Police and Justice Bill

My Lords, I have tabled a number of amendments in this large group. I added my name to Amendments Nos. 23 and 24 which, happily, have been overtaken by events. However, I wanted to draw your Lordships’ attention to the necessity of all HMICs retaining their royal warrant. I would be most grateful for an assurance. I should like to speak to Amendments Nos. 66 to 69 which are, once again, about the Audit Commission. But before I do so, I have a few questions for the Minister which refer to the same points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham with regard to Schedule 4A(2), looking at the issue from a police authority perspective. It is worth asking the questions to allow the Minister time to get an answer while I am speaking to Amendments Nos. 66 and 69. Does subsection (2)(2) of Amendment No. 17 also mean that HMIC will consult the bodies to be inspected? It was in the latest version of the Bill in Schedule 9(9)(3) on page 110, but it does not appear in this legislation, and I would like an explanation. With regard to subsection (3)(4) of AmendmentNo. 17, can the Minister say how the Secretary of State would envisage using such an order-making power, and for what purpose? Does it allow him to mandate joint inspections or just to say who the lead inspectorate will be and then leave it to the discretion of the Chief Inspector to decide? Specifically, will it allow the Secretary of State to specify that police authorities will be inspected by HMIC? I agree with the points made about the great range of the new amendments. It has been extremely difficult to find the detail in them, and I could not find anywhere a reference to inspection of police authorities. The old wording in the Bill on Report included reference to that. At page 24, Clause 29(3), they are one of the organisations listed as sitting within the criminal justice system, which would have fallen within the remit of the single inspectorate.At page 112, paragraph 12, which one of my amendments addresses, police authorities are listed as one of the bodies—CDRPs being the other—that would have been subject to joint inspection between the CJS inspectorate and the Audit Commission. But the new wording does not include reference to them. Although the wording itself is not new, the context is, which alters the way in which the wording might be read and needs to be examined afresh in light of the Government’s amendments. I am sure that if the Minister is unable to answer these questions today, she will be able to do so at a later point, having read carefully what I have said in Hansard. But is she able to tell me how the new amendment will allow for inspection of police authorities? With my Amendments Nos. 64 and 65, I turn to the matter of enabling police authority expertise to be used in inspecting police authorities. It seems that I must continue to disagree with the Minister about whether current wording adequately allows for that. For instance, ““sufficient expertise”” implies quantity rather than quality, so does not necessarily mean that the chief inspector has access to the right sort of expertise. My amendment tries to address this issue. However, it also explicitly allows for the inclusion of police authority expertise in police authority inspections. I have explained before why I think that that is important, so I will not rehearse those arguments again. But I point out that it does not imply a cosy relationship, which the Minister seemed to suggest in our previous debate. I am suggesting that police authority expertise should contribute to police authority inspections, but certainly not be wholly responsible for them. It is certainly no more questionable than the idea that police officers should inspect police forces—which, indeed, they do. I do not believe that the Minister would question the professionalism and independence of HMIC. In an effort to come up with a compromise that might be more acceptable to the Government, I suggest that the Association of Police Authorities should be consulted by the chief inspector about ensuring that he has appropriate expertise available to him. This is a change to the previous suggestion that the APA should be able to nominate suitable people. It is just slightly different. With Amendments Nos. 66 to 69, I have been very busy checking the legislation. For the avoidance of confusion, my previous amendment was about the Audit Commission’s role in best value. Best value appears in Section 24 of the Local Government Act 1999, where it says that HMIC will inspect police authorities for their compliance with best value. The Audit Commission has no role mentioned in that Act whatever. Amendments Nos. 66 to 69 address the involvement of the Audit Commission in police authority inspections. Nothing that the Minister has said has convinced me that it has the requisite knowledge or expertise to undertake this role. I know that the Minister is a great fan of its work with local authorities, and I acknowledge, as I have throughout, that it has a wealth of experience in this field, although I do not share his views about its total effectiveness. That aside, local authorities are not the same as police authorities. They have different functions and structures, and it is a mistake to think that techniques and frameworks used in inspecting local authorities can be applied to police authorities; they cannot. My second amendment would ensure that the Audit Commission sticks to what it knows about: auditing police authorities, not inspecting them. That is the very point made by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, for which I was very grateful. In addition, however, I was rather taken aback to hear the noble Lord speaking at Second Reading on this section of the Bill. He said the amendment he was then taking forward, which is now part of the Bill, gave the Audit Commission a power to act jointly with the chief inspector, where the commissioner had no power to inspect. I am sorry, but if the Audit Commission has no legal remit to inspect, it has no business conducting inspections, joint or otherwise. My amendment seeks to make that plain. I have also made sure with this amendment that it is the chief inspector, not the Audit Commission, who decides that the involvement of the commission might be helpful—although in practice, because of my other amendments, that will be restricted to inspections of crime and disorder reduction partnerships.