Police and Justice Bill

I shall deal first with the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Waddington. It is a wonderful privilege to give advice. Whether that advice is taken and used judiciously with skill and judgment is something else. If we had a recipe for imparting and applying judgment with consistency, I can promise the noble Lord that I would be first in the queue to acquire it so it could be shared among all. The noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, is right when he says that the high profile that has been given to hate crime—I know that is not directly involved with this question, but it is right that I address it—has been very important. Although the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, highlights issues that may need correction, I am confident that he accepts that there have been the most distressing and quite disgusting cases where individuals have been pilloried, abused or threatened as a result of hate, and I know that those are things that the noble Lord, as a former Home Secretary, cannot but abhor. I would not like anyone to misunderstand the way these matters are proceeded with. I say to the noble Baronesses, Lady Anelay and Lady Harris, and the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, that I am grateful that there is an understanding. The noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, clearly said that this was an exploratory amendment. As she says, the Police Standards Unit is not a statutory body in the way that Centrex or PITO are, and therefore cannot be abolished in the same way; nor do we think there is any justification for doing so. The NPIA is about creating a police-owned and police-led organisation that strongly supports self-improvement in frontline policing. As such, the NPIA will not take direct control of the mechanisms for monitoring police performance, nor will the agency be responsible for police performance management at the national level. Those functions should remain firmly with the Police Standards Unit at the Home Office, though there will of course need to be a very close working relationship between the two bodies. The distinction between monitoring and improving standards is an important one for us to acknowledge, because while we would expect the unit to work closely with the NPIA in its work to drive improvement in service delivery, the Police Standards Unit continues to have a key role to play in providing my right honourable friend the Home Secretary and his successors in title with the means to identify performance variations across the service, as well as the capacity to respond to help reduce those variations and work towards parity of police service provision across England and Wales. Since its creation in 2002 the Police Standards Unit has demonstrably proven the value that it has added both to public access to information on policing performance and identification of performance issues and in improving performance through targeted engagement. The PSU has led on the creation of the policing performance assessment framework, which for the first time provides a more balanced view of policing performance and allows comparative assessment of forces. This has meant that we are now able to publish annual assessments of policing performance. The PSU has also driven through the Government’s commitment to provide local policing performance summaries to every household in England and Wales, which started in April. The PSU’s work on assessment underpins the ability of the Home Office to spot performance variations in areas of priority, and the unit has a unique capacity to respond in a targeted way to help drive performance improvement where necessary. For example, in 2004–05, the eight forces that the PSU worked with reduced crime twice as much as the average of other forces—11.4 per cent versus 4.6 per cent—and five of the nine largest reductions in crime over the past 12 months have taken place in forces which have been engaged with the PSU. Latterly, the unit has also worked intensively with around a quarter of forces to help them improve their performance on sanction detection rates, and again the average performance improvement in these forces has been around double that of the average of other forces—4.4 percentage points versus 2.3 percentage points—between September 2004 and November 2005. The Police Standards Unit also played a key role in the recent highly effective alcohol misuse enforcement campaigns and co-ordinated work across all forces which has helped address alcohol related violent crime. There are elements of the Police Standards Unit’s current work that may sit better with the NPIA in the future, in particular some of its remit to identify and disseminate good practice; for example, the work it is doing around development of automatic number plate recognition—ANPR—and video identification. As the Police Standards Unit already works with some of the NPIA precursor bodies on good practice issues, it will continue to work with the NPIA proper to ensure the appropriate home for the relevant functions. However, the obvious benefits to policing in this country of addressing crime appropriately and having the Police Standards Unit as a central resource able to respond rapidly to performance priorities clearly outweigh any case for its removal. We hope that the NPIA will start in April next year. I understand the concern that Members of the Committee have raised about duplication. I reassure them that we are conscious of that and can address it. So we have the synergy. I say gently that we have learnt that working in partnership in a unified way in a common structure and framework has greatly assisted performance. We shall continue to work in a collaborative way for that purpose. We have indicated in the other place that it might be helpful to provide a note to Members of the differences between the two, where the overlaps are perceived to be and how that would be managed. If the Committee thinks that it would assist, I should be very happy to make a note available so that there is a greater degree of clarity on the issue.