Shortly after 3.30pm today, the Committee stage of the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill will start in the Chamber of the House of Lords.  As of last night, 310 amendments have been tabled to the Bill.

I have submitted a series of amendments which aim:

• to require each Policing and Crime Commissioner (PCC) and the Mayor’s Office of Policing and Crime (MOPC) to appoint no less than 4 and no more than 7 members of a non-executive board to support the PCC or the MOPC in its work and to provide a governance structure in respect of such matters as finance and audit, appointments, and equalities.  Such appointments would be subject to the approval of the PCP or London Assembly Panel.  This amendment has also now been signed by former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington. 
• to require each PCC and the MOPC to meet with representatives of each local authority in their area to discuss the policing needs of that area at least twice a year.
•  to widen the scope of the MOPC to cover the City of London Police.
• to require that the occupant of the MOPC be the Deputy Mayor of London for Policing and Crime and that that person be directly elected on the same day as the Mayor of London – elected by a process similar to that for a PCC.
• requiring HM Inspectorate of Constabulary to report on a regular basis or as required on the extent to which each Chief Constable is meeting his obligations under the strategic policing requirement.

I used to pride myself on being able to read accurately the mood of my local area and predict reasonably accurately its election results.   However, when I cast my vote in the AV referendum on Thursday morning, I have to confess that I had absolutely no inkling that I was voting in one of only ten local areas (out of 439 in Great Britain as a whole) that would record a majority of “YES” votes when the results were finally declared. 

My feeling had been that Haringey would vote (albeit narrowly) against AV.  In fact, the declared result showed a vote for “YES” by a margin of 56.62% to 43.38% – the fourth biggest margin in the country.

It is not clear whether there any distinguishing features in the the ten local districts that voted “YES”:

• Cambridge
• Camden
• Edinburgh Central
• Glasgow Kelvin
• Hackney
• Haringey
• Islington
• Lambeth
• Oxford
• Southwark

No doubt some academic will do the demographic analysis and the psephological postmortem ……

I have to admit that I am beginning to despair of Mayor Boris Johnson’s administration.

I have regularly expected it to descend again to the depths of administrative chaos displayed in its early months. The reason it hasn’t done so, of course, in the last two years has been because of the presence of Sir Simon Milton as the Mayor’s Chief of Staff.

With Simon’s tragic and untimely death, I was ghoulishly confident that an administrative armageddon would shortly descend on the eighth floor of City Hall.

Alas the appointment of Sir Edward Lister as Deputy Mayor and Chief of Staff may have dashed my hopes.

Eddie is, I think, the longest-serving Council Leader in London and, while we may have sparred/disagreed profoundly on frequent occasions when I chaired the Association of London Government, there is no question that he ran Wandsworth Council highly effectively, albeit on robust Thatcherite lines.

Eddie was originally going to perform a similar oiling, greasing and sweeping up role for Jeffrey Archer had he become Mayor in 2000. Now eleven years later, he will finally be doing it.

There are no doubt parallels between Jeffrey Archer’s career and that of Boris Johnson ….

I see that Assistant Commissioner Ian McPherson has launched an on-line survey to ask people how they “want to access police services” and in a letter to “stakeholders” he gives more details:

“The review of public access ‘channels’ started on the 11th April and will conclude on the 27th May. It will look at how we can enable the public to communicate with police and access policing services more effectively. A key aim of the review is to identify the role front counters play in the wide range of public access channels, from calls and online contact to face to face meetings.

The review will seek to establish the principles for re-shaping the future and ensure that the public understand and support the decisions the MPS makes about front counters, and that any changes reflect their views. You can expect to be informed about local consultation processes relating to specific locations later in the year.

Front counters will remain a core element of policing. Notwithstanding this, I think you will understand that, given our financial pressures, it is right for us to carry out a review of public access which encompasses front counters. Police station front counters – open to the public 24/7 or for set hours – are very important but, in the 21st century, they are just one way for members of the public to access police services. Staffing front counters is more expensive than most other forms of access and evidence has shown that some front counters are very busy whilst others are much quieter, averaging fewer than five callers per day or just one caller during three nights of opening. We must find ways of aligning our public access channels to better meet public need and convenience, whilst working within our financial constraints.

