Baroness Doocey (LD)

My Lords, the amendment rightly exposes a serious weakness in our current system. As the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, points out, HMICFRS can diagnose deep-seated problems within police forces but it does not have the power to make sure these problems are fixed. There are simply too few national levers to deal with police underperformance. Labour’s manifesto included a clear commitment to give HMICFRS new powers to intervene in failing forces, and Ministers have signalled that they want to legislate to do this. We welcome that, but the Bill contains no such clause. I appreciate that a White Paper might be imminent. Even so, I urge the Government not to miss this golden opportunity to legislate now for clear, time-bound duties and proper escalation mechanisms, so that police forces are required to act on inspectorate findings. Amendment 416A seeks to take the Government further by building this question into a wider statutory review of policing oversight. We support that intention, but we part company with the noble Baroness on the mechanism she proposes. Setting up yet another independent commission, with the terms of reference to be devised by the Secretary of State, approved by the Commons and then followed by nine months of deliberation, risks delaying change for at least another year. The evidence base is already substantial. What is missing is not diagnosis but the authority to enforce it. The noble Baroness is quite right that enforcement is a wider problem, one that extends beyond HMICFRS to the Independent Office for Police Conduct, where lessons are not always learned, to put it mildly. I agree with the spirit of co-ordination, but we must remember that the IOPC’s role is distinct—to oversee complaints and investigate the most serious misconduct. It is not, and should not become, a general performance regulator for police forces. That role properly lies with HMICFRS and, ultimately, with Ministers. From these Benches, our preference is clear: do not commission another review and, instead, move directly and decisively to give the inspectorate the power it so clearly needs. For too long, we have had excellent reports, full of well-reasoned recommendations, almost all accepted by the police and the Government, but nothing happens. That inaction is rarely followed up. Measures that ensure that we no longer see the same failures repeated again and again would be very welcome.