Committee (1st Day)

Part of Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill – in the House of Lords at 5:30 pm on 11 May 2011.

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Photo of The Bishop of Chichester The Bishop of Chichester Bishop 5:30, 11 May 2011

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Soley, for making the first point that I wanted to make about the danger of populism. You have only to look at the way in which reactions to particular high-profile cases have led to some very dangerous situations on our streets in recent years to recognise that although democratic accountability is highly important, populism can have a very nasty face as well.

The other point that I wanted to make, picking up something that the noble Lord said, was about the diversity of the communities that will be served by these commissioners. My own county of Sussex is a leafy, largely prosperous place, but with huge pockets of both rural and urban deprivation-precisely the places that are likely to feel themselves excluded because our community as a whole feels itself to be prosperous and settled. It seems extremely difficult to deliver policing, as it is to deliver the services that the church tries to offer, in a community as diverse as that. Great sensitivity is needed to the nature of the communities that are being served.

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Blair, for what he has just said. My main point relates to the protocol. I am afraid I have a rather more jaundiced view of the protocol than the noble Lord does. I fear that it may be worth more than the paper it is written on and could become precisely the basis on which the Act will operate if the Bill becomes an Act. I read with some terror the section headed "The Police and Crime Commissioner", which goes straight to the heart of the operational independence of chief constables. If that protocol were implemented as it is presently written and became the interpretative tool for the Bill, it is hard to see that it would not affect the operational independence of chief constables.

I speak on this as a complete fool; I am a simple bishop and I understand nothing about how these things work. However, I have a deep concern for our local communities, the confidence that they have in their police force, and the confidence they can have in that person in whom such trust is placed-the chief constable. I am undecided about this amendment in a way that I was not when the debate started. I can see many more sides to the issue than I could a couple of hours ago. However, the issue of operational independence, and how accountability is set in a properly democratic and neither populist nor party political framework, goes right to the heart of the constitutional dangers in the Bill as it stands at present.