Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2011 Lords Chamber

For all those reasons, I support the noble Baroness, Lady Harris, in raising considerable concerns about this proposal.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew]

My Lords, I hope that I will be forgiven the discourtesy of absence from some parts of this debate because of a commitment in a Committee Room upstairs. I join others in welcoming my noble friend the new Minister. I learnt the other day—indeed, I am bound to say that she told me herself—that she is an extremely good cook. In this Bill, she has as ingredients the meat of police commissioners, the wine of the licensing provisions and the hot spice of universal jurisdiction, but it may be difficult for her to produce a dish that is up to her usual culinary standard at the end of our discussions. Having been a Member in the other place with her, I can confirm her reputation for being doughty, determined and, above all, dangerously disarming.

I pay tribute to my noble friend Lady Harris for the way in which she moved the amendment. She was very persuasive, but I am bound to say that, with great respect, I disagree with her profoundly. I would like to remind the House of one or two things that have happened. Before the coalition, the Liberal Democrats were solidly in favour of democratic accountability for the police service through elected police authorities, to which we will return later today. The Conservative Party, the larger partner in the coalition, has been consistently in favour of the election of police commissioners. Both parts of the coalition have been solidly in favour of democratic accountability for the police through some kind of elected person or body through which the police service for a police area should be accountable. The amendments proposed by my noble friend Lady Harris would destroy that determination. I do not think that we have reached the point in coalition politics at which we should distance ourselves from the strongly held views of both parties because we are wedded to some old practices, which, in my view, do not stand the tests of scrutiny that have been relied upon by my noble friend. Indeed, what we should be discussing, if we are to discuss this at all, is the form of democratic accountability rather than whether there should be democratic accountability. These amendments would wreck the first Part of the Bill completely, for which reason I am opposed to them.

On police authorities, we will have a debate later about Welsh police authorities. With great respect to my very distinguished colleagues in this House who will speak in favour of basically no change in Welsh police authorities, I do not think that they could be more wrong, and I do not think that anybody could be more wrong than to say that what we have at present is a democratically accountable system that does the business really well. If one were just to stray into Wales for a moment and walk down the streets of Llanfair Caereinion, Llanfyllin or Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant and ask people on those streets to name a single member of the police authority for their police area, unless one had happened to bump into a member or one of his or her nearest or dearest, they probably would not have a clue that a police authority existed, let alone who those members were.

In a professional capacity as a barrister, I have worked for and with police authorities and I have seen them in operation—I have seen very good and I have seen much less good. As a Member of the other place for a constituency in rural Powys, I had dealings with the police force and the police authority for those 14 years, and I can say very clearly that if anybody was concerned about the police they did not go to the police authority or any member of it, because they had no idea where to go. By and large, they went to their local Member of Parliament, who then processed the issue or complaint for them.

If one looks at some police authorities—it would be invidious to name names or issues, particularly as some of my experience is shrouded in professional confidentiality—one can be far from confident that every issue has been dealt with in a way that the public would regard as properly accountable and transparent. Indeed, there has been an issue involving a chief officer this week which has been well publicised and which raises many issues about the performance of that police authority and the relationship between that police officer and the public that he supposedly serves as the paragon of policing.

This amendment is going far too far. We should carry out the examination of police authorities that the Bill predicates and should not waver one bit from a form of democratic accountability, whatever that form be.

[Baroness O'Loan]

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.

Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Wednesday 27th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carlile of Berriew]

My Lords, I hope that my noble friends on the Front Bench will welcome a brief interlude from the almost unremitting attrition in relation to Part 1, for I, too, want to speak, and mainly about the universal jurisdiction. I was one of a group of colleagues in your Lordships’ House, with most of the others coming from the Cross Benches, who were involved in activity in the last Parliament supporting the provisions that were incorporated into Section 70 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009. That provision extended the universal jurisdiction for war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. Unfortunately, since the enactment of that provision, we have seen little evidence that the new provision is working at all. My view is that it is part of good administration—which appears in the Long Title to this Bill—that Ministers should bear the responsibility for the universal jurisdiction and that police forces should bear the responsibility for showing that it is working. By now, prosecutions should be commencing as a result of the enactment of Section 70, but they are not. The criticism that the United Kingdom remains a safe haven for war criminals, I am afraid, still sticks.

