§ Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. MacGregor.]
2.32 pm§ Mr. Alexander W. Lyon (York)I am grateful, Mr. Deputy Speaker, to Mr. Speaker for selecting this subject for debate. There seems to have been some confusion in the communication between us about the title of the debate. I had in mind the accountability of chief constables. The relationship with the Home Secretary is only part of that total accountability. The issue that arises has come to light in increasingly glaring form over the last couple of years.
There have been three items of concern. One has been the detentions in custody over the last 10 years and the increasing number of celebrated cases 893 during the last two years, which have been highlighted through active work by my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham, West (Mr. Meacher). Another has been the treatment of demonstrations and the use of the special patrol groups. The most notorious incident was the death of Blair Peach. A number of hon. Members have raised this issue on several occasions, and my lion. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw) has raised the general issue of the control of police authorities.
Perhaps the most worrying case of all, however, has been the examination by Operation Countryman of widespread allegations of corruption in the Metropolitan force and the very disturbing reports that corruption is never going to be brought to light because of concealment by existing members of the force, some of them in high positions in the Metropolitan force.
I do not want to go into the details of the various allegations. From my experiences, both before I was a Minister and after, I am clear that when there are a number of incidents in a particular force the reason is not usually malpractice by individual police officers at a low level. The cause is usually a lack of grip at the highest level, which is fed down through the ranks until individual officers believe that they can break the rules with impunity.
The debate has not yet fastened on the central weakness—lack of control over what our police do. In a real sense, not in a pejorative sense, the police are irresponsible in our society. The constitutional position is that a policeman is not a servant. He is accountable for his actions in the courts if he is brought before a court. Under the law a policeman is responsible for what he does. That is the constitutional position.
The practical position is that a member of a police force can be dismissed or punished by the chief officer and is therefore accountable to that chief officer. The real weakness is the accountability of the chief officers. In 1962, the Royal Commission on the police recommended that police officers should be made more accountable. Unfortunately the Police Act 1964 was drafted as a compromise between the Commission's clear recommendations and the resistance of chief officers to outside control.
894 The result is a blurred distinction between the responsibility of chief officers and the responsibility of police authorities. In London the police authority is the Home Secretary. Outside London the police authorities in 43 police areas are composed of two-thirds local authority representatives and one-third magistrates. Their role is determined by the Police Act. That Act gives them the power not only to receive an annual report by the chief officers but to call for a report about policing in their areas when they wish. That is subject to a proviso. The chief officer is not bound to comply with that request if the report would contain information which in the public interest ought not to be disclosed or is not needed for the discharge of the functions of the police authority. That could be a crippling provision. However, the Minister said in November that the provision to appeal to the Home Secretary following a refusal had been used only once. On that occasion, the request was confirmed.
That requirement has not limited the power under the Act to police authorities to call for reports, yet most police authorities find that chief officers interpret the Act restrictively. There has been increasing resentment from police authorities, particularly from Lancashire, about the conduct of chief officers and about their refusal to discuss policing activities in their areas.
We shall never solve the difficulties highlighted by the deaths in custody, the SPGs and Operation Countryman unless there is greater public disclosure of what happens in policing and more public debate about what should happen. There is a conflict between the exponents of reactive policing and community policing. The former means that the police arrive and look into an incident when it is reported. The development that has flown from that are the special patrol groups. Such groups come in from outside, without knowledge of the area, to investigate a particular incident. Often SPGs have done their work ham fistedly. That has resulted in complaints, sometimes in injury, and even, in one case, death.
The prime exponent of community policing is the Chief Constable of Devon and Cornwall, who believes that crime can be tackled only at the roots, where social conditions breed crime and only 895 with the full co-operation of the community. He has sought—I welcome his attempt—to change the nature of policing so that the whole community is involved.
These two styles of policing are epitomised in the personalities of the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, Mr. James Anderton, and the Chief Constable of Devon and Cornwall, Mr. J. C. Alderson. Their styles illustrate the dangers of what I have called the irresponsible chief officer.
Mr. Anderton has succumbed to the attractions of the media. That follows on the desire of Sir Robert Mark to make the police more accessible to the public. Mr. Anderton says the most outrageous things—including the suggestion that he will not obey the law—in order to get himself on television. However, he is a good officer, who had a high reputation in earlier posts. He has succumbed to the temptation that I have described because he believes himself to be above the control both of his police authority and, apparently, of the Home Secretary.
Mr. Alderton, who is regarded by liberal critics as a better model of a chief officer, also regards himself as irresponsible in the true sense of that word. He believes that he can create police committees to do the work of the social services department, the probation department and the housing department without overall control by local authority councillors. He complains when those councillorssay that they should be properly consulted about work that falls directly within their remit.
The reason why these two officers—I personalise them because they have become media personalities, who represent a much wider view amongst chief officers—take that view is that in general chief officers are starting to think that they are above the law. They must never be allowed to think that. They are not above the constraints that flow from democratic control and must never be allowed to think otherwise. If they are allowed to think that, their junior officers are also likely to think it.
