Police and Justice Bill

Such relationships are valuable, but for reasons that I shall set out I am not sure about the extent to which central Government should specify what is appropriate for each area. We must get such judgments right. There has been a significant change to the performance culture of the police over the past few years. The creation of the police standards unit, the publication of better performance data, the fact that most crime information is available to front-line police officers in real time and the greater public awareness of police performance have contributed to that. However, there is uncertainty about the way in which we want to drive performance in the next phase of police reform. The Bill contains several valuable measures that will work in the right direction and other aspects that might not be wrong, but need to be treated with caution so that when trying to get the best possible performance the Government do not overstep the mark of their powers. I want comment on five aspects of the Bill. On intervention powers, the Bill revisits territory that was well discussed when we considered the Police Reform Act 2002. The Government are trying, as I did initially in those days, to broaden the Home Secretary’s powers of intervention on forces. I am inclined to think that hard cases make bad law. The Home Secretary referred to the Soham case and the Humberside police service in his speech and talked about the desire to be able to act in response to information that does not come from the inspectorate itself. However, as the hon. Member for Cambridge (David Howarth) said in an intervention, if the Home Secretary takes powers to intervene in a wide range of circumstances without any independent inspection of the police service, he takes for himself responsibility for the performance of not only every police force, but every part of every police force. The Government need to be careful about getting into such circumstances. I understand that when the Soham investigation was going on, there was frustration that legislation that the House had passed in the previous few years did not seem sufficiently adequate to give the Home Secretary clear powers to intervene. However, that is not quite the same as saying that whenever something happens, the question from the media and public to the Home Secretary of the day should be, ““Why don’t you intervene now? You’ve got wide-ranging powers, so why don’t you do something about it?”” There is a danger that Ministers will be under intense pressure to intervene when they and anyone who is close to the police service know that it would be better for politicians to stay one removed. I hope that the Committee will consider carefully whether the Bill puts the dividing line in exactly the right place. There is a powerful case for having a unified inspectorate that runs right across the criminal justice system. Many of the flaws in the system arise because of discontinuities, gaps and poor liaison among the courts, the probation service, prisons, the police and so on. I hope that in Committee careful consideration will be given to how the inspectorate will maintain a harsh light on the performance of individual parts of the system, and not only on the joins between the system. In dealing with the police service, it is not uncommon to hear police officers say, ““The problem is not really us; it is the way that we relate to the courts, or the way that we relate to the probation service or the prisons.”” There is often much truth in that. Sometimes, it is the case that the police and their performance are at fault. At present, Ministers have at hand a considerable degree of high-level professional expertise in Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary. I think that in future Ministers will want to be sure that they have an equally high level of professional expertise at their disposal in examining the police service itself as well as being involved in the entire operation of the criminal justice system. I endorse earlier interventions about the Prison Service. There is a particular responsibility on the independent inspectorate to be able to visit prisons. That is to turn up unannounced to examine the conditions in which we are holding people in custody and to have a focus on how the system operates as a whole. It must not divert from that essential role. I hope that the way in which that role will be delivered will be considered carefully in Committee. I shall refer briefly to the proposed national police improvement agency. It is something that makes a great deal of sense in that there are disparate organisations and a great deal of police force time is wasted in dealing with them. However, there is a difference between embedding professional expertise at every level of the police service and ensuring that the police service nationally can respond to current priorities. There is a role nationally for the police service to work together, as it has done over the past year on alcohol, or as it did a few years ago on dealing with street crime. Certain issues arise where getting everyone to work together makes a great deal of sense. Also important is having the latest and best investigative skills when dealing with murder, tackling fraud or investigating internet crime. Those skills must be learned and promulgated throughout the police service efficiently and effectively. One of the problems is that best practice is often developed in an isolated way and is not spread as quickly as it should be throughout the service. Accordingly, one of the aims of the National Centre for Policing Excellence was to be able to develop a high level of policing skills and to spread them quickly. In moving towards a national police improvement agency, it is important that those areas of professional improvement and expertise continue to be developed and that they are not lost by an organisation that is more focused either on volume crime or on the immediate policing priority of the day, whether that be gun crime, knife crime, burglary or whatever. I hope that consideration will be given in Committee to how the agency will be able to balance those different pressures so that we arrive at the highest possible quality of policing. As for the accountability of the police, I think that the Government have got it right in placing an emphasis on future police authorities and on those unitary council members who have responsibility for community safety measures, and also for exercising the ability to trigger community action through the local authority scrutiny committees. A few years ago, I was quite depressed when I thought that we would have a plethora of different structures, all floating around the area that we are discussing. In most instances of antisocial behaviour it is not only a policing matter. These instances will involve youth service intervention and environmental services, for example. To focus the ability to get a response through the local authority scrutiny structures seems to me to be the right approach. I say to the hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert), who leads for the Opposition, that I think that his party is going down the wrong track—this is a non-partisan point—in looking for separate elected bodies. There is a debate about how much local accountability to elected people we want in the police service. However, a proliferation of elected bodies rather than concentrating on local councils seems to be the wrong way to go. As I have said, I think that the Government have got it right. I conclude on the question of additional police powers, particularly conditional cautioning and the extension of the ability to impose parenting orders to a wide range of bodies, including social housing providers. What are broadly described as summary justice measures, particularly fixed penalty notices for drunken behaviour and so on, have achieved a great deal of success. The more that we use complicated and sophisticated sentencing and orders, the more cautious we must be to ensure that the people involved have the necessary expertise to operate effectively. If we start to tell front-line police officers that they will have responsibility for designing a sentence that includes rehabilitation, punishment and restorative justice in an effort to reduce reoffending in one go, the more pressure we will put on individuals who are not trained or expected to know how to do that job. The more that we expect people without the necessary expertise in family issues to make parenting orders the more we should ask how they will obtain that expertise. I am not against conditional cautioning or the extension of the use of parenting orders, but careful scrutiny of the way in which those powers will be exercised is required. I hope that in their consideration of conditional cautioning, Committee members will look at whether there should be a clear difference of responsibility between the arresting or investigating officer and the person who puts the condition on the order. It should not be too difficult to conceive of ways in which proper sentencing expertise is brought to bear on the conditional caution without the arresting officer necessarily being responsible for doing so. That would achieve the gain of not embarking on a substantial court procedure for a low-level minor crime, while creating confidence that there would be consistency of sentencing across the country for similar types of offence and ensuring that the sentences that are passed—that is effectively what the measures are—are appropriate to the offender and to the offence.