Police and Justice Bill

I support all these amendments and will speak in particular to Amendment No. 103, Amendment No. 114 and Amendment No. 121. It is absolutely right that every crime and disorder committee shall include at least one member nominated by the police authority responsible in that area for maintaining the police force in the area of the local authority. I very much support Amendment No. 103. On Amendment No. 114, police authorities must have a right to sit on the committees scrutinising crime and disorder issues as they are the bodies that hold the police to account on behalf of local communities, as the noble Baroness, Lady Henig, said. The Government have said that that will be prescribed in secondary legislation. We believe that it needs to be guaranteed in primary legislation because of the importance of the function and the possibility that the committees could be used by local authorities to hold the police, particularly BCU commanders, rather than the CDRP as a whole, to account. That could put conflicting demands on local police, undermine the role of the police authority in setting local priorities and interfere with the managerial accountability between BCU commanders and chief officers. Amendment No. 121 would remove the ability of the Secretary of State to confer by regulations particular functions on particular responsible authorities in relation to the formulation and implementation of CDRP strategies. The whole point of the CDRP is that it has a partnership approach that engages all the responsible authorities in a joint exercise to address community safety issues. The noble Lord, Lord Harris, put that clearly in context. To confer particular functions on one or two of the partners would go against the partnership principle. Not only would it open up the possibility of a hierarchy of more or less important responsible authorities, which would mitigate against the concept of partnership, but it risks detracting from the original purpose for which these partnerships were brought together—better to join up community safety issues. In addition, we have concerns that if the paragraph gives local authorities a primary role, it will be used to try to hold the police to account rather than the partnership as a whole. The police are accountable to police authorities and we would not wish to see that eroded or have conflicting or inappropriate priorities foisted by one partner on other partners because they have not been given a particular responsibility for formulating strategy, although they may have a responsibility for implementing it. Provisions that allow the Secretary of State to confer functions on a committee, or on a particular member or officer of the responsible authorities, are set out later in the same clause. This should be sufficient to ensure that the CDRP-plus arrangements can be put in place, allowing key strategic decisions to be made by lead members of the responsible authorities to ensure better accountability to the public.