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Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

If noble Lords like my erudition, I will continue. My second point, from my lecture this evening, is that we owe the very term ““police station””, and all that those words imply, to the British Transport Police because, in the days when the railways were being built, there were so many undisciplined chaps around causing trouble in the localities that stations had to be built—believe it or not—every mile along the track. Those became the British Transport Police stations, and the term became loosely associated with the police. So we owe a lot to BTP: it is in the DNA of our modern police. I am very grateful to the noble Lord for the points that were made about the need to discuss in more detail how we might, while respecting the differences, also seek to have a comparability of approach across the country. I think that that matters to ordinary people. I opened the debate by talking about the importance of having a memorandum of understanding. I thank the Minister for her willingness to engage with that proposal. There is a balance to be struck between having the detail, on the one hand, and safeguarding the essential verities that we want to see in our police force. We are not asking for enormous amounts of bureaucracy—we on this side of the House are not in favour of that—but we want the checks and balances that we think will be reflected by such a memorandum to be brought out a bit more securely. I look forward to our discussions and, if the Minister cares to write on that as well, we would be very grateful. I think that this has been a very satisfactory debate, which has raised a lot of points. I am sure that we will want to study the record to make sure that we have got everything right, but in the interim I seek to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 30 withdrawn. Amendment 31 Moved by