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Policing and Crime Bill

I take the hon. Gentleman's point, and I am grateful for that clarification. In sum, this is a rag-tag Bill that leaves out the central provisions that were originally meant to be its purpose, so there is no vision of how local accountability will be made real. It is merely a set of provisions that takes us back to the failed model of the past. It is a vote from an exhausted Government Bench for better yesterdays. It therefore teeters perilously close to the offence of wasting this House's time. True, there are some unexceptionable provisions, such as those on force collaboration, but even there the dead hand of Whitehall reaches out with powers of direction. Where there are new ideas in the Bill, such as those on prostitution, they are more likely to do harm than to reduce it. In most cases, the proposals are beyond amendment, although we as Liberal Democrats and therefore optimists will do our best to amend them in Committee. The Bill as a whole is stuffed with a mixture of the pernicious, the vexatious and the supernumerary, and we regret it.