Police and Crime Commissioners

Lord Paddick Excerpts

Monday 29th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, for this debate and I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Bach—there are always exceptions to the rule. As the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, said, there are other examples of police and crime commissioners doing very good work, but that is not to say that alternatives might not be more successful.

The Liberal Democrats are in favour of greater police accountability but, equally, we believe in holding the Home Office and police and crime commissioners to account for their part in providing a policing service. We have seen recent, justified criticism of the Home Office’s failure to provide leadership in a policing context. For example, as the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, said, in response to the knife crime epidemic the Government’s Serious Violence Strategy is a strategy only in Mintzberg’s post-event rationalisation sense of the word. It is simply a narrative of all the many, various, piecemeal, unco-ordinated efforts of various agencies and pockets of government funding with no clear direction from the Home Office.

We have seen justified criticism of the Home Office over central government funding for the police service, as a couple of noble Lords have mentioned. This is not just about cuts approaching 25% in real terms but about the shifting of responsibility towards local taxation, resulting in those areas most in need of policing services being worst hit by such a shift in responsibility.

We have seen justified criticism of a lack of Home Office involvement in the development and selection of the most senior police officers, as the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, just mentioned. Gone is the previous requirement that no chief constable can be appointed without experience as an assistant chief constable or deputy in another force area. Gone is the Home Office assessment of candidates’ suitability and the grading of candidates for promotion. Instead, chief constables can appoint their own senior officers and police and crime commissioners select their own chief constables. As the noble Lord said, they are almost always the incumbent deputy. Competition for chief officer posts in forces has all but evaporated against the belief that the incumbent will always be selected, having developed a relationship with his or her police and crime commissioner.

As the noble Lords, Lord Lexden, Lord Bach and Lord Campbell-Savours, mentioned, we saw in the Wiltshire constabulary’s investigation of Sir Edward Heath the failure of the police and crime commissioner to launch an investigation into his own chief constable, and then the Home Office failing to hold either the chief constable or the police and crime commissioner to account.

Under the old tripartite system of Home Office, police authority and chief constable, the Home Secretary could and did override the police authority. As police and crime commissioners are allegedly “democratically elected”, they can be held to account only every four years by the electorate. I say “allegedly” for a number of reasons. In places such as Wiltshire there is an in-built Conservative Party majority. An Electoral Commission report in 2016 found that 72% of the electorate knew not very much or nothing at all about police and crime commissioners. With PCC elections costing £75 million a go, plus one by-election so far, and on the last count a 27% turnout, with voters clearly voting along party lines in most places, in what way is this democratic? Even the candidates were overwhelmingly critical of the Government’s arrangements for communicating the views of candidates to voters, with 96% of police and crime commissioners who responded to the Electoral Commission survey saying that they were dissatisfied.

I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Wasserman, in his portrayal of the police service before police and crime commissioners and, in the light of the facts that I have just mentioned, his rather rose-tinted view of the empowerment of local people as a result of police and crime commissioners being established. The noble Lord, Lord Bach, also talked about there being little local accountability before police and crime commissioners. That is not my experience or the experience of the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe. The Metropolitan Police Authority, for example, was open, transparent and very effective in holding the Metropolitan Police Commissioner to account, setting strategic direction and priorities locally.

We are left with a situation where the Home Office has abdicated responsibility for policing, looking to blame others for crime, disorder and a lack of funding, and placing responsibility on police and crime commissioners, who are dubiously elected on small turnouts based on little or no information, largely along traditional party lines. As the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, said, placing too much power in the hands of one individual—in this case, the police and crime commissioner—creates the potential for other accountability issues. In one force we have seen inappropriate behaviour towards women being alleged against a chief constable. Vulnerable victims came forward and a case was put to the police and crime commissioner, including details of the victims, and then the PCC passed on all those details to the accused chief constable. Although that chief constable was eventually forced to resign, the police and crime commissioner is still in place.

On the other side of the coin, rather than protecting the chief constable whom the PCC appointed and has a close working relationship with, there have been instances of clashes of personality or politics between incumbent police chiefs and police and crime commissioners. The most high-profile example was Boris Johnson when Mayor of London and de facto police and crime commissioner “losing confidence” in the then Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Ian Blair, now the noble Lord, Lord Blair of Boughton, forcing him to resign.

Arguably less likely with incumbent police and crime commissioners selecting their chief constable “in their own image”, there is a danger that, with only one person responsible for hiring and firing, personality clashes can result in good chief officers being forced out of office, especially in the increasingly likely event that the PCC is replaced but the chief constable, appointed by the PCC’s predecessor, remains.

Liberal Democrats want police boards, with powers similar to those of PCCs and composed primarily of local authority members, to replace police and crime commissioners. With them representing a broad cross-section of constituencies and political parties, minority groups and ideas, and having responsibility for the overall funding and provision of local services, not just the police precept and policing, most, if not all, of the problems with the existing system of police and crime commissioners could be overcome. We would support a review.