Clause 4 - Standard powers and duties of community support officers
Police and Justice Bill
4:00 pm
Nick Herbert (Shadow Minister (Police Reform), Home Affairs; Arundel and South Downs, Conservative)
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. We seek clarification from the Minister from the standpoint that there is general support among Opposition Members for PCSOs. As I said in a debate earlier this year on the police grant, PCSOs have proved useful in reassuring the public and so on. However, there are studies, including the Home Office’s recent study, that suggest that more empirical evidence is needed to judge the effectiveness of PCSOs. One study found that it was not possible to show that they had played any role in reducing antisocial behaviour. Nevertheless, the public surveys are clear that an additional uniformed presence on the streets is valued.
The question is what the right balance is in maintaining PCSOs in a support role for the police and therefore not giving them so many powers that they almost become fully warranted officers themselves, but ensuring that they are sufficiently able to deal with the problems of antisocial behaviour in particular, for which they were deployed. It is difficult in a Committee such as this to reach a judgment on precisely which powers should be exercised by a PCSO. I would much rather that those decisions, within a framework that we set out, were taken, as far as possible, by chief police officers.
My amendment proposes that the Secretary of State, in exercising the power that he will be given by the Bill to designate standard powers for community support officers, should have regard to the desirability of leaving the discretion for chief police officers. That does not mean that the Secretary of State would be unable to designate standard powers for any of the offences proposed. It simply means that the balance should be shifted more towards discretion for chief officers, which ACPO and the APA want.
There is a question about the extent to which PCSOs should be able to use force at all. It is interesting that the range of offences for which PCSOs are used varies substantially among police forces. It differs from none at all in some cases to more than 40 in others. I wonder whether the Committee should test the proposition that the variation in PCSO powers confuses the public. After all, members of the public generally live in one place. Is it strictly necessary to standardise most powers, taking that discretion away from chief officers, simply to address the supposition that the public do not know what powers PCSOs have? I wonder whether the local variation matters as much as the Home Office’s consultation document suggests.
I hope that the Minister responds to my amendment in the spirit in which I tabled it. I did not want to undermine the process of standardisation that the Government propose, but to suggest that the balance should be shifted more in favour of chief officers, although in a non-prescriptive way—in a way that still allows the Government the discretion as to which powers will be exercised by all PCSOs.