Schedule 1 - Powers of the Secretary of State in relation to NCIS and NCS
Police Reform Bill [Lords]
5:15 pm
Mr James Paice (South East Cambridgeshire, Conservative)
The hon. Gentleman is falling into the trap of looking at the generality, but the job of our Committee is to look at the detail of what is in the Bill.
We have no problem with the Home Secretary being accountable and having some means of exercising that accountability to Parliament. We have all sat in Parliament and seen successive Home Secretaries—and Ministers in every other
Department—being challenged over the efficiency of the delivery of the services for which they accept some responsibility. However, as I have stated, the Home Secretary has considerable powers, which were given to the holder of that office by the last Conservative Government in the 1996 Act, and some of which have not yet been used or tried. Therefore, it is my contention, not that they should not have any powers at all, but that the powers that are being proposed in this new clause are unnecessary and excessive, and that that is especially the case with regard to the bits of those powers that I am referring to at present.
To answer the hon. Gentleman's question, I shall be urging my hon. Friends to continue to oppose this new clause, because this element of direction is wrong. If the Minister had come forward with a new clause that said, ''If there is an inspectorate report that says that there is a weakness in a force or a part of a force, the Home Secretary should be able to ask the chief officer of that force to come forward with an action plan to improve it,'' that would have been fine. However, he takes powers in the clause to direct not just that a remedial plan should be produced, but every word that should be in it. It is like a teacher telling a child whose homework is wrong that he must do it again and again until he gets it right. That is the only interpretation that can be given to subsection (4) of the proposed new section 41A. They are excessive powers.
I turn briefly to the safeguards that the Minister has added and which were before the other place when they debated the matter. The safeguards as they stand are welcome. I would not contest that they are step forward, but they do not go anything like far enough to over-ride that fundamental concern that the Secretary of State is taking powers to go over the head of a police authority and direct a chief officer. Nothing in those safeguards does away with that direction. I therefore remain of the view that this is a clause too far in terms of powers for the Home Secretary. It should be resisted, not just in Committee but at all other times. Not only do I intend to seek to divide the Committee on the new clause, but I hope that we shall debate it when it returns to the Floor of the House, as it is a matter of major significance to the Bill.