Lords push back on Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

13 May 2011 by Rod McLaren

The House of Lords has pushed back on the govt’s Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill by voting for a muscular Lib Dem-led amendment that effectively breaks the Bill. Lord Harris explains what happened in the vote:

The House of Lords has just voted by 188 to 176 – after more than three and a half hours of debate – to delete the first part of the first clause of the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill. The words deleted are: “There is to be a police and crime commissioner for each police area listed in Schedule 1 to the Police Act 1996 (police areas outside London).”

And this is from Lord Harris’s speech during the debate:

However, what distinguishes this proposal is that we are talking about the direct election of an individual who will be given tremendous responsibilities, but without a suitable governance structure to prevent a situation in which the individual might make capricious judgments or seek to trespass on the operational independence that chief constables hold so dear. The Bill would give an individual tremendous authority, but without the governance structures, checks and balances that would be necessary given the importance of the role.

(Now, the Home Office’s draft protocol outlines accountability mechanisms that should ensure operational independence – “The operational independence of the police service, and the decisions made by its operational leadership remain reserved to the Office of Chief Constable and that Office alone” it says on page 1. But the difficulty of maintaining that independence is perhaps illustrated by yesterday’s news that the Home Office appears to have asked the Met to review the Madeleine McCann case.)

No doubt the Bill will go back and forth a bit because the govt remains very keen to put elected commissioners in place.

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