Police and Justice Bill

Amendment No. 62 would remove yet further provisions from Schedule 2—in this case, paragraphs 23 to 25, which, among other things, repeal the requirement on the Home Secretary to issue an annual national policing plan. Under current legislation, each year the Home Secretary produces a national policing plan for the following three years. The national policing plan sets the strategic direction for the police service for the medium term and the year ahead and establishes the performance framework, including any indicators or targets against which police performance would be measured and compared. The national policing plan needs to be published by 30 November each year. Last November, we published for the first time a national community safety plan setting out the community safety priorities for 2006–09 and incorporating the national policing plan. This new plan recognised that the delivery of community safety required a multi-agency approach and could not be delivered solely by the police. To this end, the Bill will remove the inflexible requirement to produce a national policing plan. In future, we will issue the national community safety plan on a non-statutory basis. However, the Home Secretary will still retain the ability, under new Section 37A of the Police Act, inserted by paragraph 24 of the Schedule, to set ““strategic priorities””. Given the Home Secretary’s overarching responsibility for maintaining an efficient and effective police service throughout England and Wales, we argue—and the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, accepts this—that the Home Secretary has an entirely legitimate role in setting broad national strategic priorities to which police authorities should have regard. It is already the case that the Home Secretary can set ““objectives”” for police authorities in legislation. That goes back to the previous Government—to 1996 and to the Police and Magistrates’ Courts Act 1994. This is not a change of substance; it is merely a change of language. I see nothing sinister in this and I cannot understand why the noble Baronesses opposite should see anything perverse or peculiar in the wording of the Bill. It is a simple change in terminology. The strategic priorities that we set will be little different from former objectives. I am not a thesaurus expert, but they do not seem to be a million miles apart in their terminology. There is no power to impose new priorities; the requirement on police authorities is simply to have regard to those priorities. I am puzzled, especially because the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, is a member of a party that, in government, introduced the concept of national policing plans. While at the time I might have had some questions about whether this was a centralising feature of Mr Howard’s approach to policing, one could argue that national policing plans and priorities have served us very well. Earlier, the noble Baroness, Lady Harris, praised arrangements that were put in place in the 1990s to make police authorities more effective in setting priorities and objectives and so on and in working with the Home Secretary to that end. We think that that element of the legislation has worked very well, and I am surprised that the wording here has raised such strange concerns. We think that this is a very straightforward and simple matter. It is a question of language and no more than that.