Clause 1
12:30 pm
Paul Holmes (Chesterfield, Liberal Democrat)
I agree with the Minister to a point. But, again, I cannot see how any decent councillor does not do that now. I certainly would not expect any of my councillors in my town not to do that when their constituents and ward voters brought them such an issue. The obstacle is that, having run around and brought it to the attention of this or that committee, the answer that comes out is that there is not enough money or police to do anything about it. We want to give police authorities some real accountability: they should be directly elected, respond to the community, raise the funds and put on extra policing if that is what the community wants, but the community must also realise that it has to pay for it. It is not something that just appears, like manna from heaven.
The final issue that I want to tackle is politicisation. The problem with one alternative—the directly elected single figure, the commissioner, the sheriff, the Robocop, however we wish to term it—is partly that I have never quite understood the desire for the single heroic figure who is right at the centre of everything. As we have seen with mayors in some parts of the country—I am thinking about the north rather than London at the moment—they can just ride roughshod over what the majority of the councillors in their area want and go off on their own personal tack. There is a big danger in that, and we have seen part of it here in London.
The Mayor of London played a very active public role in getting the police commissioner to resign and to be replaced by another. Is that quite the role that we want an elected politician to play individually? We see the Mayor of London going to the press after an MP is arrested and their office is searched—whatever the rights and wrongs of that—and almost immediately saying, “Well, I’ve looked into this and I don’t think that anything will come of it.” Is that what we want elected police commissioners of some kind to be doing all over the country?
If we look at the example in the US that that would be modelled on, we see that the average commissioner lasts about two years in the job before they are pushed out of office either as result of electoral fortune or political circumstance. In this country, chief constables sign a five-year contract and quite often serve at least two terms. Certainly, the previous chief constable of Derbyshire, who retired last year, did. Do we want commissioners who are politicised on the American model—directly elected individuals, subject to all sorts of highly political pressures, who demand action because they are up for re-election and get shoved in and out of office very quickly?