Title
Police and Justice Bill
5:45 pm
Nick Herbert (Shadow Minister (Police Reform), Home Affairs; Arundel and 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—