In the public access review we will ask you to share your perspective on the best and most cost efficient model to enable the public to contact the police. As you know, some of the needs of the public are best met by multi agency responses. We will consult our partners and the public on several key issues including:

1.  
   1. A proposed core service commitment for front counters, based on a minimum expectation of one well-staffed and easily accessible 24/7 front counter per borough, supported by an expanded appointments system and Safer Neighbourhoods team surgeries;
   2. The criteria the MPS will use to identify the need on any borough for an enhanced front counter service, over and above the minimum of one 24/7 location.”

This means that the consultation about “specific locations” will be taking place in the run up to the Mayoral elections and the future of individual stations will no doubt become a campaign issue in  some, if not all, London Assembly contests.

These are never easy discussions. The public are often wedded to the idea of the availability of services from a particular building – even if personally they never seek services from there. 

It is hard to justify the staffing of a facility which may only get one or two members of the public coming in over the space of an hour or two. Yet the withdrawal of a staffed front-counter is often seen as tantamount to the police withdrawing from the whole area – even though not staffing a particular facility may release officers to engage in active response policing in the neighbourhood.

However, the sequence of questions in the survey asking “If you were not able to visit a police station” gives a rather large hint about the direction of travel of the review and the likely outcome for many “specific locations”.

Previous experience suggests that the Metropolitan Police do not always handle the discussions about individual front-counters in the most tactful and sure-footed of ways.

However, I rather expect that Mayor Boris Johnson and the putative Deputy MOPC* Kit Malthouse AM will be hoping that on this occasion the local consultations are handled without the usual ineptitude.

*MOPC (pronounced MOPSY) = Mayor’s Office of Policing and Crime.

On Wednesday afternoon the House of Lords will consider the Local Authorities (Mayoral Elections) (England and Wales) (Amendment) Regulations 2011.

And what does this worthy statutory instrument do?

The explanatory note says:

“The Regulations amend Schedule 1 (The Mayoral Elections Rules) and Schedule 3 (Mayoral Election (Combination of Polls) Rules) to the Local Authorities (Mayoral Elections) (England and Wales) Regulations 2007. The amendments in each case enable a candidate who is standing for election on behalf of two or more registered political parties to request that the ballot paper in an election may feature, alongside the candidate’s particulars, an emblem registered by one of those political parties.”

This means that a candidate can be put up by more than one Party and the respective Party emblems can appear on the ballot paper.

Why is this being introduced now?

Could it be that David Cameron and Nick Clegg have privately agreed to put up joint candidates in future Mayoral elections?

Do they envisage their two emblems flying proudly side by side?

Have they told their respective Parties?

And what would Margaret Thatcher say?

An excellent post from Adam Bienkov in The Scoop at SNIPE asks:

“Will Boris Johnson leave anything behind for the next Mayor?”

This picks up on Tim Donovan’s interview with Mayor Boris Johnson on The Politics Show:

“Donovan also pointed out that Boris’s police budget is totally unsustainable, relying on £70m of reserves built up in police and fire budgets over the previous ten years.

Once that money runs out (after the election) police numbers will fall …

In fact Boris will create exactly the kind of “black hole” that he accused Ken Livingstone of creating in TfL’s budget before the 2008 election.

As Donovan said to Boris: “this is money that you can’t use again.””

And Adam Bienkov goes on:

“And it’s not just money that will run out after Boris’s first term but ideas as well. I mean what major new transport projects conceived by Boris are set to go ahead over the next five years?

We’ll have a few extra bikes and a few new buses with a hole in the back, but where are the big ideas for London going into the next few years and decades?

Of course there’s still time for Boris to spell out those big ideas, but even if he does they would be too far down the pipeline to be seen under a second Boris term.

Because the sad truth about Boris as Mayor, is that rather than be the triumph or disaster many predicted, he has actually been something of a non-event.

