Clause 71 - Police members of NCIS
Police Reform Bill [Lords]
10:15 am
Mr John Denham (Minister of State (Police, Courts and Drugs), Home Office; Southampton, Itchen, Labour)
There were points of substance in the contributions of the hon. Members for Surrey Heath, for Lewes and for Newark (Patrick Mercer), but we must get the balance right. I am sure that opening up the possibility of direct recruitment is appropriate. It is undoubtedly true that the system of secondment is of value to NCIS, and it is of particular value to the police forces because NCIS trains people, as the hon. Member for Newark said, to a specialist level of operation that they would not necessarily gain in their own police forces. That is of enormous benefit to all the forces that supply officers to NCIS.
Equally, NCIS and NCS must be able to do their own job. Training people for two or three years only for them to disappear when much time and energy has been invested in developing the skills that they need to have in NCIS frequently creates problems for that organisation. NCIS has never yet managed to reach its full complement of 1,300 officers. It is about 200 short.
The further difficulty is that it is not always easy to attract officers to the relatively short secondments that are on offer, nor it is easy to attract them to the longer secondments. Officers who intend to return to their force worry about what will happen to their career prospects while they are away. I assure the Committee that there is no intention of moving away from reliance on secondment as the primary method of staffing the organisations. Allowing some direct entry would enable NCIS and NCS to develop and skill up those that they have recruited directly, so that they are not always dependent on the existing body of skills.
It is most important to have permanent appointments in some senior and supervisory posts to enable the expertise in the organisation to develop. It will enable the organisations to achieve a better balance between secondment and direct employment. At present, direct employment is not possible. While I understand the arguments about not throwing out the baby with the bath water and ignoring the benefits of secondment, no justification has been made for not allowing the organisations direct recruitment.
As the hon. Member for Surrey Heath said, we have recognised in the White Paper the shortage of specialist investigative skills and we will be dealing with that problem through the police reform programme. Some uncontroversial clauses allow a wider range of people to take up investigative jobs within the police service. I do not think that the two
clauses would diminish the number of people with investigative skills in the police service. Indeed, on some occasions they would enable NCIS to train up people in situ rather than rely on secondments. If anything, the provisions are more likely to increase the number of people with investigative skills in the police service.