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Standing Committee E
Tuesday 11 March 2003
(Morning)
[Mr. Joe Benton in the Chair]
8.55 am
The Chairman: Before we begin, I must inform the Committee that, due to a printing error, new clauses 8 and 9 are on page 1319 of the amendment paper. They should have appeared on page 1315 after new clause 7, and I shall call them then.
Mr. David Wilshire (Spelthorne): On a point of order, Mr. Benton. Are you saying that new clauses 8 and 9 are now grouped? I am anxious to know what will be required of me in a moment.
The Chairman: No. I merely draw attention to the fact that they are on the wrong page. They are not grouped. Clause 19
Fixed-term appointments
Mr. Wilshire: I beg to move amendment No. 117, in
clause 19, page 12, line 28, leave out 'three' and insert 'five'.
The Chairman: With this it will be convenient to discuss the following amendments:
No. 118, in
clause 19, page 12, leave out lines 33 to 35.
No. 119, in
clause 19, page 12, leave out lines 36 and 37.
Mr. Wilshire: I believe that I have got my mind around this.
I welcome back several Members, and I imagine that this sitting will last slightly longer than one or two previous ones. I am remarkably relieved that there were no entries in the weekend press about who said what about being got out of bed of a morning. I am grateful to have escaped that. Those who were not here should read the Official Report of the previous sitting, which is enlightening.
On a more serious note, I am grateful for the Government's assurance that they will not use the Committee to introduce anything that is not immediately relevant to the Bill. True to their word, they have made no attempt to do so, and it would be churlish not to say that I appreciate that. That is what they said and that is what has happened, but there are discussions about a possible two days of consideration on Report. I wonder why we need two days on Report to discuss matters that we have not covered in Committee.
I am full of alarm at what is being contemplated, and I repeat that the Bill should not be used at any stage to address new issues that may have arisen from recent discussions. It is entirely proper that further changes to the Police Service of Northern Ireland should be made under new legislation, so that both Houses of Parliament can give them the fullest possible
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scrutiny. We should not find that little bits have been tagged on to a Bill that has almost completed its progress through the House.
Mr. Paul Goodman (Wycombe): Has the Minister reassured my hon. Friend on that?
Mr. Wilshire: I have not discussed the matter with the Minister, so to say that I have not been reassured would imply that I might have been misled. Suffice it to say that I had a preliminary chat through the usual channels. I did not discuss the matter with the Minister one way or the other, and I hope that that puts the record straight. I genuinely do not know what might happen. I have merely noticed that there is the possibility of two days' consideration on Report.
I know the Bill fairly well by now, and I have my doubts about whether those two days would be used to allow us to examine its technicalities. If the Government are contemplating what I fear they are contemplating, the official Opposition oppose that way of doing things. That is not to say that we oppose or support what the Government might want to do, because we do not know what they might want to do. I merely observe that we object to that way of doing things.
The first group of amendments, particularly amendment No. 117, is difficult to speak to without having a wider debate on the clause. To ask questions about the details, we need to know what fixed-term appointments the Chief Constable would be allowed to make, what they would involve, why they are necessary, what the terms would be and who would be involved—all stand part matters. They are relevant to the amendments, but I shall leave them as stand part issues until the Government have explained what they are trying to do.
Amendment No. 117 would change the term of the appointment from three years to five. From my experience of appointing people on fixed-term contracts in local government, I have a clear view that three years is too little to secure the quality of person and commitment required. Making an appointment for a three-year stint—the clause makes it clear that a constable cannot be involved—means that the person in question is unlikely to be starting out on a career. That person will already have a job and be asked to give it up for three years.
Someone above the rank of constable is likely to have a pensionable job, a family and a mortgage, so is he likely to risk losing all that for the sake of a three-year appointment? Perhaps someone near to retirement age could do the job as an extension to a working life, but the clause excludes senior officers, so we are talking about middle management. We are unlikely to secure the quality of person necessary by offering a job for three years.
The amendment would extend the job to five years, although I can understand people wondering whether five years is any different from three. I admit to proposing five years to tease out for how long the job will be available. I suspect that going much beyond five or six years would take the job to near permanency, and the value of having someone who is going to leave at a specified point becomes less
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relevant if the period is to extend to the distant future. I acknowledge that it is possible to go too far, but the amendment is designed to tease out the Government's intentions and to establish whether only three years is justified and whether a fixed-term contract should apply in this example.
Amendment No. 118 allows me to get on one of my hobby-horses. Proposed new section 36A(4) states:
''The Secretary of State may by order make such modifications as he considers necessary or expedient to any provision of the 1998 Act or this Act in its application to persons appointed under subsection (1).''