By doing as little as humanly possible, Boris has been able to take credit for past investments whilst adding little or nothing to future plans.”

The Metropolitan Police Authority is still in session and Deputy Mayor Kit Malthouse AM DCiC* and Putative Deputy MOPC** (pronounced “Mopsy”) remains in the Chair.

Yesterday, the London Assembly failed to muster the necessary two-thirds majority to amend the Mayor’s Budget for 2011/12, so the Budget has de facto been approved.

The non-Conservative Assembly members, of course, sought to distance themselves from the implications of the budget and a (non-binding) motion was carried as follows:

“This Assembly notes the success of Neighbourhood Policing and regrets the Mayor’s proposal to remove 100 Sergeants from the Safer Neighbourhood Teams over the coming year. We do not believe a case for these reductions has been made given that the review of the SNTs is still underway, We ask the Mayor to reverse this decision.”

This contrasted with the upbeat tone of the Mayor’s press release:

“Increasing police on the streets and freezing the precept for a record third year running are the key elements to the Mayor of London Boris Johnson’s third budget, which has been approved unamended by the London Assembly.  …

Almost three quarters of the £935 million raised by the precept will go to the Metropolitan Police Service to help build on the success of the lowest murder rate since 1978, taking more than 11,000 knives off the streets,  and cutting robbery on public transport by 46.5 per cent in the last three years. An additional £42 million to lift the recruitment freeze and to put an extra 413 police officers on the transport network, is also included in the budget.”

In practice, the Mayor’s budget has set the funding envelope for the MPA and the Metropolitan Police, but how the money is to be deployed has yet to be finally agreed by the MPA.

The funding allocation is now therefore a zero-sum game: if one area of efficiencies/cuts is removed from the budget alternative savings/cuts will have to be found to compensate.

This did not, however, stop a number of members reprising the points made at yesterday’s Assembly meeting.

*Dog Catcher in Chief

**Mayor’s Office of Policing and Crime

People go in to public life for many reasons.

A few simply want to BE something – to be called “Councillor” or have “AM” or “MP” after their name.

Most in my experience want to make a difference – to improve public services or make them more accountable; to help those who are disadvantaged; or to promote other interests they regard as important (I will resist the temptation to talk about ex-Bullingdon Club members promoting their class interests).

The rewards and gratification for most public service are pretty small.

I was interested therefore to hear one of my MPA colleagues (a Member of the London Assembly as it happens) purring by the coffee machine just before the start of an MPA Sub-Committee.  I realised this could not be in anticipation of a riveting discussion on a particularly technical business case that was the main item on the agenda of the meeting, nor was it likely to be the prospect of the machine-generated coffee.

What had produced this reaction?

She told me it was the “sexually suggestive” description of the Sumatran coffee option – “dark roast, sweet and chocolatey”.

She had a happy smile on her face ….

…. whatever floats your boat.

Having been around during the time of rate-capping and the advent of the Poll Tax, Luke Akehurst’s warning/reminder, “Exposing the Far Left”, should be taken seriously.

As he puts it:

“There are people who really want to mess up the campaign against the Tory-led government’s cuts. They aren’t all in the Tory and Lib Dem parties. Some of them are pretending to be on our side. …

The canary in the coal mine that always tells you the far left are up to something is the student movement. Why? Because it’s full of idealistic young people who are enthusiastic about politics and naive about the motives of people selling them political newspapers. That makes it the ideal recruiting ground for the 57 varieties of ultra-left faction. …

This reached its logical conclusion with the obscene spectacle in Manchester on Saturday of Socialist Workers’ Party and other far-left students throwing eggs at Labour’s Tony Lloyd MP when he tried to speak in support of students, and chasing moderate NUS President Aaron Porter down the street having interrupted his speech with chants of ‘you’re a Tory too…’ and according to the Union of Jewish Students, the anti-Semitic variant ‘Tory Jew Scum…’. Pause for a moment and digest this. What kind of leftwinger shouts antisemitic abuse at anyone? What kind of leftwinger throws eggs and shouts abuse at the people on the same side as them in the campaign against the tuition fee hike and the EMA cuts because they are not revolutionary enough? …

The student movement is just the start though. Local government is the next key target, as it was in the 1980s, as councils are about to set their budgets. Activists were dishing out leaflets outside Hackney town hall (where I’m a councillor) on Wednesday night, three quarters of the text of which attacked in aggressive and personally vitriolic terms not David Cameron, Nick Clegg, George Osborne or Eric Pickles but Labour mayor of Hackney Jules Pipe.

