Clause 2 - Codes of practice for chief officers
Police Reform Bill [Lords]
11:00 am
Mr John Denham (Minister of State (Police, Courts and Drugs), Home Office; Southampton, Itchen, Labour)
There is not at present a sufficiently effective means of disseminating and embedding proven good practice across the police service and the provisions for strengthening those mechanisms are an important part of the Bill. There are many advantages, which have been rehearsed in other places, to having local police forces rather than a national police force, but one of the disadvantages of that can be that good practice that is developed and proven in one area may spread only slowly to other areas. We sometimes see that in the variations in the performance of police forces, albeit in similar areas, in different parts of the country.
The Bill seeks to introduce a framework for enabling and supporting all forces to come up to the standards of the best. That was set out in the White Paper on police reform, which was published before Christmas,
and was described as a three-tier structure for promoting best practice. Two of the tiers have a statutory basis, unlike the third—guidance from the Home Office, ACPO, or the Association of Police Authorities.
In practice, the amendment would cause everything other than the regulation-making powers to collapse into mere guidance. It became clear in the long discussions that the police reforming working group held last year with chief officers, the Police Superintendents Association and the Police Federation that a middle tier of guidance, setting out best practice, is necessary. It would be the duty of a chief constable to have regard to that guidance, while retaining his professional discretion on how it might be followed or applied—or not, in a particular case. It therefore constitutes the middle ground between later clauses of the Bill that specify certain types of equipment, for example, and areas of best practice.
As we said in the White Paper, we would use guidance selectively. Most people would be in no doubt that while we may not need now to drive best practice across the service, in addition to the consultation laid down in the Bill, it would have been useful in the past in terms of such issues as the management of occupational health and sickness in the police service—an area of huge variation throughout the service.