Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Earl Attlee Excerpts

Lords Hansard - part two & Committee stage
Wednesday 20th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, I am pleased to have this opportunity to introduce this group of amendments, and of those, Amendments 13, 15, 16 and 18 are in my name. They are of course probing amendments at this stage.

The Government are seeking to change the standards by which police driving is to be judged. I should explain to noble Lords that I have some background on this issue, because for 18 years I was a JP, and over those years I dealt with a number of cases that involved police pursuit. Controversial cases where police pursuit leads to traffic accidents of course occur regularly.

I have my own personal experience of this. More than a decade ago, I was involved in one such incident. One evening, I was driving along a long, straight stretch of road in Cardiff—a two-lane road, with a mix of residential and commercial properties, that had intermittent central barriers. I suddenly became aware of cars coming towards me at considerable speed, well above the 30 miles per hour limit. It turned out to be a car driven by a very young man, with a passenger, pursued by two police cars. The problem was that they were on my side of the road, and I was on a part of the road with a central barrier. There was literally nowhere for me to go. There was a head-on crash, my car was a write-off, and there was a three-car pile-up because the car being pursued turned over and one of the police cars impacted it.

The seriousness of the crash was indicated by the fact that the road was closed for the night. We had three additional police cars on the scene, two ambulances, a fire engine and a police helicopter. I spent the night in A&E, but it could easily have been very much worse, because the passengers in the other cars suffered only minor injuries too.

Why were the police taking the risk of this pursuit? There were a number of pedestrians around—the crash happened in front of a pub. The official explanation was that the car was stolen, and I was told that the young men were suspected of at least one burglary—but that was a historical suspicion. However, until the pursuit, there was clearly no risk to life and no immediate danger of violence. It has always been clear to me that that pursuit was unlikely to have been justified.

My Amendments 13 and 16 are designed to probe how the Government envisage the new standards being applied. Since the Road Traffic Act 1988, police driving standards have been judged in the same way as those for any other driver despite the additional training they receive and the various exemptions that apply to them. Following a Police Federation campaign, there was a Home Office consultation which included a question on whether the new looser standards should apply only to pursuit or to police response driving generally. Clauses 4 to 6 give effect to the proposed changes, which would judge police driving against the standards of a competent and careful police officer with additional training. The new standards are to be applied to police purposes generally. However, this is a very wide definition. My amendment suggests that it should be limited to pursuit only.

I fully accept that there is an argument that it could also include I-grade—immediate grade—responses. I know that the grading of police responses varies from one force to another but, generally, I-grade calls are those where the immediate presence of a police officer will have a significant impact on the outcome of an incident. It is typically categorised as where there is likely to be a danger to life, a serious threat of violence, serious damage to property or serious injury. The response time is 15 minutes. The other grades of police response are generally called significant, S grade, or extended, E grade, and they do not involve a risk to life or injury. S grade gives a response time of 60 minutes and E grade 48 hours. Clearly, in neither of those cases is there a justification for extremely fast speeds and less than the normal, competent standards of driving that the rest of us ordinary mortals are expected to follow. I would therefore appreciate an explanation from the Minister as to why any kind of police purpose would be regarded as acceptable. We need a greater justification for these changes.

Amendments 15 and 18 also probe the impact of these changes by suggesting that the Secretary of State be given the power to extend the new standards to other emergency services. Noble Lords will understand that this is an inquiry. Ambulance drivers and drivers of fire engines also receive special training. They are highly skilled drivers, trained to break the normal rules of the road. They respond to calls where there is an immediate danger to life. It could be argued that that applies routinely in the case of ambulance drivers, whereas it probably applies fairly exceptionally in the case of the police. My question to the Minister is this: where do the other emergency services stand in relation to the changes to the rules that the Government are suggesting in this legislation? Are we to expect changes for other emergency services in further legislation, or is that not necessary for legal reason that I have not been able to uncover?

I realise, of course, that the two sets of amendments do not sit particularly well together. I am not arguing a case one way or the other. I am simply seeking to emphasise that these are probing amendments to see what is in the Government’s mind. What is their intention?

