Standing Committee B
Tuesday 24 February 1998
(Afternoon)
[Mr. Barry Jones in the Chair]
Clause 3
Staff of the Police Authority
Question proposed, [this day] That the clause, as amended, start part of the Bill.
4.30 pm
Question again proposed.
The Minister of State, Northern Ireland Office (Mr. Adam Ingram): On a point of order, Mr. Jones. Before we start our work this afternoon, I would like to inform the Committee of some very sad news. This morning Kevin Murnaghan, the deputy chairman of the Independent Commission for Police Complaints, died after a period of illness. I am sure, Mr. Jones, that all members of the Committee will join me in sending our sympathy to Mr. Murnaghan's wife Nula and to his family.
Mr. Malcolm Moss (North-East Cambridgeshire): Further to that point of order, Mr. Jones, we add our condolences to those of the Minister and his team to Mr. Murnaghan's widow. The news of his tragic death did not come as a surprise but he will be sadly missed.
Before I was rudely interrupted at lunch time, I was going over some ground in our debate on the clause and some of the amendments that I had tabled on the two substantive subsections, which relate to the transfer of control of civilian staff to the Chief Constable, and subsection (6) which deals with civilian staff in the Police Authority. In the original drafting of the Bill, the Police Authority was supposed to discuss and reach an agreement with the Chief Constable about them. We noticed and commented upon the timely move by the Minister and the Government to table a new amendment that went a considerable way to allaying some of the fears expressed by the Police Authority. I was also dealing with some comments and quotations that the Minister had made in an earlier debate which carried a lot of force at the time.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Mr. Tony Worthington): Oh!
Mr. Moss: They did, because he gave the impression that they were direct quotes from the Police Authority. Those comments seemed fairly powerful and certainly undermined the thrust and logic of my argument, which was that the Police Authority was not happy with his proposals in clause 3. His quotes from the Police Authority appeared to contradict me and so what, he asked, was my argument?
It subsequently transpired that it was not quite as it seemed. I mention this now because if the conclusions reached by the minister and his advisors were on the basis of some misplaced or misdirected quotation from an individual or individuals in the Police Authority, but not from the Police Authority as a body, it throws a different light on his argument.
I should like to go over the chronology of events relating to the setting up of the fundamental review. This is fairly germane to the point at issue. The review was set up in June 1995 by the previous Secretary of State and it commenced under acting Deputy Chief Constable Flanagan, as he then was. The review team comprised a chief superintendent--[Interruption.] They are not listening. I am telling them the facts of the case.
Shona McIsaac (Cleethorpes): The hon. Gentleman was talking about the deputy Chief Constable.
Mr. Moss: I know you concentrate. I have noticed that your listen to every word I say.
The Chairman: Order. The hon. Gentleman should remember that he is addressing the chair.
Mr. Moss: I apologise, Mr. Jones, for that momentary aberration. That was a rather timely and welcome intervention from the hon. Lady.
The review team was composed of a chief superintendent, other police officers below that rank, Mr. Peter May from the Northern Ireland Office and a principal officer from the Police Authority, Mr. Gary Archibald. I do not know exactly how many people in total were on the team, but it ws probably no more than seven, or 10 at most. Only one person from the Police Authority was on it.
In September 1995 the Police Authority chief executive wrote to his staff stating the PANI was participating with the RUC in a support services co-ordination group to progress support services and civilian staff issues, having regard to the Government's intention to introduce legislation. That was progressing until the Provisional IRA bomb exploded in London docklands in February 1996. Between that time and June the same year, although the fundamental review working group continued to sit and work, both the RUC and PANI had agreed that any prospect of reducing the number of people employed in the RUC had disappeared.
In September 1996, under some pressure from the Northern Ireland Office, a tripartite working group was reconvened to establish which, if any, of the recommendations of the fundamental review could be implemented, notwithstanding the resumption of IRA violence. In December, Police Authority members received an executive summary of the fundamental review document, to which the Minister referred earlier.
At that time an inspection by Her Majesty's inspectorate was due and it was understood that the inspector would refer to the summary in his report. At that stage the Chief Constable--Ronnie Flanagan had now been promoted to the office--decided to publish the summary and key findings, which were put before the Police Authority on 8 January. No further action took place regarding either the adoption of the fundamental review or the publication of the summary and key findings.
