Police and Justice Bill

moved Amendment No. 1:"Page 1, line 9, at end insert—" ““(   )   the Police Standards Unit”” The noble Baroness said: After the previous excitement, the Committee will be pleased to know that this is a probing amendment. Clause 1 and Schedule 1 establish the National Policing Improvement Agency, which will replace Centrex and PITO. My amendment would add the Police Standards Unit to the list of bodies to be abolished by Clause 1(2), organisations which are, in practice, to be absorbed by the proposed National Policing Improvement Agency. I am well aware that as the PSU is not a statutory body it cannot technically be abolished in the fashion my amendment would suggest—hence it is a probing amendment. However, I hope my amendment will provide us with an opportunity to discuss the role of the PSU and whether it should be included within the new agency, and to consider the plethora of other bodies that will continue to direct and give guidance to police forces and authorities despite the creation of the new agency. The proposed establishment of the new agency has, of course, received broad support from many quarters. This support, however, is not free from caveats. The Minister informed us at Second Reading that the agency would help to rationalise the national policing landscape and inject new dynamism into support for operational policing, predominantly by subsuming some of the complex web of agencies that are currently supporting the service. It plans to bring together not only functions currently undertaken by PITO and Centrex but aspects of the work of the Home Office and ACPO—the Association of Chief Police Officers—in an aim to support and drive policing improvement. Sometimes when I look at the language so far used at the various stages of this Bill, both in this House and another place, and see the myriad of various titles of organisations, I wonder how on earth people keep abreast of them when they read our deliberations later. There are numerous organisations that assess police performance which are excluded from the agency. As well as the PSU, there is also the Audit Commission, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and local and regional government. As the Police Federation has highlighted:"““all of these organisations require their own unique set of figures and information which creates a bureaucratic strain on forces, moreover there is a considerable degree of overlap between them which can lead to costly duplication of effort””." Members of the Committee will recall that the Home Affairs Committee in another place noted that,"““overlapping remits can paradoxically create holes through which important work may fall””." I also recall that the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, whom I see in his seat, wondered at Second Reading,"““whether we should not bring more of these functions together to ensure that all the levers are available for an agency that was designed to improve policing practice””—[Official Report, 5/6/06; col. 1061.]" I agree with him on that. I do not discount the valuable work that the PSU has achieved, but we need to ask ourselves whether we need a separate standards unit and an improvement agency at the same time. The PSU measures and compares police performance, identifying and disseminating good practice across the country. Meanwhile, one of the stated aims of the new agency, in addition to driving police improvement, is to,"““ensure that national policing best practice is identified, evaluated and understood by police officers and police staff””." That is a clear duplication of objectives and effort. How are the two bodies supposed to carry out these very similar functions without overlap? If, by chance, they produced work on the same issue, whose recommendations should be seen as paramount? Whose should be preferred? It is not unknown for there to be confusion about who is responsible for certain matters—the very problem that this part of the Bill is trying to address. If the PSU is not to be subsumed by the agency, then what of the suggestion of the Home Affairs Committee in another place that it would be desirable, even inevitable, that the inspectorate and the standards unit should eventually be merged in the continued rationalising of the tangled web of agencies? No doubt we will return to the inspectorate later in the Bill. The debate in another place only highlighted to me that we need further to address the extent to which the agency, the PSU and HMIC—within the new joint inspectorate that the Government plan—will overlap. Indeed, there seems to be some confusion between the former and current director of the PSU about the role and positioning of the organisation. Dr Kevin Bond, the former director, stated that the unit was created to act as a catalyst in the police service and that the proposal to merge the unit and the HMIC made sense. Yet the current director, Paul Evans, has said that the unit works out of the Home Office and that the constabulary is independent. I should be grateful if the Minister could outline how these various organisations plan to work together in practice. Will there be formal memorandums of understanding and monthly meetings to co-ordinate the work? Will they be allowed to share work or set up joint ventures? How will there be effort without duplication of effort and ability? I beg to move.