Police and Justice Bill

I want to begin with an apology. Like a number of Members who have spoken in today’s debate, I was not here at the outset to hear the Home Secretary introduce Second Reading. My excuse is that I was obeying the law. Under the Criminal Justice Act 2003—or, at least, those of its provisions that repeal the Juries Act 1974—my exemption, as a Member of Parliament, from jury service was abolished. Until the passing of the 2003 Act, I was exempt from such service because of my membership of this House, because I am a member of the Bar, and because I am a judge. All three exemptions have gone and I was required to appear at the Old Bailey at 9 o’clock this morning to surrender to jury service. I had no particular objection to doing that; however, I have had a frustrating day. Needless to say, on the first occasion that I was called to take part in a trial, I knew the judge and several members of the Bar. Furthermore, the case involved the trial of some prison officers—and given that I am shadow Minister with responsibility for Opposition policy on prisons and prison officers, it was thought perhaps inadvisable for me to take part in that trial. However, after lunch I was given the opportunity of another go. That trial, like the first, was projected to last for several months—well beyond the two weeks for which I had been summoned. Eighty of us were put into the jury-in-waiting, of whom 20 were selected to stand by for next Wednesday and participation in the jury. Needless to say, I was disqualified again because I knew the judge—indeed, I had lunch with him about four weeks ago—and a member of the Bar. All in all, it was a deeply frustrating day—because it meant that I was unable to enjoy the Home Secretary’s speech this afternoon. I apologise, through you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, to him and to the rest of the House, but I see that I am not the only Member who missed the opening speeches. I am at least here for the closing speeches. There is a category of Member that has missed the opening speeches and the closing speeches, although if they hurry they may catch the Minister of State’s response to the debate. I look forward to welcoming those Labour Members who have not found it convenient to be detained here. The Bill is something of a curate’s egg, which is hardly surprising as it is 139 pages long. It is yet another doorstop or telephone directory of a Bill. They come out of the Home Office at regular intervals and huge acreages of Norwegian or south American forests are destroyed to produce the paper for them. There are far too many Home Office Bills and while they are not wholly imperfect, they are—as so many hon. Members have demonstrated today—riddled with imperfections that require close examination in Committee. However, this Bill will not receive the necessary close examination in Committee because it will be guillotined. All sorts of good amendments and criticisms will not be discussed as a result. We will have to rely on the other place to do our work for us. That is the end of the sermon. The Bill can be divided into three themes—police centralisation, extradition and amalgamation of police and court functions. At least, those are the themes that have emerged from the debate today. It is uncontroversial to claim that of the 18 Members of Parliament, including the Home Secretary and the Chairman of the Select Committee, who have spoken in the debate, support for the Bill has been qualified—except from the Home Secretary. Even the absent Labour Back Benchers who read out the Whips’ notes were not entirely enthusiastic about the contents of the Bill. I look forward to hearing the Minister of State’s enthusiastic endorsement of whatever it was that the Home Secretary said this afternoon, but the rest of us have serious concerns about the creeping centralisation of control over the police, of which this Bill is another example. The Government say that their powers under the Bill to exercise authority over particular police authorities—they will have an easier task when there are only 12 instead of 43—will be used only as a last resort. However, we need to place that claim in the context of the project to amalgamate police forces. I appreciate that the Bill is not about amalgamation of police forces, which will be achieved by executive decree by the Home Secretary. We have already had a written parliamentary statement from him last Friday, when a sparsely attended House was presented, at a late hour, with some proposals for the amalgamation of a certain number of police forces. I doubt whether we shall ever have an opportunity again to deal with the issue in a proper parliamentary way. However, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hornchurch (James Brokenshire) pointed out in a telling speech, that so-called promise—undertaking might be a better word—not to use the powers except in exceptional circumstances is absent from the Bill. I have learned through bitter experience since 1997, when the Government came into office, that unless a promise is made at the Dispatch Box by a Minister and is recorded in Hansard, or is made in some other official written way, it is unlikely to be kept. So when the Government say that the powers will be used only as a last resort, I see that more as a threat than as a benign indication of intent. The Bill is the pathfinder for the regionalisation of police forces, and my hon. Friends the Members for North Essex (Mr. Jenkin), for The Wrekin (Mark Pritchard), for Rayleigh (Mr. Francois), for Kettering (Mr. Hollobone), for Hornchurch, for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Mr. Evennett) and, of course, for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) made that very point. It is such an obvious point that it pains me that we have to keep on making it, but the Government still seem not to have taken it on board. The essential connection between the police and the policed is being loosened. There are more and more indications from the Government that they wish to pull in to Whitehall, disguised as strategic policy making, control over operations. Chief constables will have to follow the Home Secretary’s directions or risk their jobs. I am not sure that the British public think that that is a proper way to proceed. We should always beware Government claims that the national policing improvement agency will"““assist police forces to deliver . . . national . . . priorities””" and"““support national implementation of the Home Secretary’s key priorities for the police, as set out in the annual National Community Safety Plan””." Such offers of help from this Government, with their history, should be viewed with great scepticism, and I trust that in Committee hon. Members on both sides of the House will follow the example of the hon. Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay). I hope that he is a member of the Committee, although I doubt that the Government will be brave enough to appoint him. He demonstrates every time he rises to his feet that the duty of a Member of Parliament, whether it be on the Floor of the House or in Committee, and after acknowledging the political party to which he or she belongs and that most of us were elected as members of a particular party rather than—as the fiction has it—as individuals, is to hold the Government to account. If we do not do that, we might as well pack it in and not bother. I do not need to look far across the Chamber to find many hon. Members who seem to have given up on that duty. If crime and disorder reduction partnerships are so good and need to work with the basic command units, why will we see a reduction in their number? That point was made by my hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs and echoed by many others. Statutory basic command units and direct control by the Home Secretary seem to march hand in hand, and it is not a particularly controversial prediction to suggest that before long the Home Secretary and his Ministers will have their sticky little fingers all over the day-to-day detailed work of the police throughout the country. Power is being drawn into Whitehall—other Members have used more colourful language—and as it goes, so too does real public accountability, a point well made by my hon. Friends the Members for North Essex, for Arundel and South Downs and for Bexleyheath and Crayford and, by implication, if not expressly, by many others. The second matter covered in the debate was extradition. The Bill is not directly to do with the UK’s arrangements with the United States, but the treaty has been much discussed and it is of genuine and proper concern among the public and my hon. Friends, especially my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (Mr. Johnson). It seems to me that the purpose of all extradition treaties is to ensure that those who commit crimes, or who are suspected of committing crimes, in other jurisdictions cannot escape justice by going to another country. We do not extradite suspects to face the death penalty or torture, which is why we have memorandums of understanding with countries such as Libya, Syria, Jordan and Tunisia. Some of those memorandums have been implemented and some have not, but the mere fact that we need them suggests that the Government realise that extradition law and the need to protect our citizens from unjust extradition law—indeed, to protect any citizen, whether a UK national or not, from unjust extradition—is extremely important. There is a real sense of the injustice and lack of fairness in our current arrangements with the United States and although we cannot deal with them tonight, nor can we amend treaties by legislation, there should be ample room for proper, full, calm and considered discussion of the United States extradition arrangements in Committee and I trust that time will be provided for that purpose. It is not right for other jurisdictions to trawl in our jurisdiction with a finer net than we can use in theirs. If the principle of comity of nations is to mean anything, we need to revisit our treaty with the United States. The third theme of the debate was the amalgamation of police and court functions. The separation of powers should be not merely recognised as an important part of our constitution, but entrenched in legislation, especially when the conventions that uphold that separation in our largely unwritten constitution are being shown less respect by the Government day by day. For example, the issuing of penalty tickets by weights and measures inspectors may on the face of it seem a perfectly sensible administrative step, but the inspectors are being given the power to exercise those punitive powers by a police officer, not by the courts. The power of police officers to impose penalties under conditional bail arrangements should also be looked into in the context of a proper separation of powers. If we allow such things to be ignored as matters of tedious hindrance to a Bill that is at least partly meritorious, we let ourselves down, and we certainly let our constituents down. I was unable to be in the Chamber to hear some of the speeches, including that of the Chairman of the Select Committee, and I heard only the tail end of the speech of the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Lynne Featherstone). However, I do none of the speeches an injustice, nor do I paraphrase them unfaithfully, when I say that everyone, apart from the Home Secretary and, I dare say, the Minister for Policing, Security and Community Safety—[Interruption.] I never anticipate what the right hon. Lady is about to say. I do not need to; she repeats herself with great frequency on every occasion—none the less, it is always a delight to listen to her. The three themes that I have identified are matters of concern and even though we shall not force a Division—nor, I dare say, will the Liberal Democrats—the Government cannot allow our decision to let the Bill achieve Second Reading undermine the sincere and proper criticisms that have been made on both sides of the House in cross-party fashion. I want to finish by reminding ourselves of what the hon. Member for Thurrock had to say about police powers and mergers. He is concerned that we tend to reorganise when we do not know the answer to a problem. That problem was identified not by him, but by thinkers during the early centuries of the Roman empire.