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Lord Phillips of Sudbury: I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. He has mentioned my next point two or three times. He put it rather neatly. I believe that he said the power is in the hands of the police authorities, the money is in another place and the blame lumps on the shoulders of the poor old Home Secretary. Is not the problem here that if you go on saying that for long enough, people begin to believe it? The powers of the police authority are laid down under Section 6 of the 1996 Act; those of the chief constable under Section 10 and those of the Home Secretary under, I believe, Section 36. Clearly, the tripartite powers are spread between those three sections. If the Government and the Home Secretary in particular are attacked for matters that are not part of their remit, why on earth do they not say so? They do that often enough in other spheres. Saying, "The public are ignorant of that division of powers", or, "We have not told them", involves wholly unconvincing arguments for the further accretion of Home Office powers.
Lord Rooker: That is because the Home Secretary and I, for that matter, are a bit old fashioned in that respect. Our view is that where there is a success, the whole team gets the credit, and where there is a failure, we take the blame. That is accountability; that is the point. We are not seeking a mechanism that will allow the Home Secretary to go round blaming people; we want one that will bring solutions to problems without massive disruption. Massive disruption is involved in the current arrangement of having to go for a wholesale inspection. With the targeted use of the modification-existing power, we can assist the authority, the chief officer and the local community to
bring about a solution. We are not looking for a mechanism that involves saying, "Oh no, they are to blame because they have the money and they spent it wrongly, or the chief officer managed the situation incorrectly". We are not in that game.
Lord Phillips of Sudbury: I have given rather the wrong impression. I was not attacking the Minister's point about examining a specific act of policing; I was getting at the argument that he deployed, I believe, three times in different spheres.
Lord Rooker: That is how my right honourable friend David Blunkett sometimes expresses the matter when he is constantly told that he is wrecking the tripartite system. That is sometimes how it appears. There is a genuinely felt sense that a few more levers would not go amiss in terms of getting targeted work to deal with—this is one of the most disturbing matters—the incredible variation in performance across forces. I have already said that no one would argue that only one reason was involved.
We are therefore introducing a modified power. Indeed, to meet the earlier strictures of the noble Lord, Lord Peyton, this is in some ways a nice clear approach. We have removed an old provision and will replace it with new Section 40. One does not have to work out what the modifications are; it involves the whole or any part of the force. The fact that any part of the force is involved is pretty crucial. I argue that the modifications are minor, but they are incredibly important in a practical sense. They will allow the clause to operate. In the current situation, one would hardly ever use such a power, because it involves the nuclear option. That is the great problem. We do not seek to be onerous. I believe that all sections of the police force, including chief officers and police authorities, support this modified power.
Lord Dholakia: I well understand the Minister's argument but I have a simple question for him. One obviously does not want to disrupt the whole police force on the basis that a particular area of the police has certain weaknesses. How would he reconcile the facts that in the Metropolitan Police a commander may carry out certain functions in relation to a London borough that may not be appropriate according to him or the inspector, yet the decision-making power is wasted in Scotland Yard at the centre? Unless one examines the total police force, one will not take a decision in relation to what is going on in, for example, Lambeth or Southwark.
Lord Rooker: The noble Lord makes my point for me. I freely admit that I do not know London that well. It may be only particular areas—geographical rather than service areas—that need to be inspected. I referred to burglaries from dwellings in that regard. In that context, one would be talking not about the Metropolitan Police as a whole but about that targeted geographical area. That is surely less disruptive to the Metropolitan Police and a damn sight less expensive.
It also means that one is more likely to take action than if the only alternative is to take such action in relation to the whole of the Metropolitan Police Force.
Lord Elton: Is the Minister actually seeking to persuade us—I should be very interested if he is—that hitherto and up to this point the Home Secretary has never before been able to arrange for a part of a police force to be inspected? I thought that we heard that inspections could already be thematic and specific. It bewilders me why the power is necessary.
Lord Rooker: I do not know the background, but I believe that this is the first time that the Home Secretary has been allowed to require the inspection to be done in that targeted fashion. That may have taken place at the choice of—probably—the inspectorate. I do not know the answer to the noble Lord's question. My briefings suggest that requiring the inspectorate to carry out targeted inspections is a new power.
Lord Elton: The Minister makes my point for me. The Secretary of State has always been able to ask for that to be done, and it always has been done. What he currently does will be done with the force of law because he expects the inspectorate to disobey him if he makes a request. Have relations between the inspectorate and the Home Secretary deteriorated to the extent that it has to be judged to be criminally incompetent if it does not do what it is asked to do? What has changed to make the proposal necessary?
Lord Rooker: What has changed is that we are putting a package together for overall police reform to address our national problems, as identified in the White Paper. The Bill should not be a surprise; the issues were raised in some detail in the White Paper. The noble Lord says that in the past there have been co-operation and inquiries—some were targeted and some were more widespread. I am not sure about this and I have to be careful; such inquiries were probably not done in a targeted managed fashion in order to address the variations. I do not return to the 1996 legislation because these changes obviously transcend that. In relation to the measurement of performance and variations, access to such information was not then available; the information was not collected. We must appreciate that things have changed, particularly during the past decade.
Lord Bradshaw: I do not think that the Minister was present during our debate on the previous clause.
Lord Rooker: I heard about it.
Lord Bradshaw: Yes, the Minister has heard all about it. None the less, there are now BCU inspections of particular, discrete geographical areas. There are thematic inspections and one-day inspections, in which inspectors come in and take a snapshot of the force. All of that is done because the inspectorate targets it through best value performance indicators
and other approaches with which it is closely involved. It should be able to pick out the weak spots in the force to direct its efforts to that area. I admit that some areas perform better than others. We are all charged in police authorities with getting resources in place and improving performance. However, I do not believe that these powers are necessary because I am sure that within the Home Office there are mechanisms for directing the inspectorate to the places that really matter.
Lord Waddington: I find it very difficult to make up my mind about the amendments without understanding the purpose and scope of the last few lines of the provision. It states:
- "the Secretary of State may direct the police authority responsible for maintaining that force to take such measures as may be specified in the direction".
I know that this foreshadows amendments to come, but I should like guidance here and now about the scope of that provision. For example, can it include requiring the police authority or chief officer responsible to recruit a given number of community support officers? That is surely absolutely crucial. The words in that provision are wide enough to allow that to happen.
I believe that we know that only in the Metropolitan Police has there been any great support for the idea of having community support officers, and there is little support throughout the rest of the country. No doubt on plenty of occasions we shall hear the Minister say that we have nothing to worry about because in the provinces no one need recruit community support officers unless they want them. Under the terms of the Bill a chief officer certainly cannot be required to recruit community support officers.
However, I wonder how that can be reconciled with the plain wording of the last sentence or so of Clause 4. Read literally, that would seem to suggest that the Secretary of State could direct a police authority to get cracking and ensure that at least one-third of its force comprised community support officers.
9 p.m.
Lord Rooker: I can assure the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, that that is not the case. There are no such powers in the Bill. The Home Secretary would not seek in any way, shape or form to order any force to make up a proportion of its members according to gender, ethnicity or whatever else. That is a management power of the chief officer, not of the Home Secretary. I was intending to respond further but I gather that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mayhew, wants to intervene.
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