Lord Sandhurst (Con)

I cannot answer that from the Dispatch Box, I am afraid; nor do I have many staff. Policing and youth justice are not isolated administrative functions. They sit at the heart of a single, integrated criminal justice system spanning England and Wales. Police forces operate across borders daily; so too with the criminal justice system. Intelligence sharing, counterterrorism, and serious organised crime and public order policing all rely on consistent legal frameworks, operational standards and accountability structures. Fragmenting those arrangements would introduce complexity, duplication and risk at precisely the moment when policing faces unprecedented pressures. Policing in Wales is already delivered locally, is locally accountable and is responsible to Welsh communities. Police and crime commissioners in Wales set priorities based on local need. Chief constables in Wales are not directed from Whitehall on day-to-day policing. What is proposed is not so much localism but the creation of a new layer of political control over policing. The amendments ask your Lordships’ House to place policing and youth justice under the control of the Welsh Government. This has been run by Labour continuously since devolution began. It is therefore legitimate to ask what that Government’s track record tells us about their capacity to take on these serious responsibilities. In area after area of devolved public policy, Labour-run Wales has failed to deliver. Educational outcomes in Wales have fallen behind those in the rest of the United Kingdom on many international measures. Health waiting times are persistently worse than in England. Major infrastructure projects have been delayed or mismanaged. Those are not ideological assertions; they are documented outcomes of more than two decades of one-party dominance and failure. When systems fail in devolved areas, the response of the Welsh Government has often been to blame Westminster rather than to reflect on their own actions or inactions. If policing and youth justice were devolved, who would be blamed if and when crime rose, youth reoffending increased or serious failures occurred? Experience suggests that accountability would become more opaque, not clearer and more robust. Constitutional change should be driven by clear evidence of benefit, not by political symbolism. It has not yet been demonstrated how these proposals would reduce crime, improve public confidence or deliver better outcomes for young offenders; nor has it been shown that fragmentation would be avoided and how cross-border crime would be tackled more effectively, or failures remedied. For these reasons, we cannot support the amendments.