No.NC30, to move the following Clause:—

'It shall be the duty of the Chief Constable, the Chief Probation Officer, the local representative of the Director-General of the Prison Service and the local Courts Service manager to make an annual report to the local authority and to account for the performance of their organisation before a full public meeting of the council.'.—[Simon Hughes.]

Brought up, and read the First time.

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

This crystallises a proposition that was put the other day. I do not intend to rehearse the argument that I made on that occasion. I draw attention to the salient points, and I would be grateful to hear the Minister's considered reflection, given that we have been round this course once before.

This new clause is about ensuring that there is accountability. The hon. Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood (Mrs. Humble) made the point that these issues have a wide family of interests. A number of those, such as social services, education and education welfare, and all those who work directly or indirectly for the local authority, are already accountable. Our proposed list does not deal with the health service family, which has indirect and inadequate accountability. However, I would argue that it could be included.

Our suggestion is that we place a duty on the chief constable or a representative of the police; the chief probation officer or a local borough, county or district representative; a local representative of the director general of the Prison Service; and the local court

service manager or somebody who can speak with authority about why it took case A so long to get to court or why so many cases collapsed. I know that the Prison Service is not organised in the way that I have suggested, but there is bound to be somebody who can speak on behalf of a prison or a set of prisons, whether it is Armley jail or Rampton.

My hon. Friend the Member for Somerton and Frome made a point about getting one's tackle in order; when people turn up to court and something fails to happen, somebody ought to account for that. Those people would be obliged to make an annual report to the local authority because that feeds into the existing system—it is important not to duplicate systems—and they would report to a full public meeting of the council. When those in charge of the criminal justice services had to appear, the leader of the council and all the senior councillors would have to be available to be quizzed so that the public could hear their answers. That would be very interesting.

The local papers would publish such annual reports because the press would turn up at the annual meeting in which they were presented, and they would report in considerable detail what was said by the chief probation officer and the person responsible for the Prison Service. That would result in a lot of letters to the local papers about whether their arguments reflected a good or bad experience of the criminal justice system; that would feed back to the councillors and into the system. It would give a focus to crime and disorder partnerships involving the police and local authorities and to other forums; they could be seen, in public, to be coming into contact with those to whom we pay our taxes to provide those services on our behalf.

I do not pretend that the drafting of the new clause is perfect, but I hope that after the previous debate it is in a clearer and more crystallised form. It is built on ideas from the White Paper, so I cannot claim originality, which were put forward by people such as the hon. Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen). I say again that we are happy to sit down with colleagues and try to get a format that allows us to learn from the experience of people from all corners of the country and all parts of the House, because that would be useful.

The new clause brings back to the Committee something that we have already discussed, but I make no criticism of that because it is desirable that there should be much greater public accountability and transparency in the workings of those who operate within the criminal justice system. The idea of a system of annual reporting seems desirable, although the local authority to which the report should be made is left pleasantly unresolved in the drafting. In the Thames Valley area, the reports could be made to the county or district council—except for the fact that the Prison Service does not operate in some districts. I am not engaging in semantics—it is a matter for fine tuning—and the principle is a good one.

The report is important because it would give people an opportunity to ask questions. Indeed, many local authorities already have formal meetings. For instance, one of my district councils meets formally with me and the police chief superintendent. We now see police liaison officers assigned to, and working within, local authority buildings, which is a good and beneficial sign for the future. However, I return to what I said previously, which is that it is all very well having meetings but we also need data.

My plea to the Minister is that if such a scheme is to work—I hope that it can progress—it must be based on the availability of data to local authorities and local residents about the crime rates in their area. For instance, there is no point in telling my constituents that the overall crime rate in the police area has gone down if a serious local problem is being concealed in the general statistics being made available.

In my time as the Member for Beaconsfield, I have discovered how variable the parish crime rates can be, even in the area that I represent. Indeed patterns occur quite consistently—they are not blips—and places, or microcosms, can be identified within which one will find particular patterns of crime. People are entitled to know about that and what is being done about it. If we could move in that direction, we would start the sort of community policing that my hon. Friends and I believe in so strongly, but I am afraid that although lip service is being paid to that concept, the practice is proving elusive.

