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Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

moved Amendment No. 54: 54: After Clause 126, insert the following new Clause— ““Local authority scrutiny of crime and disorder matters In section 19 of the Police and Justice Act 2006 (c. 48) (Local authority scrutiny of crime and disorder matters), after subsection 1 insert— ““(1A) Every crime and disorder committee shall include at least one member nominated by the police authority for the area of the local authority, who shall have the same entitlement to vote as any other member of that committee.”””” The noble Baroness said: My Lords, I, too, apologise for coming in at this late stage of the Bill. I saw the government amendment only on Friday and I had to think about what I was going to say. I declare an interest as a former chair of a police authority and as a vice-president of the Association of Police Authorities. This is a very complex area, as the Minister has acknowledged, so it may be helpful to give a little background. The original provisions in the Police and Justice Act about the community call for action and the overview and scrutiny mechanisms that support it were made as a result of the Crime and Disorder Act review, which the Government initiated in November 2004 as part of the White Paper Building Communities, Beating Crime, which preceded the Bill. The aim of the proposals was to improve the working of crime and disorder reduction partnerships—CDRPs—particularly to enable better joining up and greater responsiveness and to make the partnerships more accountable. Those are all entirely laudable aims, which we support entirely. There is still significant concern about the mechanism chosen to do that, however. Since the ideas were first mooted, there has been an element of mission creep, especially in confusing the original idea of holding the whole partnership more accountable with that of holding individual partners to account. The key partners, called ““responsible authorities””, in a CDRP are the local authority, the police authority, the police force, the local primary care trust and the probation board. A number of others, such as the fire authority, have some particular responsibilities and are known as ““co-operating bodies””. The functions of a CDRP are largely operational, tasking actions against particular types of crime and disorder, such as anti-social behaviour. The main exception is the work that it does in consulting communities about very local issues, which in large part accounts for the presence of police authorities on the partnerships, and which helps them to shape policing priorities and assists them in their work in engaging communities about policing issues. Like the noble Lord, Lord Harris, I seem to remember arguing when the Police and Justice Bill was before us that if the one of the aims of the CCfA overview and scrutiny provisions was to make CDRPs more accountable, there was a good argument for putting non-executive representatives of all the five key partners on the crime and disorder committee, which is what the Act calls overview and scrutiny committees looking at crime and disorder issues. Their job would be to improve joined-up accountability for the executive arm of the partnership. This arrangement would replicate the way in which overview and scrutiny committees work in a local government context, with the committee scrutinising the work of its executive. Why should any other partner have a lesser role in holding to account the executive arm of the partnership? It is not our battle to fight on behalf of other partners, but we pressed this strongly in a policing context, arguing that accountability would be confused and place BCU commanders in a difficult position, without a police authority member present on an OSC to square the circle when it was looking into crime and disorder issues. Any other approach would inevitably raise expectations among the public and councillors—this is an important point—that they could in some measure tell the police what to do. They simply cannot do that. As to the presence of a police authority member on CDRPs, because such members have no operational role, it is unlikely that they would ever be asked to explain their actions to an OSC. In any event, mechanisms already exist in Section 20 of the Police Act 1996 for councillor members of police authorities to answer council questions about the discharge of police authority functions. However, we accept that there would be a potential conflict of interest if the individual sitting on a CDRP for the police authority was also to represent it on an OSC looking at the activities of that CDRP. The police authority representative on any OSC would, therefore, need to be another member of the authority, who had taken no part in the activities of that CDRP. As I said, this is a complex area. The Government accepted these arguments when the Police and Justice Bill was going through Parliament, although they did not want to place that in primary legislation and agreed that the presence of a police authority member on OSCs looking at crime and disorder matters would be included in regulations. As the noble Lord, Lord Harris, said, the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, stated on 6 July 2006: "““We are consulting practitioners around the country on exactly how best to exercise that power, and most importantly that will include police authority members””." He continued: "““It is also important to highlight that the composition of such committees should continue to reflect the current and future structure of community safety delivery. The power in the Bill””—" the Police and Justice Bill— "““will allow that to happen. The power is subject to the affirmative resolution process, and we can fairly argue that Parliament will have an opportunity to both monitor and scrutinise its use and effectiveness””.—[Official Report, 6/7/06; col. 391.]" I am delighted that we will still be able to do that, and I look to the Minister, who is nodding, to give me that assurance. Since that time, the exact workings of the proposals on CDRPs and related issues in the Police and Justice Act have been under discussion. They have not been finalised, in part because of this Bill. This will impact on how it all works in practice. We have not yet had any regulations. The government amendments that we saw late on Friday will leave as an exempted matter much of the operation of overview and scrutiny in a crime and disorder context. However, they make two key changes to the Police and Justice Act. First, the Act is amended in a way that leaves out the appeal mechanism that would enable a member of a community to take an issue to the council executive if a councillor declined to deal with it. Secondly, there are what appear to be relative minor amendments to Section 20 of the Act, dealing with guidance and regulations. As this section on regulations is amended, I seek reassurance that regulations will continue to specify that a police authority member will sit on crime and disorder committees. If the Government wanted joined-up thinking between departments—and the Minister has assured us of that and has acknowledged that this Bill is intended to do that—why did they not adopt the model set out in the Police and Justice Act and avoid all this confusion and concern? I beg to move.