Whatever Mr. Jardine says, a demand that the police should be under proper control does not constitute a witch hunt. If Blair Peach was killed by the unlawful use of force by a police officer—and in private Mr. Jardine accepts that he 896 was—it is a disgrace that that police officer is not brought to justice.
I can understand that the DPP cannot find the evidence if other officers are unwilling to give evidence. It is a disgrace that a man should be able to kill another person and get away with it because he is dressed in a police uniform. It is equally true when that happens in a police cell.
The fact that no individual can be accused because there is not sufficient evidence to indict a particular person does not mean that we should not be concerned about a system that leads to the kind of death that I have described. The police, Mr. Jardine and—most of all—chief officers must face up to the legitimate public demand that the police be placed under a system of control. First, that system should not allow them to get out of hand. If they do, it should ensure, that they are brought to book quickly while at the same time making plain to the public why that should be.
One of the difficulties is that over the years there has been an excessive use by the Home Office of referral to the Director of Public Prosecutions as the only means of checking a complaint of a criminal offence against a police officer. A complaint of a non-criminal offence goes to the Police Complaints Board. The most serious allegations are those of criminal offences, and they go to the DPP after they are investigated by some other police officer, who then gives a full and comprehensive report. My experience at the Home Office was that these reports were fair in most cases. The trouble is that the public never see them, and they do not know why the Director of Public Prosecutions decides not to proceed against an officer. The reason is that the DPP takes the view that before he can proceed he must have a more than 50 per cent. chance of winning the case. If he does not have that degree of evidence, he will refuse to proceed or give his reasons.
I believe that he should give a short statement of his reasons for not proceeding to prosecute. In the absence of such an explanation, the public are in the dark on the question why the DPP did not proceed. Inevitably this leads to complaints of a whitewash. Therefore, that control should be exercised more publicly.
The overall control rests with the police authorities and the Home Secretary. The 897 Home Secretary has responsibility within the police authorities through the Inspector of Constabulary. He could do a great deal more to bring home individual responsibility in individual forces. It is true that he keeps a close scrutiny and that he produces an annual report, but I wonder why there has been no statement about the succession of deaths from the Inspector of Constabulary.
In the end, we come back to my central thesis. The real responsibility lies with the police authorities, whether it is the Home Secretary or the 43 commitees. They have the power—and they must never be misled by the chief officer into believing that they do not have it—to control policing generally in their area. They have the power to call for reports, debate them and make them public if need be.
In the areas where there have been deaths in custody, they could have called for reports into the policing that led to that kind of conduct. This is an area of such central importance that it cannot be left to chief officers. There must be full public discussion about reports from the chief officer about the nature of policing in his area.
I ask the Minister to make it plain that the Home Secretary will insist on the widest possible public disclosure of all policing activities and an open public debate on the nature of police control.
§ The Minister of State, Home Office (Mr. Leon Brittan)I am grateful to the hon. Member for York (Mr. Lyon) for giving us this opportunity to discuss a matter which is so topical and important. As a result of misunderstanding, the hon. Member has raised matters which go well beyond those indicated on the Order Paper, but none the less I shall attempt to deal with what he has actually said rather than what he was expected to say.
This afternoon he has mentioned a number of topical events and occurrences which have received a great deal of prominence. Many of those deal with matters that are still being investigated by the proper procedures. The hon. Member has reached certain conclusions about these events and then reached the further conclusion that those events—tragic in some cases—would have been avoided or might have been avoided if in some 898 sense the police service had been more accountable. With great respect to the hon. Member, I must point out that there are a number of flaws in that line of argument.
As the hon. Gentleman well knows, with some of the specific events into which inquiries are still proceeding it is wholly premature to use the privilege provided by this House and jump to conclusions about what occurred in particular situations. Second, the hon. Gentleman does not make it clear, and has not in any sense shown, that a greater degree of accountability, whatever that might mean, would have prevented the events that he says occurred, if it can be shown that they did occur in the way he describes. That twin fallacy lies at the root of his speech.
When considering the question of accountability, I cannot help feeling that it was not by any manner of means clear whether the hon. Gentleman was suggesting that a different system should apply, whether he thought that the present system, if properly applied, was adequate but was not being properly applied, or whether he was merely saying that there ought to be more discussion about police matters.
On the question of public discussion, I do not believe that anybody who has scrutinised the press, watched television or been present in this House in recent weeks would feel that this subject has been left undiscussed, unregarded and unconsidered by those who are concerned about these matters.
There is a serious point to be considered as to the nature of the accountability and control of police forces. The relationship between chief constables, the Home Secretary and the police committees was not set up by some sort of enactment. It is not the product of a statute which came out of the blue. It is the result of historical development, and I should make clear at the outset, without making any implausible claims for perfection, that I believe that the process of historical growth has provided us with a constitutional framework which is basically sound.
Of course, things sometimes go wrong, but it does not follow that because they go wrong the basic structure is false, unless one is able to establish that some alternative structure would make it less likely for anything of that kind to 899 happen. If one is seriously asking what sort of accountability the police should have, one must accept that basically there is a limited number of options. One possibility is a national police force with a chain of command under the direct control of the Home Secretary in a way that is analogous to the Army, the Navy and the Royal Air Force. I do not believe that there is much support in the country for such an arrangement. Its disadvantages in terms of the concentration of power and increase of bureaucracy do not need underlining.
