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Lord Campbell of Alloway: I am much obliged to the noble Lord. I shall be brief. How can we conceivably debate this amendment without looking at Schedule 4 and considering the width of the powers equated in effect to those of a police officer? The debate is about whether there should be a supplement. I am totally in favour of supplement. Indeed, the noble Lord, who is a very experienced police officer, explained the need for it. That is fine. But that is not the essence of this debate. We cannot deal with this amendment without considering Schedule 4. That is the issue as I would put it.
Lord Tope: During the course of a most interesting speech from the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, it crossed my mind that we were going through a Second Reading debate rather than a Committee stage discussion. The two amendments that we are considering specifically call for the deletion of community support officers from the Bill. There are many noble Lords who have far more experience than I have of the procedure of this Chamber. However, I thought that we were supposed to be discussing two amendments, both of which seek to delete the reference to "community support officers" from the Bill. I was explaining why I am unhappy with that suggestion.
Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate: Perhaps I may simply make the point that it is possible to have CSOs
without any powers, other than those of civilians. That is what happens in Sedgfield. Therefore, we do not need to discuss the powers at this stage. I entirely agree with the noble Lord.
Lord Tope: This discussion is beginning to get a little like debates in the other place. I am grateful to the noble Lord. That was exactly the point that I was trying to make and was in the process of developing. Let us call these officers "community support officers", though they were originally called auxiliaries. They will be working on London buses; indeed, that will happen, whatever powers they may have. That is my point.
Many noble Lords have referred to the work in the community. Like other authorities elsewhere that have been mentioned, I know that many London boroughs employ neighbourhood wardens, or whatever. Similarly, those people have no policing powers as such, but they carry out an extremely important and useful job on estates and on the streets. It is a visible, and usually uniformed, presence that provides reassurance. Those employed by my local authority work very closely with the local police. They provide intelligence to the local police, and, indeed, receive briefing from them. It is known in the community that they do so, but one of the reasons for their strength is the fact that they are not seen to be part of the police. They perform a useful function.
I take issue with the noble Lord. It is possible—whether or not it is desirable—to have community support officers of whatever name who have no powers at all. When we move further on in the Bill we shall debate what powers they should have. Then there will be some important differences. But I am unhappy with these amendments.
5.30 p.m.
Lord Dixon-Smith: Perhaps I can try to bring the debate back to the point. It has strayed very much into the area of the community safety accreditation scheme. That is not what we are talking about. We are talking about civilians already in full-time employment doing a full-time job for the police. The suggestion is that they might be "put out on the streets"—and I do not mean that in any derogatory sense—with very limited police powers in aid of the police.
The difference between us is not whether or not they should go out onto the streets. We do not dispute that. We think that in this instance their three other suggested functions will relieve the constables who should be doing the work. Therefore, there is that aspect to the matter. We also feel that people on the streets acting as bobbies should have full police powers. Therefore, they should be special constables. We shall go over the ground again, but I want to try to draw the debate back to the slightly narrower focus.
Lord Waddington: The noble Lord, Lord Tope, was entirely right to remind us that there is nothing in the Bill which requires chief officers of police to recruit community support officers. But we have gone over
this ground many times before. I do not think that the noble Lord would seriously deny that pressure could be brought to bear on chief officers of police to recruit them purely for budgetary reasons.I thought that when we debated the issue the other day the Minister was inclined to come half way to meet us and to agree that perhaps something should be written into the Bill in order to prevent that kind of pressure being brought on chief officers of police. But there is nothing in the Bill at the present time to prevent that pressure being brought. Therefore, we must proceed on the assumption that the Bill should not go forward with this power unless we are absolutely satisfied that it would be right for a chief officer of police to exercise that power.
Lord Rooker: I do not want to pre-empt anyone's debate, but, to be honest, I think that that is a bit unfair. I gave a firm commitment about the use of the powers under Part 1 in respect of Part 4. I am hardly in a position to do anything about that today. We are still in Committee. I gave a firm commitment that we would go away and come back on Report. So I say to the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, that to start using that argument is wholly counter-productive. It is a circular argument that gets us nowhere because I have nothing else to say in response to it, other than what I have already said.
Lord Waddington: I thought that I was helping the noble Lord, not harming his case. I am perfectly prepared therefore to withdraw what I said about the Minister, which I thought was very kind to him. But it still is the fact that at the present time there is nothing in the Bill which would prevent pressure being brought on chief officers of police to recruit community support officers. That is the way we should approach this provision so that we are satisfied, before we let this power go forward, that it is a proper power and one which should in appropriate circumstances be used by chief officers of police.
No one denies that there are plenty of areas in which the burden on the police can be reduced as a result of the use of civilians. During my time in the Home Office, great progress was made in that direction. I am by no means sure that greater progress can still not be made. But we need to look at the duties which would be performed by these community support officers. Those who advocate the recruitment of community support officers are advocating that they should carry out some of the most difficult and dangerous of all police tasks.
We are not talking about these people just being ornaments on the streets. We are suggesting that they should be recruited to control city centres and housing estates and deal with louts and troublemakers. Their suggested duties are ones which police officers—it has been suggested—are sometimes reluctant to perform. Indeed, I seem to remember that one of the proposals put forward by the Home Secretary was that special financial bonuses might be available to police officers in order to encourage them to carry out these very duties.
One has only to look at the diary of a police officer in order to see how little patrolling is done. Why? Is it purely a question of chief officers of police concluding that patrolling is a useless exercise? Or is it a question of there being so many other difficult duties to perform and so many pressures on the police that they cannot spare the police to do it, although they are essentially duties which should be carried out by fully trained police officers?
I am extremely worried about the possibility of these half-trained people being put into difficult situations at a time in our history when there is a great deal of lawlessness, violence and hooliganism on our streets. At Second Reading I read a letter which had been written to The Times by a former senior officer in the Metropolitan Police. He queried how the system would work? He asked what on earth would happen if a community support officer was checking someone—a lout for dropping litter—and moments later that same lout was to draw a knife on someone standing next door to him? Is he supposed to beat a hasty retreat? In what dignified way would he get out of that kind of situation, because of course he will not be given the powers to deal with it. What would happen if he was dealing with someone who had parked a car improperly and at that moment someone came up and tried to hijack the car? No one has really answered these questions.
The lack of full police powers could lead to ridiculous situations. Yet no one so far has suggested that these half-trained people should have full police powers. It is no good the noble Lord, Lord Tope, saying that that is in another amendment. We must decide the principle of the thing now. There are difficulties in both directions. If they are given insufficient powers they cannot deal with difficult situations. If they are given too great powers then the public will question why one should give such great powers to someone who is not fully trained as a police officer.
Where will these people come from? No one has answered that question yet. Sometimes people say, "Well, there are not enough people queuing up to be police officers. Therefore somehow or other we must tap other sources for recruits". I wonder where these other sources are. I should be extremely anxious if the kind of people attracted to become community support officers were people whom we would not consider for one moment as potential police officers. They might be very good traffic wardens, but really they are not potential police officers.
Sometimes we have heard the opposite. We have heard that there are plenty of people queuing up to be police officers. If that is so, the answer is the one put forward by my noble friend. We should be recruiting sufficient police officers in order to carry out all these other duties which the Government say will have to be performed by community support officers.
Surely, we should be looking at other ways to get people who can carry out these difficult jobs. The most obvious people are the Specials. They have the right powers and the right commitment, they are well
established in the community, well known and accepted by people. We should now be bending all our efforts to devising new incentives to get more people to join the specials and encouraging every police force to expand its specials.
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