Queen’s Speech

Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate Excerpts

Monday 21st October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is a great honour to follow the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, in bringing to an end this comprehensive debate. It will not surprise your Lordships that my brief contribution to the debate on the Address and the gracious Speech is in relation to home affairs—in particular, policing.

The House will be aware that when an arrest is made by a police officer for an offence, an important decision has to be made about whether, once the preliminaries of identification and evidence collection are completed, the suspect is further detained or released pending further inquiries. In my day the normal practice, if there was no requirement to detain the suspect, would be to grant police bail. This could, of course, be with or without conditions and could require the suspect to return to the police station at a future date to be charged or released. If inquiries were not complete, the bail could be extended. As workloads increased and police numbers fell, it became common for bail to be extended for weeks or months, thereby attracting the rightful criticism that justice delayed was justice denied for both the suspect and the victim. In an attempt to rectify this, the law was changed by the Policing and Crime Act 2017, limiting police bail to 28 days and introducing the concept of being released under investigation without any conditions.

Since then, the law of unintended consequences has kicked in and matters appear to have been made worse. It is clear that, since the changes, thousands of serious crime suspects are being released by police without any restrictions or conditions. Under the previous regime, a suspect could have had bail conditions preventing him contacting the complainant, making him attend regularly at a police station or subjecting him to a curfew under pain of arrest. Recent figures published in a Law Society briefing show that the number of suspects on bail has dropped dramatically across the country from 216,000 in 2016-17 to 44,000 in 2017-18 and that, in that year, some 193,000 suspects were released under investigation with no conditions or restrictions.

This has led to serious consequences. For example, Kay Richardson was murdered by her estranged husband, Alan Martin, in Sunderland last year after police released him under investigation. He had a history of domestic abuse, and she had reported him for rape. Under the previous legal position, Martin could have had bail conditions preventing him from contacting the complainant, making him report regularly to a police station or subjecting him to a curfew.

Why has this situation come about? Quite honestly, it is another consequence of the loss over recent years of 20,000 police officers from the streets of this country, and it cannot be allowed to continue. This from a Government who a few years ago accused police officers attending a Police Federation conference of crying wolf and said that increasing crime had little to do with the number of police officers on the streets. That was patent nonsense to any sensible streetwise person who felt the insecurity caused by a reduced police presence, a lack of response to calls and the ever-increasing delays in the justice system, which impact every victim in the land.

It is good that the present Government have now announced a programme of increasing the recruitment of officers by 20,000, but this should be done as quickly as possible and should not be hamstrung by insisting on introducing a graduate entry system at constable level for all recruits. That would cost an arm and a leg and reduce the pool of potential excellent police officers who simply want to do what I did half an century ago with no aspiration for promotion: to join the police, don a uniform and serve the public. I am not sure that the new system has worked in nursing. These are the men and women we see day in, day out, running towards danger when everyone else, quite rightly, is running towards safety.

In conclusion, I simply say to the Minister two things. First, recruit quickly and sensibly. Give the recruits good-quality, professional training and do not ask them to jump through some additional academic hoop. Stiffen the thin blue line in the communities of Britain which are crying out for a sense of reassurance, which has been lost. Secondly, address the recent bail changes, which at present leave victims uncertain of how long an investigation will take and living in fear of being confronted by the accused, with no conditions or restrictions on where they can live, whom they can visit or when they can be out on the streets. That is particularly pertinent to domestic and sexual abuse cases and seems to go totally against the grain of the Domestic Abuse Bill, which is currently before Parliament and to which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, referred. In my view, these are matters of great importance, and I ask the Minister to confirm that the Government will address them with great urgency.