Police and Justice Bill

I have a great deal of sympathy with the amendment and I endorse much of what the noble Baroness, Lady Harris, said. Based on my experience as a former chair of a police authority, the best value duty was an important one. It enabled police authorities to scrutinise and become familiar with detailed aspects of policing which some chief officers would previously have guarded as matters of operational independence. It gave us access to some of those dark and dusty corners which had previously escaped rigorous scrutiny. Indeed, police authority involvement in best value reviews actually helped to strengthen relationships with the force and gave officers greater confidence that authority members understood the issues and challenges facing them. Of course, it also involved a great deal of red tape and bureaucracy. This was mostly due to the guidance issued by the then Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. When the APA and the Home Office together produced some guidance specifically for the police service, much of that was swept away. Best value, as such, may now have had its day; I know that colleagues in, for example, the Metropolitan Police Authority are using other forms of scrutiny very powerfully to achieve the same ends. However, the difficulty with what the Government are proposing is that it places police authorities between a rock and a hard place. They will still have a duty to secure best value; they will still be measured against best value measures, or SPIs, as they are now called; and they will still be inspected against the duty. But they will no longer have the levers or the tools to fulfil that duty—that is, the power to carry out best value reviews. If best value is dying, let us kill it off altogether. We do not want to leave authorities with a duty and no power. Powers to inspect police authorities are already being taken elsewhere in the Bill. The Government continue to have powers under the Bill to set strategic priorities and appropriate measures. Why do we need to continue to apply these provisions?