Hazel Blears (Minister of State (Policing, Security and Community Safety), Home Office; Salford, Labour)

I thank all members of the Committee for the generally very good-tempered proceedings that we have enjoyed today and in our previous sittings. I particularly thank you, Mr. Pope, and Mr. Conway for the excellent way in which you have presided over our proceedings. We have all benefited from your clear direction and your assistance in ensuring that we have made expeditious progress. We had one or two moments when there were unusual declarations of interest that were challenging for all of us, and we are grateful for your guidance.

I also thank all of the officials involved with the Bill, the Clerks to the Committee and everybody who has assisted us in our considerations. I also genuinely thank the Opposition spokesmen from both parties. We have managed to make good progress and we have agreed on the vast majority of the Bill’s provisions. There are one or two points that remain between us, and I am sure that we will have a chance to discuss them further on Report.

I also thank all my hon. Friends in the Committee for their forbearance, their constant and regular attendance and their rapt attention, which I have felt on my back throughout. As ever, I am grateful for their knowledge and insight into the issues with which we have dealt.

I particularly thank our Whip and the Opposition Whip, who have ensured that we have made extremely good progress and been able to finish a little before our programmed time. That is always the mark of a good and efficient Committee.

Nick Herbert (Shadow Minister (Police Reform), Home Affairs; Arundel & South Downs, Conservative)

I add my thanks to you, Mr. Pope, and to Mr. Conway for chairing the proceedings, to the Clerks for their help in tabling our amendments and to the Hansard writers, to whom I have given particular grief in having to supply various quotations to the Doorkeepers. I understand that it is traditional also to thank the police. That would seem appropriate, given the nature of the Bill.

It has been a great pleasure and a great experience for me to be on the Opposition Front Bench. It has been a particular pleasure to see the Minister in action—in full flight. I do not know whether she saw the report by the Daily Mail’s parliamentary correspondent, who was fairly unkind to us both, but his description of her as one of the Government’s springiest welterweights was surely not that unkind. My hon. Friends have observed in Committee that she is tipped for higher office; we can see why and wish her all the best in the long-overdue reshuffle. We hope that she will not have to stand by the phone too anxiously in the Easter recess.

We have learned many new things during our deliberations. We have learned about penetration testers—perhaps we learned a little too much about them. We have learned about “V for Vendetta” and the murky habits of my hon. Friend the Member for The Wrekin. We have learned about the new county of Brokenshire—given the Government’s intentions with regard to our counties and our county police forces, it is entirely appropriate that there should be a county of Brokenshire, as that is what is going to happen—and we have also learned about the Government’s extraordinary new doctrine of localism, under which any measure, however centralising, is described as a means to empower individuals and communities.

We have discussed measures that are decentralising in one respect that I can identify: the community call for action, as discussed under clause 14. However, the Minister confirmed that they were powers of last resort, not a mainstream way of doing business. By comparison, we have seen new powers for the Home Secretary to shape and intervene in police authorities,   the standardisation of powers of community support officers and the creation of the national policing improvement agency. There are also other measures about which we have concerns—the extension of summary justice and the combined inspectorate and its implications for the independence of prison inspections in particular. We tabled amendments to try to improve the Bill to make it clear that the Home Secretary should intervene in police authorities only as a last resort and to give police constables more discretion over powers for community support officers. The amendments were either clarifications or intended to give more discretion to chief constables. I regret that the Minister did not accept one of them and, to be frank, has been pretty dismissive of our concerns.

I remind the Committee that last Friday—

Greg Pope (Hyndburn, Labour)

Order. It is not the point of this part of the proceedings to rehearse the debates already held on Second Reading and in Committee. There will be plenty of opportunity to do that on Report and Third Reading.

Nick Herbert (Shadow Minister (Police Reform), Home Affairs; Arundel & South Downs, Conservative)

Thank you, Mr. Pope. I read lots of concluding speeches from other Committees, and I understood it was usual for the Opposition to remind the Committee of those aspects of the Bill about which they were concerned and to which they would return. We will need to return to various matters, because a great deal of concern has been expressed outside the House, not least by the professional bodies involved—police officers and the Association of Chief Police Officers—about the extent of the provisions and the way they centralise power and reduce the discretion of the various bodies concerned. I look forward to that debate, but in the meantime I wish every Committee member a very good Easter.

Lynne Featherstone (Shadow Minister, Home Affairs; Hornsey & Wood Green, Liberal Democrat)

I put on the record my thanks to you, Mr. Pope, and to Mr. Conway. You have chaired our proceedings very smoothly, despite the ups and downs of our disagreements. I also thank the Clerks, Hansard, all Committee members, the Minister and the official Opposition spokesperson for their contributions to our informative debates. I have learned much about computer hacking, as has the Minister—it could be a case of the blind leading the blind, but I am pleased that in that one instance no stony ground was in evidence. I wish the Minister well on her promotion, whenever that is. [Interruption.] Well, we hear rumours. I have also learned a lot about the exact powers of CPSOs. I think that the Minister gave a masterclass in them.

I thank everyone on the Committee for making this a learning experience for me.

Greg Pope (Hyndburn, Labour)

I am grateful for hon. Members’ kind comments and for the Committee’s tolerance and good humour on my first outing as Chairman of a Standing Committee. I am especially grateful to Mr. Pound and Mr. Fabricant for bogus points of order.