Minister’s giving specific replies to some of the specific, although not exhaustive, questions that I have posed.
4.7 pm
The Minister of State, Home Department (Mr. David Hanson): May I thank colleagues for the consensual and helpful way in which they have framed today’s debate? There are key issues that we need to address in government, with the support of my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz), as the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, and the hon. Members for Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Ruffley) and for Chesterfield (Paul Holmes), as Opposition spokesmen.
You will understand, Mr. Williams, that I am in day three of my tenure as Minister with responsibility for security, counter-terrorism, crime and policing. I hope that my experience as Minister with responsibility for prisons, probation and youth justice will help me to understand some of the complexities of the issues before me. Having been involved in that work for the past two and a half years, and having dealt with security issues in a previous role in Northern Ireland, it is interesting to
see things through the prism of the last three days in my new area of responsibility—I hope that I can do justice to it.
I am grateful for the tributes that have been paid to my predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Mr. Coaker), who has gone on to other activities in government as the Minister of State, Department for Children, Schools and Families. I am also grateful to those who mentioned my right hon. Friend the Member for Redditch (Jacqui Smith), who has returned to the Back Benches, but will undoubtedly occasionally contribute to debates on these issues in due course.
I will try to answer the points that have been mentioned in broad terms by right hon. and hon. Members, but I begin by thanking my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, East for the work on this matter that he has done on the Committee. He will know that we have been able to accept many of the recommendations, and my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling, who was the author of the Government’s response, acknowledged not only that my right hon. Friend and his team did tremendous work, but that their suggestions were sensible. We have been able to accept some of them but, as always, not all. However, I will continue to keep them under review because I believe in examining problems day by day. As hon. Members have said, the challenges for policing change regularly.
The hon. Member for Chesterfield, like my right hon. Friend, mentioned things that are happening now that we would never have considered 10, 11, 12 or 15 years ago, such as internet grooming and contact, child sex trafficking, and even—dare I say it?—gun and knife crime. When I was first elected to the House 17 and a half years ago, such issues were not on the radar of Members of Parliament. I know from my experience as the Minister with responsibility for prisons and probation that even during that time fresh challenges came before me that we had to examine and deal with. This important report is a snapshot of where we are now, but it will never be a static document. We will work on the issues that we have accepted, and we will continue to be aware of those that we have rejected and today’s debate. The report addressed a range of issues that hon. Members have raised this afternoon, such as collaboration, police numbers, capacity performance indicators, reducing bureaucracy, improvements in technology, the need to increase productivity and efficiency, diversity, alcohol and police numbers, all of which I will try to touch on.
This morning, I had the privilege of addressing the Local Government Association for the first time as the Minister with responsibility for policing. I tried to set out some themes that are important for me to consider during whatever time I have in this post. I am pleased that they were echoed by some of the themes in the debate. Whatever is happening at the moment, local accountability is vital. The people who know best about policing in my constituency are not just the chief constable and those on the police authority, but the local basic unit commander and beat managers. Sometimes the local community needs a better way of engaging with the police on accountability.
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