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, I have Amendments 14 and 17 in this group. I hope—in fact I am confident—that my noble friend the Minister will give a full explanation of the purpose of these clauses in the Bill, in response to the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson. My concern is the inclusion of staff members in these new tests of dangerous and careless driving. I can understand the need to include civilian police driving instructors, but what I do not understand is the inclusion of other staff members. I hope that the Minister can explain why they need to be included.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, this is a difficult and contentious part of the Bill. There has been much debate for decades about the police approach to vehicle pursuit in particular, and the ability of emergency service drivers to disregard traffic signs and speed limits in an emergency. There have been tragedies where emergency vehicles on their way to serious and urgent incidents have ignored traffic lights or give way signs, or driven on the wrong side of the road, often in an attempt to save or protect lives, and tragically they have been involved in collisions with innocent members of the public, causing serious injury and sometimes loss of life, as my noble friend Lady Randerson has so graphically illustrated from her own personal experience.

This is perhaps the less contentious of the two areas. But even here, for police control room staff—I am sure the same happens with the fire brigade and the ambulance service—calls are graded as follows: emergencies, with arrival as soon as possible; immediate, with arrival within an hour; or routine. This is to ensure that police vehicles are not driven at speed unnecessarily.

I declare an interest as a former police officer who, although in possession of a full driving licence, attended a six-week, full-time police driving course just to become a standard police driver. I was not authorised to drive high-powered cars designed for use in responding to emergency calls and I was not allowed to become involved in vehicle pursuit of criminals, but simply to be a police driver answering routine calls. Of course, it is possible to become inadvertently involved in a chase, when a car that is asked to pull over refuses to stop, as happened to me on occasion, but as soon as a qualified driver was behind, I dropped out of the pursuit. Being an advanced trained driver involved many more weeks of intensive training; from memory, two six-week courses, with a very high failure rate. The courses were highly sought after and awarded to only the most experienced officers. Police drivers are trained to some of the highest driver standards in the world.

In addition, police control room staff have the authority to direct police vehicles to withdraw from pursuits where the driver of the police vehicle involved is not suitable to conduct the pursuit, where the seriousness of the offence alleged does not justify the risks associated with a high-speed chase, or where the driving conditions —the type of road, the time of the day or any other factor; my noble friend mentioned the presence of pedestrians, for example—present an unreasonable risk to the public and the officers who are involved in the pursuit.

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[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe, to his place, and wish him well in his role. If I had realised that he was responding, I would have said that when I made my initial remarks. I apologise and look forward to our discussions.

One thing I did before discussing this group and the next group of amendments—which are incredibly important and deal with really difficult areas of law—was to Google some of the problems. Before I look at some of the examples, just from Googling, of where there have been problems around police pursuits of one sort or another, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, for sharing her horrible, terrible and awful experience with the Committee. That is another example of the sorts of issues that can arise from a police pursuit, and thankfully she is here to tell us the tale. We all found it very moving.

As I say, just from Googling, there are various examples that show some of the difficulties: an M27 police pursuit and 100-mile-per-hour chase, with a driver weaving in and out of traffic; “Driver, 18, narrowly misses bus in police pursuit”; “Driver loses police in wrong-way pursuit”; “Car driven along a railway track to escape the police”. This is not to question any of those individual cases—I did not read them; I just looked at the headlines—but a quick Google shows the extent of the problems that arise. Clearly, as it stands, the Government are seeking to address a very real issue. It is not easy, because if you are the victim of a crime, or something is going on, you want the police to respond as quickly as possible. It is a difficult situation for the police, and these clauses seek to deal with that. I appreciate that these are probing amendments, as I think the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, said, but they raise important issues that will need clarifying in both this group and the next.

We welcome these clauses because, like most people, we have been saying for a long time that there is a need for proper and improved protection for police drivers, who regularly put themselves in danger in the line of duty to pursue suspects. That is what we all want them to do. These clauses put recognition of the training that officers have had and the purposes of the journeys that they take into law. We should pay tribute to the Police Federation for the work it has done in campaigning consistently for this. As I have said already, however, we can see that issues arise from it—indeed, they have already been raised by the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, and the noble Earl opposite.

Amendments 13 and 16 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, narrow the clauses to police pursuit. We can see the purpose of the amendments when rereading the Bill, which says:

“Subsection (1B) applies where a designated person … is driving for police purposes”.


