Policing and Crime Bill
12:00 pm
Shami Chakrabarti: This is not in any sense a concern about having senior police officers involved in this kind of process. It is a concern about the nature of the creature called ACPO. There is no clear purpose for ACPO. It is not a creature of statute. It is a private company. It is exempt from freedom of information legislation. It has no clear defined role in our constitution. In practice, it seems to have developed over the years to be a range of different animals. Sometimes it appears to be a campaigning pressure group in very sensitive, sometimes party political, debates about new police powers. Sometimes it seems to be something akin to a public body that issues guidance—for example, on very sensitive police power matters. Sometimes it seems more like a staff association for chief police officers, who obviously need to communicate with each other and share expertise and experience.
There is a need for all those functions, but we think there is a real concern about ACPO being all those things. In particular, it has become one of the most powerful policing organisations in the land and it is not a creature of statute. Parliament has never taken the opportunity properly to define its role. It is possible that its roles cannot all live in one body and it is time to grip the issue and decide that it perhaps is a number of different bodies—some that are properly regulated by statute and others that are a matter for the police themselves to organise as a staff association or pressure group. It is dangerous, therefore, to give it further power without taking the opportunity to define what it is and what its role should be in modern policing.