Police and Justice Bill

I am sorry if the hon. Gentleman missed it, but I did say that any merger order would be subject to affirmative procedure. I will ensure that we learn the lessons of the summer in terms of exploring options for additional parliamentary debate and scrutiny. I will do all I can, working with ACPO, the Association of Police Authorities and the forces, to ensure that the present process fills the gaps and obviates the need for compulsory merger. After that process has finished, I cannot promise that some forces—not just Lancashire and Cumbria—will not decide that the only way forward is merger. If forces want to merge voluntarily, that is fine, but given the present situation I can confidently say that no enforced mergers are on the agenda in the near future. I cannot give an absolute guarantee, however, and I suspect that a Conservative Minister would say the same in my position. We need to retain the ability to compel mergers just in case. People have the wrong end of the stick on intervention. The Bill is not meant to introduce a centralising regime. Some of the contributions made me dig out my parliamentary pass to check whether it read Honecker or Ceausescu instead of McNulty. The 2002 legislation provides that forces must comply with direction, and the changes in the Bill involve broadening the source of information so that the Home Secretary can draw on HMIC and bring police authorities into his scope. If we may uncouple the Bill from the bad faith in the merger debate, I ask hon. Members to judge us by our actions, not policy or legislation changes. Even though we had the powers to intervene, from both the 1994 and 2002 legislation, we have not done so in all the years since 1997. That is not to say that there have not been opportunities to do so or even the need to do so—I have mentioned the eight forces we have dealt with, three of which we are still working with—but we have taken non-statutory, voluntary measures, working alongside the chief constable and the force involved. As a last resort, however, we need the ability to intervene in a failing force or police authority. There is no malice aforethought in the provisions. It is not in the interests of the Home Office or the Home Secretary to force or cajole intervention in a police force. We want to reach a stage at which we can work alongside police forces, in the interests of local council tax payers. The Bill is not Stalinist or government by a big stick. Statutory intervention would be a last resort, if fundamentally necessary in the case of an irresponsible or capricious chief constable or police authority—none of which we have at present.