What is the point of drafting and debating legislation when we end up with a provision stating that what the law says, what was said in debates or what assurances were given do not matter because the Secretary of State can tear it all up, ignore it and do exactly as he pleases? That amounts to government not through the democratic process of Parliament, but by diktat.
If it is necessary to have a provision on fixed-term appointments that sets out how long they can be and that the person appointed cannot be a constable or a senior officer and cannot do this, that or the other, we should debate it and agree to the proposal through the democratic process. As I have said in other Standing Committees, I object to the sweeping powers of the jackboot dictatorship of a Secretary of State who can do exactly as he pleases despite what Parliament has decided and pay scant regard to any assurances given by the Government of the day to Parliament.
I object to such provisions in any legislation, no matter who is in government. Parliament should be supreme. If the Secretary of State finds that the Government have made a mistake in their provisions and the arrangements they have made, let him come back to Parliament and say, ''I am sorry. We got it wrong. Please may we have permission to change this?'' He should not disregard everything that Parliament has said and the Government should not do as they please, which is what the amendment would prevent.
Amendment No. 119 is consequential on amendment No. 118. If we say that the Secretary of State cannot do those jackboot, dictatorship things, there is no point in having a clause that says that he must consult others before he does them. The amendment provides that the Secretary of State would have to tell the board and the Police Association what he intends to do before he tramples all over them with his jackboots, although there will be no need for that if parliamentary democracy prevails.
We should give serious thought to amendment No. 117 when we have heard what the Minister has to say. Amendments Nos. 118 and 119 would uphold the status of Parliament against ever-encroaching Government dictatorship.
The Minister of State, Northern Ireland Office (Jane Kennedy): What a pleasure it is to return to the calm and peace of a Standing Committee under your chairmanship, Mr. Benton, after the turmoil and
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excitement of last Monday and Tuesday, and, to judge from comments made earlier, Thursday, too.
The hon. Member for Spelthorne (Mr. Wilshire) asked about our intentions on Report. The discussions are still ongoing, and I do not know whether there has been a final agreement through the usual channels. It would be dishonest to duck the issue altogether, so I flag it up that we may consider new matters on Report. I am happy to discuss that in greater detail with the hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for Solihull (Mr. Taylor) at a more private moment.
As the hon. Member for Spelthorne said, the amendments would extend from three years to five the fixed-term period available to the Chief Constable to make appointments to the Police Service of Northern Ireland. It might help if I set the proposal in context. The British and Irish Governments signed an intergovernmental agreement on policing co-operation in April 2002 in which we committed ourselves, among other things, to introducing the necessary administrative and legislative measures to enable secondments from one police service to the other for periods not exceeding three years.
The three-year period was agreed by the Chief Constable of the PSNI and the chief commissioner of the Garda Síochana as the appropriate maximum for an officer to be seconded to the other police service. The hon. Member for Spelthorne made a strong point in arguing persuasively that, in his experience, which I accept, three years does not get the best out of a secondee in these circumstances. However, in the context that we are discussing the proposal, we should remember that secondees will return to their parent police service at the end of their secondment and retain the terms and conditions of their parent service during that period. In the discussions on whether three years is appropriate, it became clear that secondments from GB services to the PSNI that may already take place under the Police Act 1996 are generally of a similar, three-year duration or shorter. They do not tend to be longer.
Given that the three-year period specified in clause 19 will give effect to the intergovernmental commitment made by the Government on the professional advice of the Chief Constable, it would not be appropriate to extend the period to five years. I therefore invite the hon. Member for Spelthorne not to press his amendment.
The hon. Gentleman, in proposing amendments Nos. 118 and 119, railed against the Government's provisions, as we did in opposition. Taken together, the amendments would remove the order-making power in proposed new section 36A(4). It should be remembered that, before making an order under the powers, the Secretary of State would be required to consult the Policing Board and the Police Association.
I emphasise that we expect to make little recourse to the provision and that we are likely to make only a few modest modifications, whether wearing jackboots or not. However, there are issues still to be resolved, which may require modifications to the relevant legislation. For example, we might want to allow Garda officers to be represented by members of their
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association—the Garda Representative Association—in any disciplinary hearings in which they are involved. That might require an amendment to the Police (Northern Ireland) Act 1998.
There may be other issues that have not yet come to light or that might arise if the provision is used to facilitate fixed-term secondments from other police services. We therefore believe that it is prudent to ensure that we can make the necessary provision to facilitate sensible arrangements. Clause 19 requires the Secretary of State to consult the board and the Police Association before making any such provisions, and I assure Members that we would take careful note of the results of such consultations. I therefore invite the hon. Gentleman to withdraw his amendment.
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