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Commissioner for Older People (Wales) Bill [HL]

I support my noble friend’s position, as I did at the last sitting of the Committee. It is important that we do not blur the distinction of constitutional accountability between the powers that have and have not been devolved. However, I suggest that in the case of police authorities there is a rather different and better case to be made. When I sat on the Richard commission, for example, I had the impression that police authorities worked extremely closely with Assembly organisations and had entered into a large number of partnership agreements of one kind or another with them. There is a close interface between the work of the police authorities and much of the Assembly’s work in social services and elsewhere. I suggest that, while maintaining the principle, the Minister should look at a way in which the police authorities could relate to the work of the commissioner because, as the noble Lord, Lord Livsey, said, there is an important interface between elderly people and the police. Whereas other organisations are more clearly non-devolved, the work of the police authorities and their relationships with the Assembly are in a rather different category from the other bodies listed in Amendment No. 39. I hope that my noble friend will look carefully at Amendment No. 38 and consider a way, perhaps ingeniously, in which the commissioner may have a relationship with the police authorities. I certainly support my noble friend in rejecting Amendment No. 39.