Police and Justice Bill

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time. The central objective of the Bill is to help build safer communities, and the Bill seeks to do that in two ways—first, by taking forward our agenda for delivering real, sustained and lasting reforms to the police service in various ways, and secondly, by helping to create a modern culture of respect based on the needs, rights and responsibilities of the law-abiding majority, by implementing key measures in the respect action plan launched by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister in January. Working with the police service and its community safety partners, we have made significant strides in reducing crime in the past nine years in government, and I want to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the police service and its partners, which can be justifiably proud of their record of achievement. However, more needs to be done. Crime and antisocial behaviour are still too high, and public expectations around quality of service are quite properly rising and need to be properly met by all public services, including the police. Further reform of the police is necessary, and the Bill includes measures for reconfiguring the police service to meet the challenges of the 21st century. The primary task of the police service is, and will remain, to prevent, deter, detect and reduce crime and antisocial behaviour. To achieve that end, we must first embed neighbourhood policing, which is central to every part of the proposal, in every community with improved police responsiveness and customer focus. Secondly, we must further modernise the police work force so that it is fully equipped to meet those challenges, which involve building an effective policing team between the police service and those who work with it. Thirdly, we must ensure greater involvement by communities in determining how they are policed. The Bill will contribute to these goals by ensuring that we have the right structures in place to deliver sustained improvements in performance, that the accountability framework for police forces and their community safety partners is robust and responds to the voice of the citizen and that the police and community support officers have the powers that they need to tackle crime and antisocial behaviour effectively. The Bill will impact on each of the five tiers of policing—neighbourhood policing, the borough, which is the basic command unit level, the strategic force, the national policing institutions and internationally—and drive forward our modernisation proposals.