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Lord Elton: It is important to get one thing clear if the noble Lord and other Members of the Committee are not to be at cross-purposes during the following deliberations. There is a very important difference between statutory and non-statutory institutions. Statutory institutions are protected by Parliament whereas non-statutory institutions are not. Statutory institutions can be removed only by primary legislation, if they are set up by primary legislation. Non-statutory bodies can be swept aside according to the policy of any incoming government with a different political view from the one that set them up.

I am reminded of those pillboxes that were put up in 1939. They were built of brick with earth heaped up all around them. Sixty years later, the brickwork is still in place, while the earth has gone. Statutory bodies are rather like the brickwork of those pillboxes, while non-statutory bodies resemble the earthwork. When we are considering something as fundamental as the control of the police force in a democracy, it is essential to stand on brickwork rather than on earthwork. That is why we shall wish to put more into statute than perhaps the noble Lord is minded to do at the moment.

Lord Peyton of Yeovil: I hope that the noble Lord will be able to move a little further. He has already been helpful, but if what he has said amounts to a declaration that it is the Government's intention to consult at all stages over the whole of this very sensitive field, then why on earth do they not say so on the face of the Bill? I would ask the noble Lord to say today not merely that he will consider this, important though that is, but that he will bring forward on Report an amendment which makes it clear in this clause that consultation there will be.

Lord Rooker: During the course of our deliberations on the Bill there will be many times when I shall have

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to say to noble Lords that there is a line in the sand and that it is the view of the Home Secretary and the Home Office that that is the line. I am not saying that here. I shall take away all that noble Lords have said with the force and experience that they can bring to bear. I shall ask officials to see whether we can find a form of words used today by noble Lords that could be put into the Bill in order to meet their requirements. That form would keep what the Home Secretary wants to see and would meet the will of the Committee. Since we are in any case saying what we are going to do, there should be no major problem about finding a form of words. They may not make the forum a statutory body, but a form of words will be found.

As I have said, I shall take the amendments away and consider them. Unlike in my previous incarnation, I understand that in this place—the noble Lord, Lord Peyton, will know this well—should someone say that they will take something away and return with a response on Report, if they then have nothing to say at that stage, they are in the doghouse.

Lord Campbell of Alloway: Before the discussion ends, will the noble Lord ask his advisers to consider that the clause will repeal a statutory provision as to consultation? Will he ask them what effect that will have in a court of law?

Lord Rooker: I shall certainly do that.

Lord MacGregor of Pulham Market: I want to be absolutely clear. The Minister said that he sees the benefits of not putting the national policing forum and another body onto a statutory basis. His resistance is to making statutory the body to be consulted. The thrust of our argument is that the requirement to consult should be statutory. I assume that that is the issue he will address.

Lord Dixon-Smith: I am grateful to the Members of the Committee who have taken part in the debate. Noble Lords on the Liberal Democrat Benches, many of my noble friends and the noble Lord, Lord Condon, have all supported the thrust of the amendments we are addressing.

I should apologise to the Minister because I did not make clear when I had finished my general opening remarks and shifted to dealing with the specific amendments in the group. I should have done that. If I had, he would not have had the slight confusion as to whether I was addressing Clause 1 stand part. I was not doing that; I addressed my remarks to all of the clauses in Part 1 of the Bill.

However, I wish to make one point. It is purely fortuitous but it illustrates the background danger, the reason why we are concerned and why we need to put these safeguards into the Bill. At lunchtime, I fell into conversation—it is easy to do—with the noble Lord, Lord Glentoran, who shares my room. With no prompting—I had not done anything to introduce the subject of the Bill—he said, "You know, it's a funny thing, Bill, but in Northern Ireland the Prime Minister controls the careers of individual policemen". That, of

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course, is a situation which would not be acceptable here. I am sorry. It is not Northern Ireland; it is southern Ireland. Let me get my facts right. "In southern Ireland the Prime Minister controls the careers of individual policemen". That would be clearly intolerable.

My noble friend Lord Elton made a very important point about the difference between having a statutory requirement to consult and a non-statutory requirement. His allegory of the brick fortress surrounded by an earth bank is appropriate and I am grateful to the Minister for recognising that. We would say that the issue of consultation should be explicit and not implicit in the Bill.

I am grateful to the Minister for conceding the principle of the amendments and I shall study his remarks with care. I shall study with even greater care and even greater pleasure the product of his remarks when we return to the Bill at a later stage. For the moment, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

4.45 p.m.

Lord Dixon-Smith moved Amendment No. 2:

Page 1, line 6, after "State," insert "not less than six months"

The noble Lord said: It may seem a diversion, but I went through a difficult baptism of fire when I first got involved in local government finance in County Hall, Essex. It happened early in my career. The old sweats in County Hall were in generous mode when they put a slip of a boy on the finance committee. They probably thought that I would not be much trouble—they may well have been right—but the baptism of fire was quite difficult.

In the middle of February 1966 or 1967, we were well into the budget-making process in County Hall when the government of the day had a financial crisis. The noble Lord, Lord Jenkins of Hillhead, was the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time. Six weeks before we were due to put a budget before the council, we received a request from the government to remove £2 million from our expenditure. In those days the county council's budget was about £50 million. We achieved the savings, of course—we had to. We were told that we had to do it and we did it.

But if you get that kind of request from a government late on in the planning process, it disrupts life quite considerably. Amendments Nos. 2 and 3 are both designed to create a situation where that kind of disruption is not brought about. Indeed, they are designed to create a situation in which there is a smooth and almost seamless process between the creation of the national policing plan and guidelines for the police and their incorporation into the planning systems of local forces across the country.

I hope that the Minister will again agree that the principles of the amendments are unexceptionable, even if he wishes to quibble about the detail. Police authorities are responsible bodies which want to work with and help the Government in making the police service work smoothly and in fulfilling the ambitions of society generally to improve law and order matters.

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I am absolutely confident that chief constables have the same ambition. I would go further. If one were to go down through the police service, I do not think that anyone would quarrel with that ambition.

Before that can happen, one needs a seamless system in which the planning process in the strategic sense starts at a sufficiently early stage of the financial year—the calendar year, the administrative year or whatever time of the year you want to operate from—to enable the national conclusions to be smoothly incorporated into the local conclusions, so that, ultimately, there is not friction. Amendments Nos. 2 and 3 are two different ways of expressing that sentiment.

The amendment would be enormously helpful to the smooth operating of this part of the Bill. I hope that the Minister will feel that he can accept its principle even if he cannot accept its detail, much in the way that he did with the previous group of amendments. I beg to move.

Lord Bradshaw: I apologise for having got this matter confused previously. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, that, in a good, well-ordered situation, the strategic priorities to which the Minister referred should be put at the beginning of a process and not somewhere towards its end. We should like to see an amendment to the Bill in which those strategic objectives are made clear at the beginning. We should also like to see them confined to a few strategic objectives and not, as the Home Office is sometimes wont to do, sub-divided into "A"s and "B"s. We do not wish to be told, for example, that there will be many fewer best value performance indicators only to have them divided and sub-divided in such a way that there are as many as we had before.

We certainly want to respond to government directions. It makes it a lot easier to respond throughout the police authorities if the strategic objectives are received in good time.

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