Clause 71 - Police members of NCIS
Police Reform Bill [Lords]
10:15 am
Mr Patrick Mercer (Newark, Conservative)
The Minister will be aware of the work that the Select Committee on Defence has been doing recently on homeland defence. A point that has been raised, not just by police forces but by ambulance and other emergency services, is that the level of threat to this country that has developed—or that has been underlined—since the events of 11 September last year has made it clear that all types of specialist skills are woefully lacking in some of the ordinary forces, not just police forces, across the country.
One of the clearest statements came first from the Ministry of Defence police and then from several different chief officers of constabularies, who discussed
the intelligence effort necessary to combat the higher level of threat that we now face. They mentioned how heavily they depended on the cross-fertilisation of expertise from organisations such as NCIS and the NCS and how powerfully useful officers were, at quite modest levels, who had had a two or three-year tour with those organisations. They went into a hothouse of intelligence matters, understood intelligence at a level higher than just that of the petty criminal on the streets, honed their skills and were allowed to return to the forces to the huge aiding and abetting of the ordinary workaday intelligence out in the shires. I shall not labour the point further. However, the forces made the point clearly that the cross-fertilisation is important and that clauses 71 and 72 would probably work to its detriment.