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Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendments 53, 54, 55 and 56. I see that Amendment 55, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, is in this group. I do not quite know what it means and I am not sure that it is meant to be in this group, but the noble Baroness will no doubt enlighten us later. The purpose of the amendment in my name is to extend the responsibility of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime to cover the City of London Police. I put this forward because I was sure that it would be a minor and non-controversial change to the Bill—something that would attract universal approbation and something that the Government would have done had they thought of it at the time. We are all familiar with the City of London Police force. Of course, it does an excellent and much-respected job. It has an annual budget of around £61 million, which is what the Metropolitan Police gets through in a week. The City of London Police force covers a population of 8,000 people, which is rather smaller than most local government wards in Greater London. There is of course a slight commuter issue in that some 300,000 people come into the area each day. The area covers just over one square mile. It has 800-plus police officers, 85 special constables, 48 PCSOs, a number of police staff and three police stations. It is the smallest territorial police force in England and Wales. It is something of an anomaly. The argument is that because of the economic significance of the City of London, it has historically had a separate police force. That argument has prevailed every single time in the past 180 years that people have considered whether there should be different policing arrangements in London, but I hope that it is something that we can consider afresh today. I looked at the figures from the City of London Police annual report. Apparently, the average monthly number of crimes recorded in the City of London Police district is 505. The Metropolitan Police force clocks that up in around six hours. That gives noble Lords some idea of the different scales. The noble Lord, Lord Condon, who is not in his place, is apocryphally said to have been asked on one occasion, ““Commissioner, what would you do if you were given responsibility for the City of London Police?””. I have never asked him whether he actually said this, but he is alleged to have replied, ““I would put a sergeant in charge””. I say that not to be pejorative about the City of London Police, but to highlight what a strange anomaly it is to have within Greater London this tiny enclave catering for a tiny population with the full panoply of staff. It has its own commissioner—a commissioner in the policing of the metropolis sense rather than in terms of an elected police and crime commissioner. The Bill is silent on whether there will be any changes in governance of the force. It will continue to be governed by the Corporation of London Police Committee with no changes whatever to reflect the general drift of government policy in this area, whether amended or not by your Lordships' House or Parliament. I hope that the Minister, in responding, will be able to enlighten us as to why the Corporation of London is exempt from the general provisions of the Bill. If one believes in the principle of seeing direct and visible accountability, what could be better than to say that the entire police service within Greater London should be accountable to the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime? Surely that is the way to do it. That is the way to make it explicit and demonstrate that the entire police service in London is the responsibility of the mayor's office. In an earlier debate in Committee, we talked about the problem of the confusion of members of the public. The City of London Police force goes to great lengths to ensure that its officers are distinguishable. The little squares on the cap band are red rather than black and the insignia and helmet are different, so it should be immediately apparent to members of the public that they are now being dealt with by the City of London Police as opposed to the Metropolitan Police. However, I rather suspect that this is a distinction—even though enormous efforts are made to demonstrate it—that will be lost on most Londoners. The point in putting forward this amendment is to say, for the sake of completeness, that Greater London contains the square mile of the City of London. Its 8,000 residents—who vote for the Mayor of London—should have the right, through that process, to see their police service being governed through the same arrangements as the rest of London, the mayor’s Office of Policing and Crime as envisaged in this Bill. I am sure that the five people who were subjected to firearms offences in 2009-10, or the four instances of trade description offences that the force dealt with, or the two offences relating to obscene publications or the two offences of dangerous driving—and this is an area where 300,000 cars come in each day—would all be better served it if it was seen as part of a Greater London police force, accountable to the Mayor of London’s Office of Policing and Crime. I beg to move.