In the ‘through the looking glass’ world of the ultra-left, Labour councils are not the victims of Eric Pickles’ massive cuts; we are the villains ‘implementing’ them. We are to be harangued, insulted and abused until we agree to replicate the 1985 ratecapping rebellion by setting illegal unbalanced budgets. That won’t stop any cuts – they’ll just be made by officials instead, but with no Labour input into deciding which services to protect. But the people campaigning for it think it would ‘send a signal’ to government. Actually the signal it would send is that we were completely irresponsible. Eric Pickles is laughing all the way to the polling station about this because his strategy of localising the blame for cuts on councils is being implemented by the far left. It’s a classic Trotskyite transitional demand – call for councils to do something they can’t – spend money the government hasn’t given them – then when this doesn’t happen tell people revolution is the only solution. A tactical objective for the far left is to get left Labour councillors to break the whip and get themselves expelled from their Labour groups – thereby fracturing the unity of the Labour party and creating political martyrs.

On Saturday in Hackney as Labour members used street stalls to promote the 26 March TUC national demo against the cuts and explain their impact on one of the UK’s most deprived areas, the SWP counter-leafleted the people our members were talking to, attacking the Labour council and saying there was no difference between Labour’s deficit-reduction plans and the Tories’ (surely halving the deficit not eliminating it is a difference of 50 per cent, quite aside from the difference in emphasis between the parties on the balance of cuts versus tax increases?). Another unachievable transitional demand – call for Labour to support having no cuts at all.

In weeks to come the SWP have announced they will be turning up en masse at individual Labour councillors’ advice surgeries, effectively stopping residents with real problems seeing their councillors, and creating a very intimidating atmosphere.”

It is Day 13 of the Committee Stage of the Parliamentary Voting Systems and Constituencies Bill.

Here is my contribution to a debate on whether constituency boundaries should cross rivers like the Thames, the Mersey or the Tyne:

“Lord Harris of Haringey: My Lords, we owe my noble friend Lady Morgan of Huyton a debt of gratitude for introducing this group of amendments which are extremely important in the context of this Bill. First, they raise the issue of geography, and we have already had some debate on that on the amendment that was passed in respect of the Isle of Wight. Secondly, they raise the question of the way in which communities are divided. This group of amendments is about division by rivers. I heard what the noble Lord, Lord Swinfen, said about rivers uniting and driving communities, but the reality is that rivers do divide communities, and communities on one side or other of a river feel very differently from those on the other side. My noble friend Lady Armstrong of Hill Top has just articulated it supremely well. If we believe in the principle of representation whereby individuals are elected to the other place on the basis of a community of feeling and are able to represent that community of feeling, that should be taken into account as part of these discussions.

I know that the Government are committed to the concept of fairness. There are other ways of achieving fairness. For example, I fail to understand why it is a given that when Members of the House of Commons go through the Division Lobby and are ticked off in the way that we are familiar with in this House, they each count for one vote. If you really want to have equality of representation, have them have a statistic associated with them so that one gets 1.1 votes and one gets 0.9 votes and, at a stroke, you have solved the problem that the Government claim they are trying to deal with. I am not suggesting that that is a solution that we should follow, but it is a much easier way than the many hours that this House has debated this issue.

Lord Elystan-Morgan: Does the noble Lord recollect the myth that when the Habeas Corpus Act was passed, it did not achieve a majority but fat men were counted as two? Some of us would have served the cause of liberty magnificently. 

Lord Harris of Haringey: I am particularly grateful for that intervention because I can see the value of such an analysis, though I must admit that I was not previously aware of that historical fact.