I welcome the new clause; it seems sensible, and I hope that the Minister will build on his earlier answers and say that he will accept it.

The new clause touches on a subject that we debated at some length a week or two ago. As I said then, the new local criminal justice boards, the membership of which will comprise the chief officers of the courts, the probation service, the Prison Service, the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and the youth offending teams—that covers all the bodies listed in the new clause—will be required to produce annual reports containing statistics and information.

I take the point made by the hon. Member for Beaconsfield about the importance of local statistics and information. The boards will be required to produce an annual report on the performance of local areas and to make that report available to the public. The first part of what the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey is seeking is already achieved through the new criminal justice boards, which will be launched on 1 April. Their central purpose is to strengthen the performance of the criminal justice system and to improve its delivery.

Each board will also be required to establish advisory machinery, which may include representatives of the local community within which consultation will take place. A document will be circulated on those consultation arrangements which sets out a range of proposals and considerations that the boards can look at in deciding how most effectively to perform their task. The hon. Member for Beaconsfield raised the question of what is the most appropriate local authority for the purposes of such

reporting arrangements. By virtue of the fact that an annual report will be produced, which will, I am sure, be circulated to all the relevant local authorities in the area, there is nothing to stop a local authority from, for example, inviting representatives of the board in to discuss a local issue.

As I think I said when we discussed the matter previously, I am keen that we should let local arrangements develop in light of the statutory requirements that we are placing on the local criminal justice boards. I accept entirely the argument that we should develop better consultative arrangements with representatives of the local community in its various forms. I hope that we can build on that as we welcome the spirit of the new clause, while recognising that the new clause itself is not needed.

I am grateful to the Minister for generally being constructive, but I suggest that something is needed. I shall not push the motion to a vote, but raise two points that I hope the Minister will take into consideration. First, we recognise that under the arrangements that the Government propose there are to be annual reports from the agencies that he talked about. We are in the middle of a debate about statistics in the Home Office, and I have now received the letter that he said I might receive. I have asked my office to arrange a meeting with the Home Office head of statistics at the first practical opportunity, and I look forward to that. If we are to have such reports and they are to be meaningful, can the reports for the areas for which publication is currently an obligation be published at the same time, so that they can all be seen together? Members of the public could then find them together and look at them in the round, and they would read coherently together. There would then not be different accounting years, different crime years or different boundaries. It is important that there is comparability and transparency.

Secondly, the fact that there will be sets of reports at the level proposed is welcome. However, to take the constituency of the hon. Member for Beaconsfield, the report for the level proposed will be for the Thames Valley police area, which is three counties and something in the order of 15 to 20 districts. If one considers urban areas, in London there are 33 local authorities, and in Greater Manchester there would be, I think, 10 metropolitan borough councils. Although the hon. Member for Nottingham, North will know better than I do, in a county such as Nottinghamshire there will be about half a dozen, seven or eight local authorities below the county level. There is the county, the city and non-unitary districts. The report will not be very relevant to them. Not every district, thank God, has a prison in it; neither has every parish. There will be places where people will not expect the prison governor to appear, because they will not be worried that prisoners are about to climb over the wall.

However, people in those areas would still be interested in policing, probation and courts. Unless the Government close even more courts and make them even more remote, such matters will be relevant locally. There would not be a district in Buckinghamshire or Somerset or a borough in London or a unitary authority in any other part of England or Wales in which people would not like the statistics to be available. As well as the macro-statistics that we will get—and I make a plea that they be co-ordinated—we should make comparable transparent and useful statistics available at the lower local authority level. To answer the question posed by the hon. Member for Beaconsfield, we should start at the principal local authority. Once we have those in the bag, we can think about bringing it down to a more local level.

I wonder whether my hon. Friend has read the correspondence page of The Times today. It contains an excellent letter from a detective constable quoting Sir Josiah Stamp on government statistics on crime, saying that even though they were sophisticated to the nth degree—I am paraphrasing—they all come down to what the local watchman chooses to put into his account.

My hon. Friend is ahead of me. I have not yet read the correspondence page of The Times, for which I apologise. It is not always my first reading of the day. No doubt all Committee members, including Government Members, have scoured the press. I hope that we will see results from our combined efforts. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.

Motion and clause, by leave, withdrawn.