Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Lord Wasserman Excerpts

Wednesday 27th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wasserman]

My Lords, I, too, begin by declaring an interest. I have been involved with policing for almost the whole of my working life. I cannot claim to have been at the sharp end of policing, unlike some noble Lords who spoke earlier. I have never made an arrest, I have never tackled an angry mob and I have never even walked the beat. My policing experience was gained in much safer conditions. For nearly 27 years I was a member of the Home Office, where I had responsibilities for policing policy and for the provision of national policing support services, including information technology and forensic science. After leaving the Home Office in 1995, I continued my involvement with the police in the United States, where I spent 10 years working on the other side of policing as an adviser to chiefs of police in New York, Philadelphia and a number of other American cities.

This experience has left me with the greatest respect for the professional police officer who puts his or her life on the line each day to keep us safe and free. It has also given me a tremendous sense of admiration for the management and leadership skills of our chief police officers. We are lucky in this country to have at the top of our police service a group of men and women of outstanding ability, unquestioned integrity, a high level of professionalism and a deep commitment to public service. As I shall argue, this Bill recognises the quality of our chief officers and gives them the freedom that they require to exploit their full potential as leaders and managers. I believe also that it keeps us safe from the sort of corruption dangers which other countries have faced and which some noble Lords have mentioned as one of the problems inherent in this Bill.

A number of noble Lords have argued that one of the major flaws of the Bill is that it is an attempt to copy models of policing accountability from the United States. I can assure your Lordships that that is not the case. There is no American model for the governance of local police forces. American policing is as diverse as America itself. The only thing that American police departments have in common is that they are all paid for locally and they are managed locally. The national Government takes almost no interest in local policing. For this reason, the governance arrangements for these forces, and there are some 18,000 of them—some noble Lords have mentioned 17,000 while others have quoted 19,000; no one knows because some of them are one-man bands where a single officer fulfils every role from chief constable to the constable on the beat—are all home-grown; that is, they reflect the governance of the local communities that they serve.

In New York, for example, the police chief is appointed by and reports to the mayor. In other cities, including Miami, the police chief reports to the city manager. In Los Angeles, the mayor appoints the police chief, but the chief reports to a five-person board of police commissioners, who, in turn, are appointed by the mayor. As Americans are fond of saying, “You pays your money, you takes your choice”. I cannot swear that there is not a single police force somewhere in America with governance arrangements that resemble what is proposed in this Bill, but if there is I do not know about it. Even if there were, that does not affect the fact that, as my noble friend Lord Howard of Lympne told us what seems like many hours ago, the proposal for directly elected PCCs set out in this Bill was developed to meet a particularly British policing need: the need to re-establish close links between local people and their police force.

I use the word “re-establish” advisedly when referring to these links, because our police forces grew out of our local communities and at one time could not have been closer to them. I have no doubt that many noble Lords will remember the pre-amalgamation days when there were nearly 200 local police forces and when chief constables were familiar local figures. Over the years, forces have grown larger and more dependent on central support services such as the police national computer, the police national network and other information and communications systems. They have had to give more attention to such things as serious and organised crime, illegal immigration, internet crime and terrorism, all of which can be tackled effectively only through the strong national and even international collaboration that had to be put in place.

All this has led to a steady growth in the influence of central government on local forces. Chief constables have been drawn inexorably to the Home Office for leadership, direction and funding. Inevitably, this has meant that they have had far less time to spend in their local communities. In fact, some of our best chief constables spend several days a week in London at meetings with Home Office officials and others developing new “policies and initiatives”. The police authorities set up in the 1960s to be responsible for these forces have proved too weak to overcome these pressures from Whitehall. They have had to accept the demands set centrally and sit by and watch their chief constables tick the boxes, complete the report cards and strive to meet the national targets that often bear no relationship to the crime and anti-social behaviour problems that they see all around them.

This Bill stops that trend dead in its tracks. It returns responsibility for local policing to local people. It gives responsibility for identifying and prioritising local policing needs to a local individual who understands the needs of the community and is very much part of it. Most important of all, it makes this individual directly accountable to the community, through the ballot box, for meeting those needs. Many noble Lords have said that PPCs will not know anything about policing. In my view, that is a very good thing. Their job is to identify the policing needs of their communities, not to deliver the policing services required to meet those needs. That is the job of the professional, the chief constable. In parentheses, I can say from first-hand experience that those Ministers who come into office thinking that they know all about the subject for which they now find themselves responsible are not always the most successful.

This Bill does all this without in any way affecting the complex structure of national support and crime-fighting arrangements which have been put in place over the past 50 years and which are rightly admired around the world. At the same time, the Bill significantly strengthens the management role of chief constables. It gives them the freedom to use their professional skills to manage their forces as they judge best. It treats them like proper chief executives of major organisations, which is exactly what they are. It gives them, for the first time, the power to appoint their own top management teams rather than having to make do with a team imposed by their police authorities. It also provides for them to be corporations sole, which means that the force’s civilian staff can be employed by them rather than by the police authority.

Most important, this Bill formalises a process that began when this Government took office a year ago. It frees chief constables from the bureaucratic accountability of the Home Office. It relieves them of the constant flow of guidance, advice, report cards, targets and ring-fenced grants issued by successive Ministers with the encouragement of enthusiastic officials like me, who themselves have had no direct experience of policing and whose knowledge of the local circumstances in which all this guidance and advice have to be applied is at best second-hand. In short, this Bill recognises that local policing needs can be identified only at the local level and that it is only the local chief constable who can decide how best to deliver the policing required to meet those needs. I commend it to the House in the strongest possible terms.