Clause 9 - General functions of the Commission
Police Reform Bill [Lords]
2:45 pm
Mr Bob Ainsworth (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Home Office; Coventry North East, Labour)
Let me avoid unnecessary delay. I meant the 43 police forces covered by the IPCC under the Bill. Let us sidestep that issue and get on with the meat of the amendment.
For the commission to have functions with regard to NCIS and the NCS, the Secretary of State must make regulations to bring them into the new scheme. With regard to other forces, the commission can enter into an agreement with the approval of the Secretary of State.
NCIS and the NCS are covered by the current system through regulations, and they will be brought
into the new system in the same way. Most other non-Home Office forces—''non-43 forces,'' if that suits the hon. Gentleman—have also decided to come into the current system. In clauses 23 and 24, we have provided for the Government also to bring these organisations into the new system. It is appropriate to provide for these bodies to be brought into the new system, and within the remit of the commission, by regulations or agreement, and for there to be a certain degree of flexibility, because there will be real differences between them and other police forces. For example, each of these forces are maintained by a different authority, and each authority has a slightly different role and terminology with regard to the officers concerned. Moreover, the forces have different areas of jurisdiction, so we need to study the specific wording of the regulations and tailor it to reflect the specialisation of some of these forces and their differences from other police forces—hence the importance of the word ''broadly''. They cannot just be straightforwardly absorbed into the mainstream complaints system. The provisions allow for the new system to be extended to those forces, while also taking their differences into account.
It is not the intention to introduce something that widely differs from that which applies to others but, as I have said, there are different structures and terminologies, and as this is a statutory provision, that flexibility is needed in order to tailor these provisions to the particular forces in question. That is why we are going down this road: we have no agenda to do something radically different from that which will apply to the normal police force.