New clause 9 - Amalgamation of police districts
Police (Northern Ireland) Bill [Lords]
4:30 pm
Mr David Wilshire (Spelthorne, Conservative)
I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
Let us see whether I can win one. Again, this is something very different. Section 20 of the 2000 Act relates to police districts. Section 21 states:
''Each district, other than Belfast, shall be a police district.''
That seems hopelessly inefficient in theory. A Chief Constable, who is appointed to run the police service efficiently, as the Minister argued—let us leave aside whether that should include economy—may, as circumstances change, time goes by and techniques alter, decide for entirely operational reasons that the districts of Northern Ireland are too small for his management organisational structure.
One thing about Northern Ireland that always strikes me is that we have considered the boundaries of local government units in GB, but Northern Ireland
has managed to escape that process, and there are probably rather too many districts by GB standards. I know that that point is controversial, but we may well have to return to it. I have always argued that there is an alternative to devolved arrangements, which is to have a two-tier structure, involving a county council and a district council, that we would recognise in rural England.
The Chief Constable has no choice whatever but to have one police district for one local government district. It seems silly to be so restrictive. The new clause would merely give the Chief Constable, for operational reasons, the power to merge police districts if he thought that that was in the best interests of effective and efficient policing in Northern Ireland.