Another possibility is a series of forces with operational control under local bodies of some sort—whether the local authority, the police committee or whatever. Again, I do not believe that there is any serious suggestion that that is preferable and less likely to lead to the occasional malpractice or tragedy of the kind that has been to the fore.
The third possibility, and the only other sensible way of approaching the matter, is to have some kind of balance, with operational independence for the chief officers and accountability to the Home Secretary and to the local police committees in differing ways and to a differing extent. Unless one is prepared to select a national police force with a chain of command or a series of local police forces under local total control, it is only by having a complex set of checks and balances of power and accountability that one can operate a police service. I happen to believe that with all these difficulties the present basic structure is much more appropriate than any alternative.
I give just one example. The hon. Member referred to the position of the local police committee and its power to call for reports. He fairly analysed the exercise of that power, showing that the exercise of the power given by the statute to refuse such a report had been attempted on only one occasion, and then unsuccessfully. That suggests to me the opposite to the conclusion at which the hon. Gentleman was hinting but which he did not actually come out with—namely, that the control, if properly exercised, was inadequate.
I think that it is accepted, as the Royal Commission accepted, that chief con- 900 stables should be independent in enforcing the criminal law, while at the same time there should be adequate accountability without compromising that impartiality. The Commission's report was generally accepted by the Government of the day. The Police Act 1964 sets out the responsibilities of the three distinct elements on which, as endorsed by the Royal Commission, our policing arrangements are based.
The Act places each force under the direction and control of its chief constable. In that way, his operational independence is clearly set out. Secondly, the chief constable is appointed and his force maintained by his policy authority. The responsibility for maintaining an adequate and efficient force rests with that authority, and it is to his authority that the chief constable is generally accountable.
As the hon. Member showed, in his fair description of attempts to question the chief constable by local authorities, that degree of control and check on the operations of the chief constable is by no means illusory or a shell. It is a reality.
By referring to the differing views of different policies of two named chief constables operating in different areas and with different problems, one is proving only that there is freedom of speech even for chief constables. That is not something that one would wish to end.
I put that in a slightly mocking tone, but there is a reality there, in the sense that, before the tradition began of chief constables speaking out as vociferously and actively as they now do, there were many complaints to the effect that the experience and knowledge of those working in the police service was not available to this House, for example, in considering matters in which their experience was supremely relevant.
Therefore, I do not believe that the fact that chief constables may have different professional views and policies and the fact that they may be able to speak and set up committees to try to help in the community without a veto from local authorities prove that in any real sense they are less accountable than they should be.
Then there is the role of the Home Secretary, which we are supposed to be debating.
§ Mr. Alexander W. LyonThe Minister has used those words three times, yet I told his PPS yesterday the true nature of this debate and he was fully briefed before he came into the Chamber. I hope that he will not raise that matter a fourth time.
§ Mr. BrittanI am making no complaint. I am trying to deal with the points raised by the hon. Gentleman, and I think that I have dealt with a large number of them.
I have emphasised that chief constables are operationally independent. The Home Secretary cannot give them instructions on whether or not to institute proceedings in any particular case; nor can he give instructions about the deployment of their officers; nor may a police authority issue such instructions. That is the key element in our policing arrangements.
The reason is sound. It has always been true that the police must act in the name and with the support of the community as a whole. The impartiality and independence of chief constables in their force is therefore vital. I give one illustration that I hope will appeal to the hon. Gentleman. Nowhere is it more obvious than in the task of maintaining public order. For example, picketing and public demonstrations are inevitably the expression of strong feelings.
If the police are to maintain public order, they must be seen to be there on behalf of the community to preserve order and not to enforce the views of one side or the other, not even if the Government of the day or the local authority in the area is involved in the dispute. This is vividly and evidently true 902 in the case of public order. It is also true of other operational tasks. How it is dealt with must be a matter for the chief constable.
As the hon. Gentleman said, the chief constables are accountable to the law. That is an important restraint. If anything goes wrong, they and those working under them are accountable. The whole Countryman operation is a process of detailed investigation to see whether there is anything that has gone wrong. I do not see how the operation of the DPP in considering evidence that is assembled and put to him for his professional consideration relates to the matter. It is a red herring.
It is in the Home Secretary's power to do a great deal in relation to the operation of the police. He can be responsible and involved to a great extent in the appointment of chief constables and their dismissal. He can require police authorities to exercise that power. He can call for a report on any matter connected with the policing of an area. He can call a local inquiry on any matter that he believes to be relevant. Above all, he has the power of the purse. He has the express power to withhold the whole or part of any of the money that is required, and normally available, if he is not satisfied that the area is effectively policed.
§ The Question having been proposed after half-past Two o'clock and the debate having continued for half an hour, Mr. DEPUTY SPEAKER adjourned the House without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.
§ Adjourned at two minutes past Three o'clock.