With this in mind, I, along with others, will in due course table an amendment aimed to ensure reporting and accountability of the work in relation to the universal jurisdiction. Of course, the universal jurisdiction, as the noble Baroness has just said, is connected to Clause 154. For the reasons she has given, I welcome that clause and cannot understand any logical argument for the view that private prosecutions could be brought at a lower standard than public prosecutions. The Director of Public Prosecutions has shown himself to be reliable in dealing with private prosecutions when he has taken them over and recently the higher courts have supported his view that private prosecutions should be subject to the same dual code test that the CPS applies to public prosecutions. I shall strongly oppose any attempt to remove Clause 154 from the Bill.

Now back to the attrition, I am afraid. I congratulate the Government on their decision to create direct democratic accountability for the supervision of police services. It is long overdue. However, I do not congratulate them on the way they have set about it. It has long been Liberal Democrat policy—and I regret very much that this was not in the coalition agreement—that we should have elected police authorities. I see no problem with elected police authorities—they would be reasonably substantial in size, they could elect and remove their own chair, and it is likely that their own chair would be from diverse sections of the community from time to time. I see this as a much more accountable and reliable process than that set out in the Bill. It would avoid—or at least be more likely to avoid—maverick leadership, eccentricity, crass bad judgment and conflict with the relevant chief officer.

I have worked professionally with police authorities in some pretty critical cases and have seen them to be responsible and careful and to listen to advice but, quite rightly, not always to take it. However, it has been their collective approach that has been the benchmark of their success. I therefore intend—I hope with others—to table an amendment for elected police authorities.

Finally, I want to regret the waste of an opportunity. In the time when I was the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, I watched joint working—which is absolutely inevitable in counterterrorism work—between police authorities. The Wales Extremism and Counter Terrorism Unit, which is a unified body involving the four police forces currently in existence in Wales, is an example. In all difficult areas of policing, 43 territorial police forces can no longer do the really serious work on their own. It is my regret that the Government have not taken the long-overdue opportunity to reform the police service in England and Wales; to reduce the number of police forces from 43 to something like a quarter or a third of that number; to reduce the number of chief officers and police authorities, whether elected or not; and to reflect, by that means, the essence—the needs—of modern policing.

Wales is one example I have much experience of and I cannot believe that it would not be better policed by one police force, or at the most, two, instead of four. I cannot believe that north-west England would not be better policed by the combination of Cheshire, Greater Manchester and the Merseyside police. I deeply regret that the Government and their predecessor—for their predecessor when Charles Clarke was Home Secretary started to approach this territory—have not taken on this agenda, which is really what we need to produce a police force that will survive the next couple of decades.

Sex Offenders Register

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Wednesday 16th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

Perhaps I could point out to the noble Lord that this piece of legislation, which the courts have decided is not entirely proportionate, was passed under our predecessors, the Labour Government. This Government, in the light of the Supreme Court’s judgment, are now putting in place a mechanism that we believe will restore proportionality that evidently the courts thought was lacking.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew]

I apologise to my noble friend for interrupting her earlier. Given the real and perceived importance of this issue, will my noble friend help the House by explaining why the Government feel that it is best to deal with this by a remedial order, which, although there would be consultation, is not capable of any form of amendment? We have until the end of the year to deal with this and the matter could better, one might suggest, be dealt with by addition to primary legislation currently going through Parliament, which would be open to amendment by Members of both Houses. Furthermore, does my noble friend agree that the one thing the Government cannot and would not wish to do is to exclude the potential for judicial review, where a decision has been taken that is perverse or otherwise Wednesbury unreasonable?

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

My Lords, ideally, the police will be aware of the fact that their judgments in any given instance could be subject to judicial review. The law has not changed in that respect. As for the previous question about the alternative legislative route, I am not a lawyer and I hesitate to get terribly far into this terrain. I was advised that this was regarded—as there is no obvious legal vehicle in which to incorporate this particular bit of legislation—as related to our obligations under the Human Rights Act, and that it was a speedy and sensible way of bringing us into compliance.