Schedule 1 - The Serious Organised Crime Agency
Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill
2:45 pm
Mr David Heath (Shadow Minister (Home Affairs), Home Affairs; Somerton and Frome, Liberal Democrat)
I, too, welcome you to the Chair, Mr. O'Brien.
This is an important group of amendments, because we need greater clarity about the budget of the new organisation. To an extent, we have been at this point before in the genesis of the predecessor organisations. NCIS was set up on the basis of recharging from the constabularies and police authorities—an arrangement that did not work well, as we ended up with some unfortunate spats between the various police authorities and forces and NCIS about the appropriate level of funding for what was described as a service to them rather than a national agency. Clearly, that is not the case with the establishment of SOCA, but there are still some imponderables about exactly where the funding will come from and the extent to which it will be a top slice from the police grant. Is there a view in the Home Office about whether there are any savings in the operational requirements of police authorities as a result of the establishment of SOCA? Will that be factored in to the distribution of police grant at a later stage?
We are also not clear—this is tangential to the comments of the hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr. Mitchell)—about the extent to which SOCA will have to buy in services either from other parts of the Home Office or from outside. Will it have to buy in IT requirements in order to make them compatible with those of police forces around the country? The privatisation of the Forensic Science Service was announced today—something about which many of us have serious questions. We do not know what the implications of that privatisation will be for SOCA, but clearly there is a high-level requirement for forensic science support to enable SOCA to do its job properly. The privatisation proposals may have an impact on that, and we must consider those implications seriously.
The hon. Gentleman makes another, crucial, point about the prospect of compartmentalisation and earmarking of resources within the SOCA budget to establish priorities laid down by the Home Secretary. That is not an idle threat; we know that it will happen. Yesterday's very illuminating interview with Sir Stephen Lander revealed the extraordinary ''policing by focus group'' that is being foisted on the organisation even before its creation, so that priorities
''will be partly based upon on the number of column inches newspapers give to different types of organised criminality''.
When the Daily Mail gets into one of its periodic spates of excitement about a particular aspect of crime, SOCA will be expected to apply its resources there. Presumably, if the Home Secretary of the day has anything to do with it, that is how the Home Office budget will be allocated. The interview reports Sir Stephen as saying, helpfully:
''The brainboxes in the Home Office have been putting together a sort of harm model.
The model basically articulates the harm that is caused to the UK under a number of headings''—
some of which he lists—
''and tries to put a cost [on them].
It also brings into play judgements about the degree of public concern and they have a proxy for this, which is the amount of column inches in the press. Which is not quite right''.
I agree; it is not quite right. I hope that the Home Office will think again about setting its priorities in that way. The proposed amendments would at least correct that potential mischief by ensuring that there would be a single allocation. That would be based, one would hope, on a costed approach to the annual plan derived from the work of SOCA itself, which would make proposals. That approach would have the further advantage of making the budgetary arrangements more accessible to audit.
That brings me to the last point on which I should like the Minister to comment in the context of the amendments. What will the process of audit be for SOCA? I am very keen to ensure that the Home Affairs Committee has the greatest possible access to the budgetary requirements set out by the organisation and to information about the degree to which those are met. Presumably, SOCA, because it is not a police force, as we have been told repeatedly, will not fall under the remit of the Audit Commission, but will come within the remit of the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee. If those bodies are to do a satisfactory job, they must be able to assess what the organisation itself assesses it needs to meet the demands put on it by the policing plan, which will in part derive from the Home Secretary's priorities. We are told that those priorities are to be led by an obscure voting system—a sort of ''Big Brother'' that gives people the police they want.
The question of funding is full of complexities that are not clear at the moment. The Minister must, during the passage of the Bill, make much clearer how SOCA is to be funded, the level at which it will be funded, and where the funding will come from.