Police and Justice Bill

moved Amendment No. 94: Page 109, line 39, at end insert ““and in particular he shall secure that persons nominated by the Association of Police Authorities will assist in conducting inspections of police authorities”” The noble Baroness said: My Lords, I wish to speak to Amendments Nos. 94, 99 and 101 in this grouping in the names of my noble friend Lord Dholakia and myself. These amendments seek to clarify how police authorities will be inspected in future. I should be very grateful if the Minister would explain exactly what is meant by Amendment No. 98. I wondered whether it was code for giving HMIC the lead role. If so, we would be happy, but not if that were not the case. The amendments in my name and that of my noble friend would enable police authority expertise explicitly to be involved in inspecting police authorities. When we previously spoke about this amendment in Committee, the Minister was confident that the current wording of the Bill would achieve this. It is certainly true that the wording allows the chief inspector to secure assistance with inspections and ensure there is sufficient expertise available, but this is general wording applying to all inspections and is a discretionary power. At this point I thought it might be helpful to read a briefing from HMIC. Although the briefing deals with the single inspectorate issue, it is worth highlighting the actual role of the inspector. I am grateful to HMIC for the briefing, which states with regard to the current role of HMIC: "““It is important to understand that the role of inspector in HMIC is very different to that of the inspection team leaders in the other criminal justice inspectorates. At its heart, of course, there is a similar responsibility for inspection of organisations, processes, outcomes and service delivery which would be found in all the respective job descriptions. In addition, however, and probably forming the greater part of their work, HMIC inspectors undertake: Advice to the chief inspector on portfolio specialisms; Advice to police authorities on chief officer appointments, complaints and performance issues; Mentoring advice and counselling to chief constables and chief officers; Trouble-shooting and arbitration in sensitive and/or complex policing problem areas; Commissioned thematic examination of key services or areas; Ensuring ‘organisational health’ through identifying and addressing issues relating to diversity, information management, governance, resourcing and capacity and capability; and PDRs of chief constables (in liaison with authority chairs)””." I thought that it was important to highlight exactly what it is the inspectors do. This is a very sensitive area. HMIC is largely made up of people drawn from police forces, and the majority of people involved in the arm of the new single inspectorate, which will inspect police authorities, will continue to be police. This effectively means that police authorities are being held to account by people whom they once held to account. That is a constitutionally questionable and potentially unbalanced situation, unless there is a significant injection of independent police authority expertise into the process. The amendment would place on a secure statutory footing the involvement of police authority members and staff and/or other independent experts in police authority inspections, overcoming these objections in primary legislation. The involvement of APA and police authority members and staff in developing inspection frameworks and conducting police authority inspections has in the past been more or less accepted by HMIC, which has enough to do itself. The skills of the Audit Commission in this area are even less developed, as I will refer to under the next amendment. Because police authorities are very specialised, we believe that the expert knowledge and understanding necessary to conduct targeted, balanced and robust inspections will most readily be found in police authorities. The idea is that underlying this arrangement will be a pool of police authority members and staff co-ordinated by the APA who will assist with conducting inspections on something akin to a peer review model. They will, of course, be required to undertake specialist training before they can become involved in inspections. Inspection is a very important function, on which a great deal of public and professional confidence will rest. For this reason, it is important that skilled and balanced structures through which to conduct inspections are secured in primary legislation and are not left to the discretion of one individual. Amendments Nos. 99 and 101 would remove references to police authorities being subject to joint inspection with the Audit Commission, so that they would be subject to inspection only by the new CJS inspectorate. That would leave in place the existing proposals that would make crime and disorder reduction partnerships subject to joint inspection. At present, police authorities are inspected by HMIC but audited by the Audit Commission, and I think we would all agree that there is considerable room for crossover and duplication between those two activities. I applaud the intention behind this part of the Bill to better join up the demands that are made on police authorities in this respect, but I am not convinced that providing for joint inspection will achieve that aim. I am mindful that the government amendment in this area adds some clarity. It makes it clear that the new CJS inspectorate will be in the lead on inspections of police authorities; but it does not go quite far enough. The Audit Commission has expert auditors, but they are definitely not experts on conducting inspections of police authorities; they have no experience in this field. Audit is, and should be, a distinctly separate function and an independent safeguard on financial probity separate from inspection. I am all for trying to reduce duplication, but there are other ways of doing that. I would not wish that the important independent check on financial governance is lost in blurring two functions in the way that these proposals risk doing. Indeed, the prospect of two different sets of inspectors with different ideas about what should be inspected and how it should be done might have exactly the opposite effect to streamlining the process, which is what is intended, and could muddy the waters even further. Whose opinion takes precedence? The Audit Commission already has powers in relation to auditing police authorities and it would seem unnecessary and superfluous to add inspection to those powers, when that could better be undertaken by HMIC, or the elements of it that would transfer to the new inspectorate, which has much more experience in this area. I agree that it would be sensible for the Audit Commission to have a role in the inspection of crime and disorder reduction partnerships, because local authorities significantly contribute to those partnerships and the Audit Commission has a remit in respect of their functions. I beg to move.