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Lord Dixon-Smith moved Amendment No. 41:
- Page 4, line 19, leave out "chief officer of police of the"
The noble Lord said: The purpose of Amendment No. 41 is quite straightforward. The amendment seeks to restore traditional lines of communication. For the convenience of the Committee, I should say that I shall not be moving Amendments Nos. 48, 50 and 57, which are grouped with this amendment.
Amendment No. 41 is tabled for the simple reason that it would require the Home Secretary to issue his directions to prepare a plan to the police authority rather than to the chief constable direct. I know that there is a requirement later in the clause for the chief constable to inform the police authority and to consult it on anything that he does subsequently, but that is the wrong way round. The proper lines of communication should be from the Home Secretary to the police authority. The police authority would then, of course, immediately pass on the directions to the chief constable because he is the man who will have to take
whatever action is required. It is a simple amendment which seeks to leave out a few words in order to restore the original situation.I hope that the Minister will find it in his heart to be as amenable as he was so many times last week when we discussed the Bill. Perhaps he will accept the principle of the amendment even if he does not like the wording. I beg to move.
Lord Rooker: As to the noble Lord's last point, I should say at this early part of our considerations that the Committee has, as yet, no idea of how emollient and amenable we will be in today's proceedings. There will be occasions when my noble friend Lord Bassam will have good news for the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, but he will have to wait and be patient. That is not designed to suck up to him when I ask him to withdraw his amendment.
I accept that the noble Lord makes a seductive case, but his amendment would have no real effect. I shall briefly explain why. The purpose of Clause 5 is to establish why a force or a part of a force is under-performing and to draw up plans to address the issue. The production of an action plan must be an on-going process if it is to address the underlying causes of under-performance. It will not work if the Secretary of State is presented with a finished action plan to which no amendments can be made. Therefore, removing some of the Secretary of State's powers to influence resubmitted plans would seriously dilute the effectiveness of the provisions.
It is in no one's interest not to take the remedial action required. Obviously, if the action plan did not address the under-performance and correct the issues, there would be no point in having it. But, having reached that stage, there is no point in not taking the action required—least of all for the local community which, by definition, is not receiving the policing it is entitled to expect.
Amendment No. 41 seeks to remove the reference to the chief officer in proposed new Section 41A(4) so that the force would be required to amend and resubmit the action plan. However, the duty would still fall on the chief officer as he is responsible for the direction and control of the force. To that extent, the amendment would have no discernible effect. As I said, the amendment is seductive, but I hope that for those reasons the noble Lord will think again and not pursue his amendment.
3.45 p.m.
Lord Dixon-Smith: I do not want to stray on to later amendments in the way that the Minister did, but there are reasons why the proprieties of the lines of communication should be maintained. Amendment No. 41 is directed towards restoring the more normal way of dealing with matters. I have never yet found it satisfactory to move away from the normal lines of communication towards a situation whereby senior officers—or, in this case, the Government—are able to give orders to people down the line.
I accept that we are dealing with a situation where there is a lot of mutual feed-back of information. It is highly unlikely that a force would receive an adverse inspector's report just like that. Any force which received such a report would probably know about it before the Minister. That kind of situation makes some of this legislation incomprehensible to me. By the time the directions come down from the Secretary of State, someone will already be taking action to put things right. If not, then the police would not be acting in the way I would expect them to act. That is the way I would expect them to behave.
I heard what the Minister said and, at this stage, I shall withdraw the amendment, but I cannot say that I am satisfied with the answers I have received.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
[Amendments Nos. 42 to 50 not moved.]
Lord Dixon-Smith moved Amendment No. 51:
- Page 4, leave out lines 34 to 38.
The noble Lord said: We now come to the Secretary of State's power to, quite literally, micro-manage the police. We are not talking only about action plans to rectify the consequences of an adverse report but, if I have read the Bill correctly, about the fact that those action plans can be bounced backwards and forwards between the Government and the police force until they are worded in precisely the way required by the Home Secretary. If he does not like what he sees, the Home Secretary can require that the plan be resubmitted and that the resubmission be resubmitted. We could go on and on with submission and resubmission for so long that, if we were not careful, the original fault would be lost sight of by the time the argument ended. This is micro-management run wild. We need to think very seriously about whether this is an appropriate way to go forward.
I accept that if an adverse report is received the Home Secretary has every right to call for a plan to rectify the situation. There is no difficulty with that. But I do not understand why the Home Secretary would have so little confidence in senior officers— with an immense amount of experience and local knowledge—doing the serious job that they had to do and submitting a report to put matters right. The idea in the Bill is that the Home Secretary, if he did not like particular parts of the report, or if it did not alter the emphasis in quite the way that he believed it should be altered, could say as a consequence that Answer A was not the answer and that the Home Office wanted something else.
It seems to me that this provision is in danger of being an immense vote of no confidence in the senior officers who are employed to do the work. I do not believe that it is wise to legislate for this kind of detailed interference—even if I thought that the interference could be explained on any rational basis.
It is extremely unfortunate that the Bill is drafted in this way. I should prefer to see the capacity to "micro-manage" removed from it. We may not have wholly succeeded in achieving that in our amendment and I should be the first to admit that. However, if the
Minister is prepared to accept the principle that I have enunciated, he could help us to make sure that the Bill was consistently drafted. He has the experts, and we just do our little best. I beg to move.
Lord Bradshaw: I support the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith. I declare an interest as a member of the Thames Valley Police Authority.
I ask the Minister at the outset: has he any idea about the way in which police authorities are managed? First, they are inspected by inspectors of constabulary, who are employees of the Secretary of State and presumably do his bidding. They carry out their inspections at several levels. There are also the community partnerships. We have an audit and performance review committee and a strategy, finance and planning committee. I can assure the Minister that if any weakness is indicated, either in the best-value performance indicators or in the indicators of various crimes, that is the work of the committees and of the police authorities. In no way would an authority be found to be inefficient or ineffective without there having been very clear signals for some time in advance of that happening. Plenty of time exists for the Home Secretary to draw people's attention to that and to order a special inspection.
I know that the Minister is not listening to what I am saying, but he has not made a case for the powers set out in the Bill. There are all kinds of means by which authorities are managed—properly, thoroughly and in respect of legislation and audits which we have previously been given. It is incumbent on the Minister to indicate the degree of inefficiency which would require the powers that are now being sought. There is little evidence of that at present. We strongly support the amendment.
Lord Borrie: The noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, has emphasised that this clause—like the previous one, which deals with authorities as distinct from chief officers of police—provides powers for the Home Secretary based on findings of inefficiency or ineffectiveness in the whole or in a part of a police force, or at the very least findings that the force will be inefficient or ineffective unless remedial measures are taken.
I listened to the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, and I bear in mind his experience in these matters, but that strikes me as very much something to be done as a last resort. A most unfortunate and undesirable occasion will have arisen. But the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, did not mention—or certainly did not stress—the basic requirements set out in both clauses before the Home Secretary can act. He mentioned the fact that senior officers will have great experience. There will be officers of great experience, but, sadly, we are talking about a position where those officers, albeit of great experience, have failed—where they have been ineffective or inefficient in the running of their force—or about the fact that that will be the outcome unless remedial measures are taken in a last
resort. Given those circumstances, I do not see the strength in the argument of the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, that the provisions to which the amendment refers are overblown or unnecessary.
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