Clause 3 - Police authorities as best value authorities
Police and Justice Bill
12:45 pm
Martin Horwood (Shadow Minister, Home Affairs; Cheltenham, Liberal Democrat)
These are probing amendments to try to discover what on earth is the Government’s purpose in clause 3, which does some rather strange things. It is probably common ground that we want good and constantly improving performance and business excellence in police authorities, although judging by what the Minister said at our last sitting, best value may not always be the best way to achieve it. In practice, best value has proved rather bureaucratic and tiresome for public sector organisations.
The amendment would remove paragraph (d), which itself removes from a police authority’s best value obligations
“section 5 (best value reviews);
section 6 (best value performance plans);
sections 7 to 9 (audit of best value performance plans)”,
and sections 13(5) and 15(2) of the Local Government Act 1999, which I consulted to see what would be left. The answer is precious little, except for the right to collect information and to be inspected. It is not so much throwing out the baby with the bathwater, as throwing out the baby and being left with the bathwater. The obligations and the bureaucracy of the best value framework remain, but the meat of best value does not.
That raises the question whether the best value framework is really needed in this context and it is why we suggest removing the proposal and replacing it with a general principle of improving performance. There are plenty of other models of performance improvement that a police authority might choose to adopt: for example, one of its members may have experience of ISO 9000, Investors in People or the European Foundation for Quality Management business excellence model, any of which might be appropriate, cheaper and more effective than what is left of the best value process in the clause. That might be an alternative way to proceed and it is the purpose of the amendment.