Police and Justice Bill

The Home Secretary may know that we are consulting on a range of options to achieve local accountability of the police. The situation in London is more difficult because the commissioner has national and local policing functions. His accountability is already very confused and the fact that he is accountable to a number of bodies is problematic. We shall consider carefully how that should be resolved, but we will not resile from the principle, which the Home Secretary and the Government have not accepted, that police forces should be locally accountable. There is a fundamental difference between us. Whereas there are many things about which we agree in relation to neighbourhood policing, his view is that it is acceptable for the police increasingly to be directed by the Government, which is the essence of the Bill. Our view is that police forces should be locally accountable. Concern has been expressed by a number of interested parties that a combined justice, community safety and custody inspectorate, as set out in part 4, will lose the expertise and focus present in existing inspectorates. We will want closely to examine this issue in Committee. Against that concern, which we should take seriously, is the fact that the cost of public inspection doubled from £250 million in 1997 to more than £550 million in 2002–03. There may also be significant advantages in creating a broader and more powerful inspectorate that is not so close to a particular department and can maintain its independence from Government more easily. I suspect that I am not alone in fearing that Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary was too easily deployed by the Government to support their desire to merge police forces. When the Bill was published, the Home Office’s news release proclaimed that it would"““instill a culture of respect in society””," There is not a single measure in the Bill that begins to live up to that grandiose claim. The more high blown the rhetoric in the Government’s respect agenda, the more certain we can be of its vacuity. Page 20 of the respect action plan is entitled ““Everyone is Part of Everyone Else””. I feel sure that the whole House would be intrigued to know what that means and how it will assist the fight against crime. Journalists are being briefed that the Bill is a ““flagship measure””, a crucial part of the Government’s respect agenda. In fact, only a few of the proposals in the respect agenda have found their way into the Bill. Clauses 16 and 17 expand the use of parenting orders. Since only 31 such orders were made in the five years between June 2000 and 2005, reducing their use was not really an option. Yesterday, we read of an exciting new scheme under which Government ““super nannies”” are to descend, like Mary Poppins, on chaotic families. With the Minister for Policing, Security and Community Safety, the right hon. Member for Salford (Hazel Blears), as the Minister for respect and nanny-in-chief in charge, this scheme is, according to The Sunday Times, the latest phase of the Government’s respect agenda. Cynics who suspect that this is another worthless gimmick to be dropped or forgotten in a few weeks’ time are missing the point. The story made the front page of a newspaper, so it has done its job. The respect agenda is entirely remedial. It embodies the Government’s view that problems can be solved only by centrally directed executive action. The Prime Minister once spoke about tackling the causes of crime. Today his focus is on enhancing police powers. A number of the Bill’s proposals rely on the extension of police summary power and summary justice. Clause 12 allows conditional cautions to include punitive conditions. Schedule 4 will allow arresting officers to set bail conditions. However, those proposals raise a number of serious issues. First, under the new bail conditions, the police alone will be able to make significant restrictions on someone’s liberty, such as by tagging and with curfews, before they have even decided that there is enough evidence to bring a criminal prosecution. The power to impose punitive conditions in cautions will effectively allow the police to act as investigator, prosecutor and judge. The Magistrates Association has said that is ““extremely concerned”” that the courts are simply being shut out of the process, but that appears to be just the beginning of a fundamental shake-up of the criminal justice system. According to an obviously well-informed commentator,"““Ministers are drawing up plans to bypass the courts in the handling of hundreds of thousands more low-level crimes. Defendants who plead guilty to most offences with non-custodial sentences would, under their proposals, be sentenced by prosecutors, in consultation with the police. According to one document circulating in Whitehall, about half of the two million cases heard by magistrates every year could be processed without the costly and time-consuming business of a trial.””" The Prime Minister has persuaded himself that we have reached a watershed, where the ““rules of the game””—by which he means the quaint idea that convictions require a trial first—need changing to deal with not just terrorism, but antisocial behaviour. The judiciary may take a different view. The second concern is that the Prime Minister says that summary justice will be tough and hard, but it may, in fact, mean soft justice. The maximum penalty for a conditional caution will be £500—an attractive alternative to a stiffer fine or even a custodial sentence for offenders committing actual bodily harm, affray, criminal damage, possession of class A drugs or carrying knives. Summary justice will increasingly mean two-tier