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Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

My Lords, first, I welcome the Minister to her onerous new responsibilities. She has a particularly difficult Bill to deal with. Policing operates only with the consent of the people, and it has long been the experience in the United Kingdom that that consent depends very largely on the extent to which the people can trust in the independence and impartiality of the policing service which is delivered to them. I want for a moment to refer to the situation in Northern Ireland in which policing became very seriously politicised and the consequences of that politicisation. In the first instance, there was a loss of community confidence in the police, which over the period of the Troubles crossed from the nationalist republican community into the loyalist community. It is important to acknowledge that the loss of confidence was right across the community. That led to a lack of support for the police in critical moments. I am thinking in particular about things like demonstrations, which are becoming more prevalent on the streets of the United Kingdom. It led to the loss of the flow of active information to the police, and the extent to which people were prepared to come forward and tell the police things. They very often told me as Police Ombudsman that the decisions that they made were based on whether they thought they might be listened to anyway. So people stopped providing information—sometimes information relating to the commission of crimes—and that led to the necessity for greater use of other mechanisms for collecting information, with the additional costs attached to those, all the complexities of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and the potential for the increase in corruption. Ultimately, the loss of confidence in policing led to a lack of proper accountability in Northern Ireland, and we saw what happened, and we saw the necessity for the commission headed by the noble Lord, Lord Patten, and all the consequences which derived from that. Members of the House will now have gathered that I stand in support of the noble Baroness, Lady Harris. I want to consider what it is that we are contemplating in this election of a police commissioner. The noble Baroness, Lady Harris, has identified the deficiencies in what a police commissioner could deliver which is not currently delivered by a police authority. I speak as a former member of the Police Authority for Northern Ireland, and I know the extent to which authorities go in extending their reach and bringing people in. When you combine that with the district and community policing partnerships that exist across the country, there is very significant outreach between the police, the police authority and those who are served by policing. The imposition of a single elected person would almost inevitably result in the election of someone who was politically affiliated. Political affiliation could be very damaging to policing and could lead to decisions in the allocation of resources which may well not reflect the needs of the marginalised, the poor, the vulnerable, the disabled and many other constituents of our community. As Jessica de Grazia said when she addressed the meeting on the Bill, the United States system is very different from ours. I have spent a great deal of time going backwards and forwards to America looking at the possibility of importing ideas to improve policing in Northern Ireland. We do not have in the Bill the extensive protections which, as Jessica de Grazia said, have been built into the United States system over a period of 200 years to mitigate and correct the abuses of power that are a consistent feature of that form of police governance; we do not have an FBI which has a responsibility for significant areas of policing; we do not have police forces which comprise nine, 10, 20 or 50 people as the majority of American police forces do. The situation which we have is profoundly different from the one in America and the process which has evolved in the tripartite relationship between the Home Secretary, the police authority and the police has been adopted in other countries because it is seen to work. On the American system and the references to Commissioner Bratton, there is absolutely no doubt that Commissioner Bratton was an able, effective and innovative police chief. We have adopted from America ideas such as broken windows and zero tolerance in many of our policing areas, and we have had significant developments in neighbourhood policing. All those initiatives have led to a greater relationship between people and police. To effectively take all those out and to replace them with a single person—who, as the noble Baroness, Lady Henig, said, sits over a significant area—could not deliver the existing level of contact with the community. We are making these decisions at a time of a massively increased national security threat and it is profoundly important that we do all we can to ensure the total impartiality of our policing; to give all sections of the community the right to be represented in the running of policing; and, perhaps most of all, to ensure that we do not in any way imperil the impartiality of our policing. Our police commissioners are required to be effective and efficient; they are not required, as our chief constables are, to be independent and impartial. This is an ill thought-out scheme which will not produce the level of policing that we have at the moment; and it will not maintain or sustain the level of community confidence in policing which exists at present.