I return now to the comments that I was making before lunch. The original plan was that the fundamental review report would be endorsed, individually and collectively, by the tripartite structure--the Secretary of State, the Chief Constable and the Chairman of the authority. But that endorsement never took place.
The Minister referred to comments that were written by the working group participants; the most senior officer on the group was a chief superintendent. There was one member from PANI, but I was told that he was not representing the Police Authority in the working group's deliberations. He was not empowered by the authority to place the different elements into the equation.
Mr. Ingram: Who appointed him?
Mr. Moss: The Police Authority appointed him. We have already agreed on that. We know that it announced that its people were joining the working group to put forward ideas for the fundamental review. Yes, a person from the Police Authority was on the working group, but that is different from saying that he took the Police Authority's views into the working group on every occasion.
My key point is that the working group's views and the summary were never brought back before a full meeting of the Police Authority for endorsement.
Mr. Ingram indicated dissent.
Mr. Moss: The Minister shakes his head. His earlier quotes were plucked from the contribution of one principal officer of the Police Authority, yet playing the PANI card might give the impression that those were the stated, confirmed and agreed views of the Police Authority as a whole, whose members had taken a vote to endorse the summary and key findings. They did not do that. The Chief Constable produced a report, and they have never seen the fundamental review.
The Minister tried to give us the impression that this was a Police Authority for Northern Ireland view, but as events unfolded it came as no surprise to learn that PANI never looked at the summary and key findings, or read the fundamental review. The hon. Gentleman certainly did not confirm his earlier comments in Committee that his quotations represented PANI's views. It is therefore incumbent upon the Minister to recognise that and to say to PANI, publicly or privately, that he did not intend to misrepresent its members' views. I hope that he will do so.
Will the Minister also confirm that his quotes recorded in columns 63 and 64 came from the original unpublished working group's draft submissions to the fundamental review, not from the Chief Constable's summary and key findings document? Will he also confirm that those so-called quotes were never seen by PANI members, let alone endorsed by them. Will he confirm that PANI made it clear more than once that although it is not implacably opposed to the Chief Constable's assuming the control and management of civilian workers that currently rests with the Police Authority, it would support such a change only if the proper mechanisms for accountability were in place?
That was the subject of a letter written in December 1994 to the Minister then responsible for the RUC, Sir John Wheeler, by the then Chairman of the Police Authority, David Cook, which pre-dates many of the review's findings. David Cook wrote that the Police Authority would be inclined to move down that road--and that was when the Police and Magistrates' Courts Act 1994 was going through the House, or perhaps a short time after its passage had been completed. Mr. Cook emphasised that the Police Authority would agree on the management of all resources only when mechanisms for accountability were in place. That has been the authority's position all along. Its members were therefore surprised indeed to see ascribed to them in Hansard comments that they did not make.
The Police Authority also thinks that representations made by it have been ignored by the Government, which is why it opposes the main thrust of clause 3. I am sure that its members will be happy with the crumb that has been offered to them today, because at least some progress is being made. But they still consider that transferring 3,000-plus civilian personnel is a huge undertaking.
The sheer scale of policing in Northern Ireland is such that that transfer would be difficult at the best of times. The authority's members would like to work towards a sensible agreement--without the Bill--that would ensure that the rights of the civil servants, as well as the sheer logistics of the transfer, were looked at again.
Members of the Police Authority have, as I said, visited 12 police authorities in England and Wales, and have spoken about the proposals and how well or otherwise they have been implemented in those two territories. They reiterated their conclusions that many police authorities were having serious second thoughts about the wisdom of giving the chief constables powers of management over the authorities' human resources. Many told the Police Authority for Northern Ireland that if they had their time again, they would view the matter differently.
4.45 pm
The Minister did not claim that a specific number of police authorities in England and Wales were happy with the 1994 and 1996 legislation.
There may be problems that are not being tackled, and should be examined in the future. Yet the Bill transposes that legislation to Northern Ireland without reference to its success or failure in England and Wales.
| 
