Police and Justice Bill

The amendment is best described as rather curious. As I understand it, the noble Baroness, Lady Harris, and my noble friend Lady Henig have explained that police authorities continue to support the notion of best value and want it retained. It has been argued fairly that leaving in place the overarching duty to promote best value while removing the tools provided for best value reviews and best value performance plans might leave police authorities somewhat hamstrung. The noble Baroness's solution is simply to disapply the entire best value regime for police authorities. That is a strange solution to what is seen as a problem. I do not see it as a problem at all. I cannot accept the analysis. In repealing the duty to undertake best value reviews, all we are removing is fairly acknowledged as an overly bureaucratic and resource-intensive process. Those are terms and words that I would have thought would be more than a little familiar to the noble Baroness, Lady Harris; I recognise them as terms that she might use to describe best value at its worst, when best value becomes more overbearing than useful in getting good value for money from any organisation. As I understand it and as I attempted to make it work in my time in local government, that is what best value is about. Of course, police authorities, as with any other statutory body corporate, may do anything consistent with the exercise of their functions. They do not, therefore, need express statutory powers to undertake reviews in order to do so. I would have thought that an element of good practice in any organisation involved in local government or in police authorities is that it is important at all times to review the way in which the organisation operates to secure good value for money. Furthermore, police authorities can continue to draw on their powers in Section 22 of the Police Act 1996 to request a report from their chief officer. In other words, the chief officer has a continuing commitment and obligation to ensure that good value is provided through the police authority. Police authorities will still be able to discharge their general duty to secure continuous improvement in the delivery of police forces’ functions. That general duty is well worth retaining without the cumbersome bureaucracy that best value can have associated with it, although it has often been shown to be positive. In those circumstances, I am puzzled why the noble Baroness, Lady Harris, takes agin what I would have thought would be recognised as a government move that provided for some freeing up. My noble friend Lady Henig has acknowledged that the Metropolitan Police Authority is using other tools of scrutiny to secure best value. In a sense, that makes the argument for the Government. If that is the case, what is to stop other police authorities acting in a similar way? They do not need the cumbersome nature of some best value practices to carry out reviews or assess performance plans. I would have thought that this would be a welcome change of approach, because it would enable some scope and some use of imagination in how reviews can be carried out to benefit the police authority and ensure that it continues to deliver the services that it is asked to provide at good value.