Police and Justice Bill

My hon. Friend makes an interesting point. The powers are not circumscribed at all. It is not clear how they could be used, and there appears to be no limit on their use. The judgment as to whether a police force or authority is failing is largely a judgment for the Home Secretary, and there could indeed be a conflict between the way in which a police force was responding to local demands and the Home Secretary’s desire for some other aspect of policing. I will return to that point in a moment. During the passage of the Bill, Ministers have claimed that these powers of intervention will be used only as a last resort. That explanation appeared in the notes that accompanied the publication of the original Bill. However, Ministers have consistently refused to put the expression ““last resort””—or a similar check—into the Bill. It was in the explanatory notes, but it has never been in the Bill. The power that the Government are now seeking to take is not circumscribed; it is entirely open-ended. The Minister said that he had made a concession to the Association of Police Authorities and to ACPO, and indeed he has. We need to examine the extent of that concession, however, and ask whether it really addresses the concern about the centralisation of power. Part of the concession is that the Government can now make a direction only through a police authority. But what that means is that it will be the police authority that is directed, rather than the force. If the police authority is so directed, it is not clear that it will have the discretion to do anything other than obey the direction. That change might preserve the amour propre of the Association of Police Authorities, but if authorities have to comply with a direction, what difference will the change actually make? The Minister said that the Secretary of State would now have to consult the inspectorate of constabulary about an intervention, but the Bill does not use the word ““consult””. It simply says that the Secretary of State has to inform the inspectorate, and that the inspectorate can then make its own views known. I am not sure that that amounts to consultation. It certainly does not resemble the existing power that the inspectorate has to initiate the intervention of the Secretary of State. The Secretary of State is now taking that power to himself.