Schedule 1 - The Serious Organised Crime Agency
Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill
10:00 am
Mr David Heath (Shadow Minister (Home Affairs), Home Affairs; Somerton and Frome, Liberal Democrat)
I have some sympathy with the position outlined by the hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield. We are dealing with the SOCA board. I find the opening wording of schedule 1 a little confusing, saying that ''SOCA shall consist of'' rather than ''the board of SOCA shall consist of'', because that may be open to manifold confusion further down the line. I invite the Minister to look at that. There may, of course, be a technical reason for that wording, because of the corporate nature of SOCA.
Almost every Home Secretary I can remember has wanted to subvert the tripartite arrangement as far as he feels he can get away with it, and to instil a degree of making police services accountable—I shall use the term ''police services'', whatever the Minister says—to the Home Secretary of the day. That is testimony to how times have changed. I was chair of a police authority when we had reforms back in the 1990s. The then Home Secretary, the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard), wanted to appoint all the members of all the police authorities for the whole of England and Wales. He felt it entirely appropriate that the Home Secretary should have control of the membership of the so-called independent police authorities. Happily, there was a degree of resistance to that, and we ended up with the most Byzantine structure ever formulated for the appointment of police authorities, which involved at least some outside involvement in the working of police authorities. Times have changed. The Conservatives now put forward a proposal that would wrest some control from the Home Secretary, while still accepting the principle that the new body is a national one in which it is quite proper for the Home Secretary to have an involvement. I support them in that contention.