Clause 1 - National Policing Improvement Agency
Police and Justice Bill
9:15 am
Hazel Blears (Minister of State (Policing, Security and Community Safety), Home Office; Salford, Labour)
That is a good question, and I welcome the opportunity to clarify the situation. HMIC undertakes broad inspections of the whole service. It makes annual baseline reports, so it looks at performance across the piece. Inevitably, that is done over a longer time than the work of the Police Standards Unit. Her Majesty’s inspectorate also does thematic inspections—into call handling and other specific issues, for example—in order to give us a snapshot of the performance of different forces. The Police Standards Unit can act like a radar, so that when forces start to drift in their performance it can target them immediately. At the moment, it is engaged with some basic command units, not necessarily the whole force. There could be a basic command unit in which things are not going well, and in some of our city BCUs that can account for a huge proportion of crime across the force. The Police Standards Unit is quick to act and has the performance monitoring information, so if there are problems in that BCU, it can get in.
The Police Standards Unit has done that consensually. It has not been a heavy-handed organisation, although people originally had fears that it might be and that it would trample over the service. In fact, we are probably at the point now where, although the Police Standards Unit might not be welcomed, once it is engaged, most forces feel that it is very useful. There is a difference, but it is important that there should be close working relationships between HMIC, the Police Standards Unit and the national policing improvement agency, when it is up and running.
I said to the Home Affairs Committee that I wanted to rationalise, to use the jargon, the policing landscape. The fact that the NPIA will take over the functions of Centrex and the Police Information Technology Organisation, which are significant and large organisations, should be generally welcome.