I suggest to the Minister that that is a bit vague. What on earth does it mean? Without being sarcastic, “police purposes” could mean that you get in a car to drive down the road because you have to go and see somebody about a crime. That is a police purpose. I am not suggesting that any police officer would therefore drive at 100 miles per hour to do that, but we can see the problem that the noble Baroness is trying to get at; “police purposes” is really wide-ranging. On the other hand—and no doubt the Minister will say this when he responds—saying “police pursuit purposes” narrows it down to the extent that we end up excluding the possibility of the police having an emergency response to things that we would all wish them to have an emergency response to. That is why, I suspect, the noble Baroness has made them probing amendments. Indeed, she said that if you thought somebody was in danger, or if a murder, serious rape or something like was that taking place, you would not want the police driving along slowly to get there. You would want them—in a proper way—getting there as soon as possible with an armed response or whatever response was appropriate.

On one hand, the Bill has, “police purposes”, and I am not sure that that is drafted as well as it might be, but then the definition we would want—“police pursuit purposes”—probably narrows it too much, which is why I am pleased it is a probing amendment. The Committee wants the Government to come back, I think, with something that encapsulates that competing and conflicting point about where we go with respect to that.

Amendment 17 from the noble Earl, Lord Attlee—again, this is the point of any Committee—removes any driver from the Bill who is not a constable or civilian driving instructor who is training a police driver. He is saying to the Government, and I think it is a really good point, that they have a long list of designated persons in the Bill—I will not read them all out. I remind the Committee that it does not apply just to the police force; it applies—and it is a good thing the Government added this to the Bill—to the British Transport Police, the Civil Nuclear Police Authority, the Chief Constable of the Ministry of Defence, the Scottish Police Authority and the National Crime Agency. These can be designated and it gives power to the chief constables and chief officers of those to designate a person, to give them the authority to drive in that way if they have received training. The noble Earl, Lord Attlee, is therefore right to ask why. What is the Government’s justification for extending this to that range? There might be a very good reason for it, but it is a point we need to understand.

To conclude on this group of amendments, can the Minister shed light on my earlier point as well as who is covered by the current list of designated persons in the Bill and why they have been included?

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, if I may come in briefly before my noble friend the Minister speaks, I think the term “for police purposes” appears in other forms of road traffic law. I am not certain, and maybe the Minister can help us on that.

On “police purposes”, I have given the Committee an example of where a police driver might choose to go very fast indeed but perfectly safely. Suppose a passenger carrying vehicle, a minibus, breaks down on the motorway somewhere. As soon as the driver tells the police control room they are a passenger carrying vehicle and they have passengers in the back of that vehicle, I imagine that the police will try to get there as fast as they possibly can, to get a police car behind that broken-down vehicle. That would be a “police purpose”. It is not a pursuit, it is not after criminals; however, a police driver in those circumstances, because he is properly trained in the way that the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, says, would be expected to identify a change in road surface. The noble Lord, Lord Paddick, will remember being trained to identify a change in road surface, so actually, if he fails to identify a change in road surface, he could in fact be caught by the changes proposed by the Government.

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, and my noble friend Lord Attlee for explaining their amendments. I think it is clear that we all want the same outcome, which is protecting police officers who are pursuing dangerous criminals, but also protecting the public. The Government believe that Clauses 4 to 6 of the Bill achieve a sensible balance in meeting these objectives. We believe police officers must be able to do their jobs effectively and keep the public safe without fear of prosecution for simply doing their job in the manner that they are trained to do. The noble Lord, Lord Coaker, pointed to some really quite poignant examples of exactly that.

Current laws do not recognise the training that police drivers undertake and the tactics they may have to employ to respond to emergencies and pursue criminals. The new test will allow courts to judge their standard of driving against a “competent and careful” police constable with the same level of training, providing assurance that their skills and training will be taken into account. The new comparison with a “competent and careful” police driver takes into account whether a police driver with the same training would have reasonably made the same decision under the same circumstances.

I was very moved by the personal experiences of the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson. Her Amendments 13 and 16 seek to specify that the new standard should apply only to “police pursuit purposes”, rather than all “police purposes”.

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I hope that I have been able to persuade noble Lords that the approach taken in these clauses is the right one and that, on this basis, the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, will be content to withdraw her amendment.

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, could the Minister tell us what powers ambulance drivers and fire engine drivers have in terms of being able to disregard speed limits and traffic regulations? He may choose to write to me—that will be fine—but I think it would be very helpful for the Committee to know what those drivers can and cannot do. I understand his point that the requirements of the police are more extensive.

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

I undertake to write to my noble friend.

