Clause 1 - National Policing Plan
Police Reform Bill [Lords]
9:45 am
Ms Annette Brooke (Mid Dorset and North Poole, Liberal Democrat)
I shall primarily address amendments Nos. 132 and 133. I broadly welcome the annual national policing plan. However, we are discussing a strategic document and such a document should be coherent and comprehensive, as my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Norman Baker) mentioned. I fail to see why we do not include the three other bodies that we suggested.
I took the opportunity to read about the NCS. It is strange to have separate plans that are not dovetailed into the national plan. For example, the squad is staffed by 1,450 officers who are seconded from police forces throughout England and it has 36 locations throughout the country. In terms of accountability, there are 10 elected members of local police authorities, who are nominated by the Association of Police Authorities, on the NCS authority. Such facts are among the reasons why one must look at the whole.
If one reads the section of the NCS website entitled ''Added value'', one sees a vision of how everything must been seen under one umbrella at some stage. The squad is described as
''a national police agency under single command with overall responsibility for direction and control and with sufficient mobile resources to undertake large scale protracted operations''.
The squad's own technical support is
''capable of deploying sensitive and sophisticated technical equipment and assisting other police forces as appropriate''.
Again, links are there all the time. The squad supports
''other police forces as appropriate in their investigations of serious crime.''
In other words, there is continuous interlocking, which is also true of NCIS. One of its strategic aims is
''The provision of services to enhance the co-ordination and development of criminal intelligence to combat serious and organised crime.''
The details show that the NCS and NCIS are not stand-alone organisations because there is a single objective to which we are all signing up: reducing crime and tackling it effectively. I ask the Minister to consider seriously the amendment.
With regard to amendment No. 133, I share the worries of my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes about the term ''plans and advice''. Perhaps the word ''plans'' has a specific connotation because we can always consider the word ''advice'' in terms of additional guidance. However, when the words are put together, the phrase is open-ended about what could
be incorporated under it. That is my concern, and if the Minister agreed to something more precise, we would know where we stood and what the phrase asked for.
With regard to amendment No. 76, we have a problem of timing throughout the process. If we have separate plans for all the different bodies, they will be published at different times of the year. Equally, the timing must be right on financial constraints so that it makes some sense of the annual policing plan. The plans must go together, which is what links the three amendments.