What is it that creates a community? Do we value community in terms of representation? I should have thought that for the quality of our democracy we want to value the quality of representation and the way in which there is a link between the community that elects a representative and that representative. It is interesting that if you look at constituencies and the history of where there has been division by a river, you see this problem. For example, my noble friend Lady Morgan of Huyton talked about the Mersey. I have a report from a Boundary Commission inquiry into that issue. The Boundary Commission clearly wished to cross the Mersey on that occasion but was overwhelmed by the nature of the representations. It stated that,

“local opposition is a factor to be weighed, but it cannot of itself be decisive”.

It went on to say that,

“the unusual factor in this case, is this: opposition to the proposed cross-Mersey constituency is voiced by all political interests as well as a number of individuals without any party political affiliation. The Commission will know whether such practically universal opposition to an aspect of their Provisional Recommendations is unique. However, if not unique, I suspect it is something which is rarely found”.

Another inquiry report looked at crossing the Clyde. The inspector concluded,

“that strong feeling exists on this issue on both sides of the Clyde and that none of it is supportive of the Boundary Commission’s proposal for a river-spanning constituency … It is I think significant that their opposition does not appear to have a connection with any party political advantage that might be derived from having or not having a cross-river constituency but it is based purely on a conviction from their local understanding that an attempt to span the Clyde is quite simply wrong for the area”.

The report went on to talk about the differences between the communities.

That is why we should recognise those considerations regarding the Bill. I particularly want to speak, but shall not speak at length, about Amendment 75ZB, which deals with constituencies not crossing the Thames. I appreciate that those who are not part of London may not realise that there are such strong feelings between the north and south of the city. I speak as someone who, although an unabashed north Londoner, has had the privilege of representing the whole of the city when I chaired the Association of London Government, now London Councils. I was very well aware of the strong feelings between the north and the south. It goes into every aspect of community life. A study published just a few weeks ago demonstrates—I think this is fascinating—that 54 per cent of Londoners living north of the River Thames never, not occasionally, but never, venture south for work or cultural pursuits. It is interesting that south Londoners are more likely to go north. I make no comments about the quality of life in south London or about whether anyone would wish to travel south. I have travelled south of the river on many occasions for cultural pursuits. However, it is interesting that more than half of north Londoners have never done so. If that does not indicate that there is a difference in terms of community feeling, then nothing does.

The same survey demonstrates some quite interesting findings about the different interests of north Londoners and south Londoners. I am a north Londoner, and 55 per cent of north Londoners rated eating out as one of their top three interests, followed by the visual arts and popular music. While eating out and visual arts also ranked highly for south Londoners, they were more likely to enjoy the capital’s performing arts, heritage, classical music and markets. Again, I make no judgment about that. The indication is that on these issues alone there is a distinction in the approach of north Londoners and south Londoners.

Where does this come from? In the 1850s, London was already the world’s wealthiest city, but that success had come at the expense of many of the people of London. Population growth and overcrowding had created a divided city, with Londoners living in separate worlds of rich and poor. Up to half of those born in the capital’s slums did not survive their first year. However, not only the poor died young; tuberculosis, smallpox, cholera and typhoid also killed the rich. The significant point was that London had failed to provide clean water, basic sanitation and housing for its growing population. In its analysis, the People’s City, the Museum of London stated:

“The deadly River Thames flowed like an open sewer through the heart of the city”.

That open sewer feeling is the reason why the divide is so deep and cultural between the different parts of the city.

Even more modern literature reflects this. Wise Children, the novel by Angela Carter, centres on a particular family and focuses on the distinctions between members of the family as represented by the physical divide of the River Thames. A very deep-seated difference exists between north Londoners and south Londoners.

If we are to have any concern whatever about the importance of geography and community to representation in Parliament, we have to take these issues into account. If the Government say that that would wreck the central purpose of the Bill of fair representation, I would ask two questions: first, will they consider an alternative which changes the value of the votes of Members at the other end of the Corridor; and, secondly, what is the value of fairer representation if you destroy the basis on which it rests in the communities that elect Members of Parliament?”