My Lords, this gives us an opportunity to come back to a subject where there has not been a great deal of meeting of minds. I am anxious to make sure that we are all reading this situation in the same way. I will address the various points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey—I accept that he is not making them out of mischievousness but out of genuine inquiry as to how the operations are going to work—and the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Smith.
When we talked about setting this process up, I thought my speaking notes made it clear that information that we provided in the consultation we had on this was about making efficient dispersal arrangements and providing them in connection with the public space protection order. One of those things deals with territory and one deals with situations. I think we all agree that when we are dealing with territory, there is often quite a bit of history—there is certainly a lot of experience—and local government and the police can work very happily in hand together to deal with it. When we are dealing with situations and people, it is very important that we have a clear order of command. In areas which may well have provided trouble in the past or, indeed, in situations which are known to the police and local authorities to be likely to be troublesome, there may well be some prior discussions.
One of the great advantages of using inspector grades to take these decisions is that most inspectors have territorial responsibilities and local knowledge is very important. Indeed, in terms of policing—and it is an operational matter involving the police, not local authority employees, for example—it is the police who have that local knowledge. They have access to that local knowledge and an inspector would have access to it by consultation with sergeants and constables. Indeed, it need not be at inspector level that the decision is ultimately made. If it is a complex issue that requires great sensitivity, the inspector is perfectly entitled to go up to superintendent or even chief constable level before determining that the dispersal order is made. However, this legislation provides the facility for it to occur.
The noble Baroness talked about the evidence. To my mind, the evidence is pretty self-explanatory in that what we need is a clear command structure. The Government feel that this is the right thing. We have presented it to the police. I met Richard Antcliff of Nottinghamshire Police city community protection team before Christmas. He welcomes these new powers. His team is a partnership team of police officers, police staff and council officers. I went to Nottingham in October to see its work. He is very positive about the new dispersal power and sees it as a key intervention in dealing with anti-social behaviour in the city of Nottingham. The work in Nottingham is co-operative, and that is surely the sort of thing we want.