Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)

My Lords, I apologise that I was unable to be here at the previous sittings—I had clashes of different obligations in the Lords last week. I want to pick up from what my noble friend Lady Pinnock called the structural consistency issue. In preparing for the speech that I am going to make on Amendment 195, in the past few days I have read through a number of recent reports, including Labour Party as well as government and parliamentary reports on the governance of England, and I am struck with the frequency with which everyone from Gordon Brown through to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee say that one thing that we should be aiming for is consistency in the boundaries of different authorities so that, as far as possible, they coincide and the question of accountability is therefore relatively clear. I was therefore struck when the Ministry of Justice produced a White Paper on policing that suggests that we might change the current structure of police forces in England—in Yorkshire that at least now coincides with the four mayors—by perhaps six to eight police authorities, which would not coincide at all with the 30 to 35 strategic authorities that we are heading towards in Britain.