Clause 72
Crime and disorder strategies
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
The Minister for Crime, Policing and Fire ()
It is a pleasure, as always, to serve under your benevolent and
wise chairmanship, Dame Angela.
The clause confers a new power on Police and
Crime Commissioners and other local policing bodies
to make recommendations on the activity of community safety
partnerships and, in turn, places a duty on community safety
partnerships to consider those recommendations. Community safety
partnerships will be duty-bound to consider recommendations, but
they are not under a duty to implement them. However, if a
partnership does not implement the recommendations, it must share
its reasons for not doing so with the relevant local policing
body, most likely the PCC.
The feedback from part 2 of the police and crime
commissioner review, conducted by the Home Office in
2021, was that while the importance of local partnerships such as
CSPs was widely acknowledged, they were not being used as
effectively as they could be. Every public service should be
accountable to the public, and to the local communities they
serve. This provision will strengthen the accountability and
visibility of CSPs and improve how they work with the relevant
policing body to tackle crime, disorder and antisocial
behaviour.
No one single agency can address all drivers of crime and
antisocial behaviour, so partnership working between policing,
local authorities, local education providers, the prisons,
probation service, mental health trusts and so on are all very
important. This measure will take a step towards formalising more
that kind of collaboration.
I take the view, as I am sure other Members here do,
that Police and Crime
Commissioners as directly elected representatives
of the local people are particularly well placed to convene
groups. More often than not, they chair the local criminal
justice board. They have a lot of public visibility, convening
power and influence, and provide visible public local leadership.
The provision helps build on and strengthen the work that PCCs up
and down the country are doing together. I commend the clause to
the Committee.
(Nottingham North)
(Lab/Co-op)
It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Dame Angela.
I am a community safety partnership enthusiast. The partnerships,
which were established under the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, are
a crucial forum for leadership, partnership working around crime
prevention and reduction, and problem solving. I chaired my
partnership in Nottingham a decade or so ago, and saw at first
hand the impact of all those partners coming together, with
shared priorities and mutual accountability, in a partnership
built on trusted, close relationships and focused on solving
problems.
It is with a degree of sadness that I say that partnerships have
fallen in prominence and impact in recent years. One of the major
challenges these bodies have found, and one of the limiting
factors to the proposals in the Bill, is that austerity has
bitten the partners that formed CSPs, certainly as regards
funding, and partners have pulled away. In many cases, we have
lost the shared data and insight function, and some of the things
that brought partners to the table. Some of the extras done by
CSPs are seen as nice-to-haves, rather than crucial
functions.
As a result, there is a danger, certainly in some parts of the
country, of the partnerships becoming meetings, rather than
problem-solving bodies. Of course, whatever saving is made is
lost later, through the impact on the criminal justice process.
Certainly, if I ever get the chance to sit where the Minister
sits, I will seek to reallocate those bodies and use them to
their fullest extent, because we know the impact they can
have.
In the meantime, we have what the Government have offered us. I
probed the issue a little in our evidence session with
the Police and Crime
Commissioners and the real impact of this measure
is that we are setting the police and crime
commissioner or the relevant deputy Mayor as first among
equals, and giving them higher status in CSPs. They are clearly
to be given primacy. I thought about voting against this clause,
but I talked to PCCs and local authorities, and
they have fewer concerns than I do. The requirement is relatively
light, in the sense that the power is to make recommendations,
rather than to direct. That is probably right, so I have not
chosen to vote against.
I have some degree of enthusiasm for what the Minister said about
public transparency on decisions and recommendations. If
recommendations are rejected, at least there will be an
explanation why; that is probably enough. We should make it
clear—I hope that the Minister will—that circumstances in which
this power was necessary would generally reflect a failure. If a
PCC needs to direct their CSP, there is no doubt a bigger problem
in play.
What we want—I am sure that the Minister does as well—is a family
of organisations across sectors in a community. We are talking
about principally public sector organisations, but also bodies in
the community and voluntary sector and, to some degree, the
private sector, coming together on a basis of mutual trust to
identify the common challenges for crime prevention and community
safety in an area. They should have agreed priorities and plans
based on good-quality data, insight and understanding of what
each organisation is doing. Those are all parts of the puzzle.
They should work to common goals in the interests of their
community. That is easy to say, but it can be a difficult alchemy
to achieve sometimes. However, that is what makes change, and
that is what we need to see from CSPs. It will drive us away from
what we have sadly seen in recent years.
There has been a move to counting crimes, and a move away from
problem solving and problem-oriented policing. I have to say,
there is minimal value to having one partner able to trump the
rest. However, in cases of dysfunction, it will be a valuable
asset for a police and crime commissioner or a
deputy Mayor for policing to be able to say, “Hang on a minute.
We have the ultimate mandate in this area. We don’t think things
are working. This is how they ought to work.” Every time this
provision is used, it will be a sign of failure, rather than
success, but nevertheless it probably does add some value, so we
will not oppose it.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 72 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