justice, with a ““get out of jail with your credit card”” option for those who can afford to pay the fine or the fixed penalty notice for antisocial behaviour. The third concern is that we need to debate whether all police officers should be empowered to exercise summary justice. There might be a case for restricting certain powers, such as the setting of bail conditions, to more senior constables, who have the experience and judgment to exercise them with discretion. Alternatively, we should consider whether such powers should be exercised at least with the scrutiny of a more senior officer. Those important issues need to be debated more thoroughly and examined closely in Committee. When the Bill was published, the Home Secretary said that it"““would help to free up police time to deal with more serious crime””." In fact, there is just one measure in the Bill that might free up police time—the provision in clause 10 to allow chief officers to accredit trading standards inspectors to issue penalty notices. If the Government were serious about freeing up police time, the Bill would tackle the bureaucracy that prevents police officers from doing their job. It would end the requirement on police officers to record every stop that they make, filling in a foot-long form that takes seven minutes to complete. It would address the fact that it takes three and a half hours for an officer to process an arrest and that only 17 per cent. of a police officer’s time is spent on patrol. It would give chief constables greater discretion over the employment of support staff, thus releasing warranted officers for front-line duties. It would introduce a modern and flexible pay and employment regime. It would replace incessant top-down demands for reporting, which sap so much time and morale across our public services, with simplified performance measurement. It would free up the police to fight crime, rather than to file. But the Bill does none of those things. The closest that the Bill gets to police modernisation is in clause 4, which would allow standardisation of the powers of community support officers. The balance of the exact powers involved will need discussion in Committee. We favour giving chief constables as much discretion as possible in that respect, as in many others, but those provisions are being introduced before we have had a proper debate about the effectiveness of CSOs. I strongly support their deployment, but the Home Office’s own evaluation, published earlier this year, found"““no evidence that CSOs were having a measurable impact on the level of . . . crime or . . . antisocial behaviour””." The Government’s boast that they will recruit 25,000 CSOs by 2008 must be matched by both the funding to ensure that CSOs remain employed, because funding for them is tapered, and a more rigorous assessment of how to deploy them effectively. The fight against terrorism will remain at the top of the police agenda, so we welcome the power in clause 8 to extend police search powers in airports. For the same reason, we will be open-minded about the power in clause 9 to gather bulk passenger information for ship and aircraft journeys in the UK. We will want to be persuaded that that is necessary and that it will contain adequate safeguards. The Bill’s technical amendments to the Extradition Act 2003 appear to be acceptable, although we will subject them to detailed scrutiny. We will seek to raise the issue of the UK-US extradition treaty that my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (Mr. Johnson) raised in an intervention on the Home Secretary. It has not been ratified by Congress and its one-sided operation is a serious cause for concern. The treaty was sold as being necessary to deal with terrorism and serious crime, but is being used to require the extradition of offenders who have a minimal connection with the US. We will propose amendments to restrict extradition to the US under the Extradition Act to terrorism cases until such time as full reciprocity is granted by the US, and will place safeguards to ensure that, in future, extradition will not happen if the alleged crime could be tried here, under domestic jurisdictions, and there is no clear causal link with the US. In his Dimbleby lecture last year, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner called for a national debate on policing, and said:"““It is time to decide what kind of police service we want.””" This is the right time to have such a debate. Important issues are at stake: the independence of police forces; how they should be accountable; and how they should be organised both to accommodate the demand for neighbourhood policing and to meet the renewed threat of domestic terrorism. The Bill is not much of an answer to those questions. It reflects the Government’s preoccupation with the incessant reorganisation of, and intervention in, public services, but it shies away from the tougher, but essential, work force modernisation agenda that would truly enhance police performance. It places new summary powers in the hands of the police, but it also weakens their local accountability—an uncomfortable mix, particularly when public trust in the service has reached a record low. There are measures in the Bill that are of value, so we will not seek to divide the House. However, we will seek to improve the Bill to check the powers of the Home Secretary and to enhance the local accountability of police forces. We will want to scrutinise carefully the new summary powers to be granted to officers. We all want to see police forces that provide value for money, instil public confidence and are effective in the fight against crime. We will work constructively to achieve those aims.