Schedule 2 - Amendments to the Police Act 1996
Police and Justice Bill
10:30 am
Hazel Blears (Minister of State (Policing, Security and Community Safety), Home Office; Salford, Labour)
The amendments seek to remove the flexible arrangements that the Bill will introduce in relation to police authorities’ responsibilities for setting local police objectives and issuing policing plans. The core functions of police authorities—to maintain an efficient and effective force and to hold the chief constable to account—will continue to be those set out in the Police Act 1996. However, I genuinely believe that second-order functions such as determining objectives, and issuing plans and reports should be set out in secondary legislation, because it will allow flexibility.
There have been too many cases in which it has been necessary to amend primary legislation because the world has changed. If we cover everything in primary legislation, we remove the flexibility that the use of regulations allows us. The hon. Gentleman has taken issue with some of the detail of the regulations, but it is right in principle to cover such matters in secondary legislation.
I have to reassure the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood), as I have before, that this is not part of a sinister plot to centralise power in the Home Office. Responsibility for determining local policing objectives and issuing a force-wide business plan will rightly remain with police authorities; we are not removing those functions. The provisions in schedule 2 simply recognise that modern policing is a rapidly changing sphere, and that we need the flexibility to amend legislation if we are to streamline the planning process rather than making it more bureaucratic.
In particular, the provisions will enable us to merge the existing annual policing plan and the three-year strategy plan to produce a single rolling three-year plan, which can be renewed every 12 months to take into account—as the hon. Gentleman said—the changing policing priorities that are apparent in different communities. Different communities will have different needs, so rolling three-year plans will be important.
The Bill also gives us an opportunity to take another look at whether it is necessary for police authorities to continue to produce old-style annual reports. Many of them do at the moment, and some are very good. However, I am not convinced that a thick annual report is the best means of getting information across to local communities. The local policing summaries that we are introducing will be much more user-friendly and direct and will give people information such as who their local officers are. The Bill will enable us to consider whether it is better to ask police authorities to continue to produce big annual reports every year or to enhance the local policing summaries. That is what I want to be able to do.