Police Service: New Governance Structure

Baroness Doocey Excerpts

Thursday 1st November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Doocey]

My Lords, I would like to focus my remarks on the specific issue of the Independent Police Complaints Commission, the workings of which are critical to the future of the police service. The IPPC was established in 2004 to oversee the police complaints system in England and Wales. Its most valuable function is to maintain public trust in the police.

Until 2004, the police themselves had sole responsibility for investigating allegations of police misconduct. Rightly or wrongly, this created a public perception of whitewash and cover-ups. The establishment of the IPCC ought to have solved this problem. Sadly, it has not because the IPCC effectively delegates most investigations into serious complaints back to the local police force concerned. This situation continues to jeopardise public trust in the police. Trust is a very valuable commodity. It is very hard to win but very easy to lose. This is particularly so for the police where allegations of serious misconduct by a few officers can undermine the superb work done on a daily basis by the vast majority of police officers.

Maintaining trust is vital for the police because of the unique nature of British policing. Our police are civilians in uniform, not a paramilitary force imposed on the people. Ever since the days of Sir Robert Peel, we have maintained Peel’s principle that:

“The police are the public and the public are the police”,

but that principle can be upheld only with the consent of the people. The recent controversy over the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, to which other noble Lords have referred, is a spectacular reminder of the harm that can be done and demonstrates why independent scrutiny of the police is essential.

When the IPCC receives a complaint, it can, at its discretion, allocate it to one of four “modes of investigation”, depending on the seriousness of the complaint. The system looks good on paper but, in practice, the IPCC is fully hands-on in only one of the modes of investigation. In the other three, the local police force concerned remains effectively free to run the investigation exactly as it sees fit. Perhaps the most controversial type of complaint about police misconduct concerns deaths in, or following, police custody. Through some freedom of information requests, I have discovered that in the year 2009-10, 17 such cases were referred to the IPCC. Of these, only five were independently investigated. In 2010-11, 16 out of 21 such cases were investigated independently, and in 2011-12, 10 out of 15 cases were independently investigated, but should not all deaths in, or following, police custody be independently investigated?

The IPCC’s own published figures reveal that during the three years 2008 to 2011, it received 837 referrals of cases of police corruption. Of these, just 2% were subject to an independent investigation while 70% were investigated locally. How can this be right? Some powerful case studies illustrate how things have gone wrong over the past eight years. I shall give just one example: the botched investigation by South Wales Police into the murder of Lynette White in 1988. The outcome of the original investigation was the wrongful conviction and imprisonment of a number of innocent men in 1990, who were not released until 1992. The investigation of the resulting complaint to the IPCC was delegated to none other than the South Wales Police themselves who had been responsible for the original investigation. It led to one senior officer being required to investigate his former boss, which is clearly unsatisfactory. Subsequently, eight police officers were charged with perverting the course of justice, but the trial collapsed in dubious circumstances concerning non-disclosure by the South Wales Police. Meanwhile, those wrongfully imprisoned continue to suffer and have not seen justice done. Another man later confessed to the murder and was imprisoned.

We cannot allow this sort of malpractice to undermine public trust in the police. We must ensure that the IPCC stops delegating to the police investigations into serious complaints. The IPCC should investigate such complaints itself and the Government should provide it with adequate resources to do so. I recognise, of course, that in a time of austerity this could mean a bigger budget for the IPCC, but it would also mean less waste on ineffective self-investigations by local police forces and it would restore trust, which is a commodity beyond price.