Police: Officer Numbers

Debate between Lord Davies of Stamford and Baroness Neville-Jones

Tuesday 1st February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness for mentioning the Government’s initiative on crime mapping, which was announced today and which in our view will enable people in their own localities to be much better informed than hitherto of the real state of crime in their localities and to have a direct relationship therefore with the police. It will be helpful to them that the police commissioners will have direct accountability to the localities and not upwards to the Home Secretary.

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

Is it not quite fatuous to keep on repeating that there is no relationship between numbers of police officers and good policing? Obviously effective policing depends on efficient deployment of the police and it should be the responsibility of any Government at all times to make sure that deployment is optimised. However, once you have the optimised deployment, surely more police automatically means better policing?

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

I am sure that the noble Lord will be able to enlighten us as to what the optimised level is. I did not say there was no link; I said there was no simple link. It is very clear that there is no simple link. Numbers of police officers began to decline before this Government came into office and the level of crime continues to decline. The level of crime began to decline in 1995, well before our predecessors came into office, and when police numbers were stable. There is no simple link between these two things.

Identity Documents Bill

Debate between Lord Davies of Stamford and Baroness Neville-Jones

Tuesday 21st December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

I will respond to the noble Lord’s point. The answer is no. The card does not have value or efficacy because it is no longer attached to a database which would enable it to be a valid document that could prove your identity. It is simply a piece of paper, because there is nothing behind it.

I am not ignoring the fact that the cardholder spent £30 on a card for which there is no further use. During debates here and in the other place opponents of the Bill indicated that the decision to refuse to issue refunds will affect the poorest or the less well off members of society. However, there is no socioeconomic breakdown of cardholders, so neither noble Lords opposite nor the Identity and Passport Service can indicate the economic status of cardholders. I cannot imagine the circumstances in which a person struggling to make ends meet would think that buying an ID card was a necessity. If the ID card scheme was intended to allow travel to Europe or to provide proof of identity to get into pubs and clubs, then, frankly, it is doubtful that we should consider this form of purchase to satisfy the criterion of core household spending.

There is no provision in the Identity Cards Act, which the Benches opposite passed in 2006, for applicants short of cash or on a limited income—

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

My Lords—

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

My Lords, does this not go to the heart of parliamentary government as we know it and understand it in this country? The Minister gave a clear and solemn undertaking on a previous occasion that she would seek the law officers’ advice on a specific point. How can it possibly be “inappropriate”, to use her term, for her now to tell the House whether or not she fulfilled that solemn commitment? It is quite clear to me that if the Minister gives a solemn commitment and then refuses to say even whether that commitment has been fulfilled, and the House does nothing about it and simply goes away, we have abdicated our responsibilities as a Parliament.

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

My Lords, I am just not in a position to advise what information has been provided by the law officers, but I can confirm that we are satisfied that the provisions of the Bill are compatible with the ECHR. I have an answer on the substance. Could we perhaps turn to the question of financial privilege?

Identity Documents Bill

Debate between Lord Davies of Stamford and Baroness Neville-Jones

Wednesday 17th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

I am not sure that I can confirm that. I will seek to do so before Third Reading.

We should not exaggerate the significance of all this. Much has been made of the elderly and the very young. We have no reliable demographic information at all on who the purchasers were. We know that 3,000 of the 15,000 were given free to airside workers for a particular purpose.

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

The noble Baroness is getting into the complexities and numbers of this. Is this not a matter of simple principle, irrespective of numbers? If the noble Baroness buys a good or a service and the merchant or other supplier who sells that to her fails to deliver it, she would feel cheated. If that merchant got away with it, she would feel that that undermined the good faith on which the economy and society depend. Is it not a fact that people have in good faith bought a service for 10 years, and after a matter of months, that service is being unilaterally withdrawn? Are people who have done that not entitled to feel thoroughly cheated? Is this not a disgraceful example for a Government of this country to give?

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

The point I was answering before noble Lords intervened was the inference somehow that we are inflicting great hardship on cardholders. We do not believe this to be the case.

We do not believe that the statutory basis of the issue of ID cards creates a contract or anything akin to a contract in relations between the Secretary of State and the cardholder. Remedies that would be available in the courts if the contract were governed by the law of contract or consumer legislation—which I think is the point raised by the noble Lord—is not available for identity cards.

One or two noble Lords have raised the issue of compromise and of whether it would be a good idea to have one. Could we not, for instance, set the cost of this against the cost of the next passport or, indeed, use the lifetime for which the present card was available? There are associated problems. I do not want to detain the House extensively on this, but the fact of the matter is that the two databases—that is to say, the identity register and the passport database—are not the same. They contain different information, issued for different purposes; their legislative frameworks for what you pay are also different. We cannot therefore simply transfer the one across from the other.

That construction of two differently governed databases with different information on them was the construction of the legislation put through by our predecessors. Unfortunately, in addition to that we are going to destroy the database. We would otherwise have the continuing cost of maintaining it. That is why it cannot be regarded as a valid document for its lifetime; there is nothing behind it against which anybody needing to check your identity would validly be able so to do. There is a problem in that it simply is not a useful document any longer.