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Lord Phillips of Sudbury: We on these Benches wholeheartedly concur with these two amendments. The words in brackets could be said to be misleading. Frankly, they should not be there at all and the clause would then be clearer.
It is difficult to know how to deal with all the amendments prior to the debate on whether the clause should stand part of the Bill. We are completely opposed to it on grounds of local democracy, destruction of the tripartite arrangements, the impact and fall-out that it will have on the calibre of people who
will be willing to serve on these partly neutered police authorities and a number of other reasons. I shall confine my remarks to that. For the other amendments in this group and later amendments, I shall be extremely brief, keeping my powder dry for the big one; that is, to knock out the whole mis-shapen clause.10.30 p.m.
Lord Condon: I support Amendments Nos. 30 and 31. Unless the Home Secretary's view about ineffectiveness and inefficiency is sourced back to objective evidence, there is a danger, as the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, said, of the provision giving carte blanche. An unreasonable Home Secretary could take a doctrinal, subjective, idiosyncratic view of inefficiency and ineffectiveness and seek to impose directions based on that subjective view.
Lord Mayhew of Twysden: We were told just a few minutes ago by the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, with the tacit approval of the Minister, that the power remains and is sufficient for the Secretary of State to give a direction to the police authority. Now it is said that it is necessary for the Secretary of State to be able to give a direction directly to the chief constable, by-passing the police authority. Perhaps the Minister will deal with that point.
Lord Rooker: I do not want to repeat what I have already said. It was not written down in impeccable text; it was in bits and pieces. I stand by what I said earlier. We shall take another look at this issue. I wrap this point up in relation to both Clauses 4 and 5 as opposed to individual amendments on which I could almost make the same points.
As my noble friend Lord Bassam said in response to an earlier amendment, there are sources of information on police performance other than just the inspectorate. While it is true that it is not on the face of the Bill—I accept that—last year the Home Secretary set up the standards unit with the remit of driving up the performance of all forces to the standards of the best. It will be working with police forces, the basic command units and local communities on the ground. They will be a valuable source of information on performance.
Similarly, organisations like the Audit Commission, which has been referred to many times, produce valuable work indicating where police performance is strong and where there is room for improvement. It would restrict the aim of the clause—to improve police performance across the board—if those sources of information could not be used as the basis for requiring remedial action in forces which are not offering the highest quality of service.
In other words, other sources of information exist, none of which will be dreamed up on a whim as the Home Secretary gets out bed in the morning, as someone said. As former Ministers will know, lawyers in departments spend most of their time telling us what we cannot do, not what we can do. We get out of bed with ideas and they say we cannot implement them.
That is the point. The legal advice in the main is to say, "You cannot do it because you have duties, restrictions and statutory requirements and you must find another way of achieving your outcome". At the end of the day it is the outcome in which we are interested. The process is important in respect of having acceptable outcomes because of the democratic involvement of local communities and police authorities. But the outcome of improving police performance across the board is what it is all about.I cannot go further than that. It is implicit in what I said earlier that we need to look again at this matter. I am not saying that these bodies will end up on the face of the Bill. But it is legitimate for us to say, as set out in the White Paper, that the Home Secretary has access to other sources of information which would give him the wherewithal to say, if you like, it is time to pull the levers of last resort—I repeat "of last resort"—to raise standards in a force or part of it. That is quite legitimate and what the public would expect him to do.
Lord Elton: Presumably the sources of information which the Home Secretary has, to which the Minister referred, are also available to the inspectorate. Therefore it would be perfectly possible for the Secretary of State to function only on the consequence of an adverse report, as my noble friend suggests.
When the noble Lord is Home Secretary in his turn, as we all hope he will be, and leaps out of bed with an idea which is a bit far-fetched, and the lawyers say, "You cannot do that because", we hope they will say, "You cannot do that because of Lord Dixon-Smith's Amendments Nos. 30 and 31 to the Act".
Lord Phillips of Sudbury: Can I also take up the point with the Minister? He talks with emphasis about the Home Secretary using these powers only as a last resort. There is nothing in this clause about the Home Secretary using these powers as a last resort. The Minister's retort will be, "Of course no Home Secretary in his or her right senses will use them other than in a last resort". Our response to that—and the Minister was good enough at the start of today's debate to make the point—is that one does not legislate in the field of police rights, powers and duties other than on a highly "suspicious" basis. Let us put it that way.
We have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Condon, who knows a thing or two about policing, that one could have—and it is not fanciful to contemplate—a Home Secretary who was thoroughly misguided, thoroughly doctrinaire or thoroughly pig-headed. Therefore, I put it to the Minister that it really is not fair of him to say that this is only a last resort power. If he wants to put that in the Bill we should all be very happy. It might be a rather difficult provision to write in, but I should accept it.
Lord Rooker: I do not know what more I can say. That these powers will be exercised as a last resort is not in the Bill but it is in the letter that I wrote to noble Lords. I cannot say any more than I have already said. Otherwise, I shall repeat myself. I have listened to what Members of the Committee have said.
Lord Dixon-Smith: The Minister, as always, is trying to be helpful. The standards unit, which is a part of the CPTDA, and the Audit Commission are likely to be the Home Secretary's main sources of information beyond the inspectorate, although I have no doubt that he will have other sources. Both are public bodies working all the time with the various police forces. Certainly, they will not be working in secret. Therefore, those forces will know what is happening. As the body develops a view of what is happening in a particular force, perhaps even a particular BCU or whatever, it certainly will not be keeping its conclusions secret. The knowledge of its opinion will disseminate through the force that is being examined, whether it is in the financial management field, in the field of management advice—which the Audit Commission is always developing—or in the field of, if one likes, the organisation and practice of the management of a small number of men in a tight geographic area.
The idea that the Secretary of State will find out about this in some blinding flash of light at the tail end of the process and then need to regulate to do something about it is, frankly, stretching the imagination. If the local force has not begun to operate on the matter causing concern to either of those bodies long before the Secretary of State gets to hear about it, I, for one, would be extremely surprised.
We return to the need for what is proposed and its open unrestricted carte blanche discretion. I cannot see it. The Minister has done his best to answer. As I have already said, we shall need to look carefully at what the Government may come up with before Report stage. I remain completely convinced that the wording of the amendment is appropriate, but for now I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Lord Dixon-Smith moved Amendment No. 32:
- Page 4, leave out lines 5 and 6 and insert—
The noble Lord said: We come to another aspect of the clause. Amendments Nos. 32, 33, 34 and 39 all relate to the question of whether we really need a 14-pound sledgehammer to crack a nut, even though it is probably no more than a hazelnut. The real question is whether if something in a particular part of a force is going wrong, that really requires all the force and direction of the Secretary of State in the formal sense to put it right. The Minister said, "Oh, of course that is only the last resort". That may or may not be so, but a Secretary of State faced with two or three days of bad reports in the tabloids on a specific issue may find both his temper and patience somewhat abbreviated.
While he may feel that he should have a power to direct in respect of matters that affect the whole force, I find it amazing that he should feel that it might be desirable to have that power of direction down to something as small as a BCU. The performance of a BCU is not exclusively related to those who work
I find the idea that it would be appropriate for the Secretary of State to say that a particular little area was causing such vast problems that it required all the force and majesty of Her Majesty's Government quite amazing. That underestimates both the Secretary of State himself and his powers of influence and persuasion and the men on the ground who would be subject to that power, who are deemed by the clause to be insensitive, unresponsive and unwilling to take steps to improve their performance. I have not yet met a group of men doing such work with that sort of attitude. I beg to move.
"(a) that the force is, or in particular respects, not efficient or not effective; or"
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