Ken Livingstone has announced that Val Shawcross AM will be his running mate and nominee for Deputy Mayor in the London elections in May 2012.
I have known Val since she led Labour to victory in Croydon, overturning many decades of unbroken Tory control. We were both elected to the London Assembly in 2000 and, when I became the first Chair of the Metropolitan Police Authority, she became the first Chair of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority. She has real and serious experience and her record in Croydon and LFEPA was outstanding. She will – I am sure – make a superb Deputy Mayor.

As we know Deputy Mayor Kit Malthouse AM is an extremely publicity shy person, but there must – even for him – be a quiet sense of pride that one day soon there may be a piece of legislation that will be forever remembered as containing the Kit Malthouse clause.

And here it is – Schedule 3 Paragraph 4 (6) of the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill:

Last night I hosted an event in the River Room of the House of Lords (by kind permission of the Lord Speaker) to launch the new Freedom Charity.  The event was well-attended despite the weather and there were inspiring speeches from Dr Humayra Abedin (an NHS doctor who was kidnapped by her parents in Bangladesh after she rejected the husband they had selected for her), solicitors Anne-Marie Hutchinson and Aina Khan, as well as Baroness Patricia Scotland, the former Attorney-General.

The charity’s aim is to combat forced marriage and dishonour killings and intends to work to empower young people through education and school awareness programmes.Next year, the Charity hopes to distribute a book aimed at teenagers, “But It’s Not Fair”, written by Freedom’s founder, Aneeta Prem, to every school in the country.

A charity well worth supporting.

Nearly eighteen months ago I reported that Cressida Dick had been appointed as the first female Assistant Commissioner in he history of the Metropolitan Police.  There is now a second with the appointment of Lynne Owens as Assistant Commissioner for Central Operations.  This is another excellent appointment and prompted a gloat from Sir Paul Stephenson, the Met Commissioner, that he now had more women on his Management Team than any previous Commissioner and that there were certainly more than in my time as Chair of the MPA.  Next he’ll be telling me that Kit Malthouse is a feminista.

I spent a large part of today sitting in on a table-top exercise designed to see how London’s police and other services and agencies would respond to a developing emergency on the streets of London.  It would be inappropriate to go into more details. However, it did bring home to me the importance and value of such exercises.

I will readily admit to once having been something of a cynic about such “war-gaming”.  The idea of bringing together quite a large group of people to act out how they would do their jobs in an imaginary set of circumstances at first sight could appear rather absurd.  Yet the evidence from de-briefs after real emergencies convinced me long ago that these sorts of exercises and practices have a real benefit.  Organisations or parts of organisations that only work together occasionally or only do so under normally fairly clearly-defined situations need to understand each other’s capabilities and practices in the very different circumstances that would apply in a major emergency.  Exercises mean that key individuals get to know each other, procedures are tested and worked through and – most importantly – potential problems are identified and can be resolved.

Although some of the reports from the inquest into the deaths of those killed in the July 2005 bombings have inevitably focused on those things that did not work as well as they might have done, much of what the witnesses have described has demonstrated how well London’s emergency services performed under the terrible circumstances of that day.  I know from those I have spoken to who were intimately involved how important previous exercises had been in planning for what unfolded five years ago and improving the collective response of the emergency services.

I am sure today’s exercise will have been similarly valuable, even though one hopes that the procedures tested never have to be carried out for real.  Several issues emerged where it was clear existing plans were inadequate or required further consideration.  And it has to be better to discover such problems in an exercise than in the middle of a full-scale emergency.

The Metropolitan Police Authority is still in session and is grinding slowly through its agenda.  And there has just been a revealing aside from Deputy Mayor Kit Malthouse AM DCiC* PSPCC**.

Caroline Pidgeon AM, who takes what is – I am sure – an entirely healthy interest in such matters, had asked the Commissioner what changes were being made to police officer uniforms.  Reference was made to uniform “cargo pants” and “anoraks” at which point the DCiC piped up to tell us that he was looking forward to receiving some for his own use – try not to think too hard about the image that this suggests ……..

*Dog Catcher in Chief

**Putative Surrogate Policing and Crime Commissioner

The Metropolitan Police Authority is in session and Deputy Mayor Kit Malthouse AM DCiC* PSPCC** is in the Chair.  Sir Paul Stephenson, the Commissioner, is reporting on the student protests both yesterday and two weeks ago when what he describes as “unexpected disorder” took place.

According to the Commissioner, the Metropolitan Police “got it wrong” two weeks ago and that they were slow to recognise that “the game has changed” – presumably meaning that the Conservative Coalition is going to attract a higher level of protest than its predecessor (presumably the demonstrations against the Iraq war and those organised by the Countryside Alliance were a piece of cake compared with the National Union of Students).

He also made the interesting comment that “social networking sites are not intelligence” – a comment that may have a wider relevance than he intended.

Although there was no “unexpected disorder” within the meeting, a surreal discussion then developed about the welfare of those who were “contained” (Sir Paul)/”kettled” (Jennette Arnold AM)/”imprisoned” (Jenny Jones AM) in Whitehall and, in particular, when toilet facilities were provided to them, about whether the coldness of the weather was considered and what arrangements were made to communicate with the parents of any schoolchildren who were within the area.  Until I intervened, there was no mention of the personal responsibility of those choosing to go on demonstrations to ensure they are suitably attired or communicate with their parents where appropriate.

*Dog Catcher in Chief

**Putative Surrogate Policing and Crime Commissioner

I have just been to an event organised by the Probation Association for MPs and Peers to meet probation trust chairs and chief executives.  The intention was to broaden the understanding by Parliamentarians of probation – often regarded as the Cinderella of the criminal justice system.  This was a laudable intention and there was a good turnout of members of both Houses.

What was striking, however, was how mono-ethnic the probation trust chief executives were.  I spoke to Beverley Thompson, whom I first knew when she chaired the Metropolitan Police’s Independent Advisory Group.  She is now the Acting Chief Executive of Northamptonshire Probation.  However, as far as I could tell, she is the only black chief executive in the country – and an acting one at that.

Given the probation service’s workforce and the make-up of their clientele, I find this lack of senior black probation leaders surprising and depressing – it’s a bit like the Police Service.

The Prime Minister was very critical about the failure of the Metropolitan Police to protect Conservative Party HQ on the occasion of the last demonstration by students. 

In planning for today’s demonstration, it seems that Sir Paul Stephenson has taken to heart the comments about “a thin blue line”.  When I went through Trafalgar Square earlier the entire Square seemed to be surrounded by police carriers and a former Commissioner of the Met has just informed me that he had seen three rows of police horses a few minutes earlier. 

And kettling is back – as called for by Gareth Bacon, a Conservative member of the London Assembly.