Greater Manchester Combined Authority (Election of Mayor with Police and Crime Commissioner Functions) Order 2016 — House of Lords, 2016-03-23
Topic: Law and Crime
Alan Beith (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, I join my noble friend Lord Shipley in welcoming the Tees Valley order. I sympathise with those who prefer to call it Teesside as well. I note in particular that Liberal Democrat councillors and party chairmen in the Tees area have firmly and publicly stated how much they want to work together with others to make a success of the combined authority and associated arrangements I also say in passing that I share the view expressed in several quarters that making an elected mayor a condition of deals of this kind is a very unreasonable position for the Government to adopt. I say that when I look at what would happen if we had to have an elected mayor covering an area from Berwick to Sunderland—an area of very diverse differences. It would be a very inappropriate governance arrangement. I turn to the Greater Manchester order because of a little-mentioned positive aspect of it, but I am not clear how far it goes. It is what was referred to at paragraph 1.279 of the Budget statement, on criminal justice: "The government has also agreed a further devolution deal with Greater Manchester, including a commitment to work towards the devolution of criminal justice powers" That is rather weak wording: "to work towards" is what Governments sometimes say when they are making concessions and are in difficulty. I do not think that that is the origin in this case. As far as I am aware, there is a genuine government commitment to achieve some devolution of criminal justice powers. Will the Minister, in responding to the debate, say just a little more? It was barely mentioned at the opening. It is a new development and unique to the Greater Manchester deal There is tremendous scope to be had from developments of this kind because at the moment we have a distortion in our system that means that, whereas the prison system is funded nationally, all other disposals arising from sentences tend to depend on local funding and extremely variable local provision of services for alcohol addiction, drug addiction and so forth. Greater Manchester is one of the areas that has tried to grapple with some of this. When, in my former capacity as chairman of the Justice Committee, we visited Stockport, we found there determined co-operation between magistrates, the local authority and the probation service, the development of something more like the problem-solving court, and the bringing together of various public bodies to deal with the problems that a case identifies that could lead to the ending of a pattern of offending behaviour. That requires a lot of co-operation between different bodies. Similarly, making logical use of alternatives to custody in sentencing depends on having a financial structure in which the commissioning is not done by completely different bodies There is a lot of scope here, and there will be even more scope if national spending on criminal justice is increasingly devolved to local areas. If that is done, we have a much better chance of ending up spending money on preventing crime, rather than on keeping people in prison for crimes that should never have happened. I see this as potentially important, and not something that we should allow to be forgotten in the Greater Manchester deal.