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[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, we are extraordinarily lucky to have the expertise of the noble Lord, Lord Paddick. I have just one anxiety about a national standard: conditions in the Metropolitan Police area are different from those facing, say, Devon and Cornwall Police. Devon and Cornwall Police might not have to dismount someone riding a motorbike illegally very often, whereas I suspect it is something the Metropolitan Police has to do quite often. On the one hand, I can see the benefit of national police standards, but I have an anxiety that they might not meet the different needs of different types of police force.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

I am grateful to the noble Earl for his intervention. I think national standards would say that the tactic of colliding with a stolen motorbike was an acceptable tactic that officers could be compared against whether or not it was actually used by particular forces, bearing in mind the circumstances faced by different forces. So, legally, officers in Devon and Cornwall could use that tactic according to the national standard, but it would be very rare for them to use it—if ever at all.

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[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

My Lords, the amendments would improve the Bill. The legislation in some respects is too loose, and needs to be tightened. I hope that, when we move from Committee to Report in a few weeks, the Minister will have had time to reflect on the previous group but also on some of the points being made here, because that will make what we all want much more likely to happen. I hope that he will be able to reflect on the points that noble Lords have made and come forward with the Government’s own amendments to take account of those points, some of which are exceedingly logical and good and would enhance the Bill and what the Government are seeking to achieve.

The amendments raise key issues in relation to the police driving provisions. The aim of the clause is not to allow the police to drive without safeguards or scrutiny but to ensure that they are not criminalised for what they have been trained to do. Amendment 19 raises a reasonable question about national standards for competent and carefully trained drivers. As we will come on to in Amendment 20, there are various levels of training, and the number of fully trained officers will differ between forces. However, that does not alter the fact that there is a need to set out in more detail and with more clarity what a nationally recognised standard will look like. Will it be covered in the training that officers receive, and is the Minister confident that the Bill makes it clear what a national standard means? The noble Earl, Lord Attlee, posed a reasonable question, which was answered well by the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, about what that means between different police forces such as Devon and Cornwall and the Metropolitan Police, and how they do things. Those are the sort of points that the Minister needs to raise.

On Amendment 20, the idea of a reasonableness defence is an issue that officers are concerned about, which was raised consistently in the Commons. The noble Lord, Lord Paddick, did not mention that quite as much as he did the national standards, but we need to ask how this whole area of reasonableness, which is used in the courts, stands with respect to this Bill. It is difficult to craft an answer, but the issue goes back to the level of training that an officer receives, which varies from force to force. It not only varies from force to force, however: the level of training varies within the police force.

Let me give an example for clarity. If I am a member of the public on the street, I know generally what a response car looks like, and you would expect a response car driver to have had the highest level of training, as the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, said he had received in the past. It is about a proper response driver responding to emergencies or pursuing a vehicle. That is what you would expect if you were a member of the public. But not all police cars are response cars. What about a police van? I have seen police vans driving after people. What happens then?

Is this level of training—police pursuit—available only to response drivers? What about other drivers, or will they be compared to the normal standard? This takes the police into very difficult territory. I have not been a serving police officer like the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, but I can only imagine that if someone said, “Officer, a mile down the road there is a really serious incident”, and a police van driver did not put the blue lights on and go down there, and as a consequence a murder or a rape took place, people are not going to say, “That officer driving the police van was quite right; he did not respond in the way that he should because he has not had the proper level of training”. This takes us into difficult territory, and it is also about the reputation of the police.

What happens, however, if the police van driver does that, but then crashes or injures somebody else? I thought that was the point of Amendment 20 and the reasonableness defence: you would expect the police officer driving the van to do that, even though they are not trained to the level of the police response driver. From the Bill, however, it is not clear whether the police van driver—I am making that up as an example—would be able to do that and respond to an emergency situation with the same level of protection that the Bill tries to give to a response-level trained driver, whereas the public would expect them both to respond in the same way.

That is the point of the reasonableness test that Amendment 20 seeks to drive into the Bill. I hope that I have given a clear enough example of the sort of situation that might arise for a police officer, whether operating in Devon and Cornwall, the middle of London, Sheffield, Cardiff or wherever.

This is the point of the Committee: it drives that level of detail that seeks to clarify the way the legislation is drafted—as we saw with the previous grouping, where there is a real problem around the phrase “police purpose”—but also tries to ensure that the legislation delivers in both its wording and its intention.

On the drafting of the Bill, can the Minister just give us some assurance that officers with basic police driver training would be protected if they found themselves having to respond to an incident that ideally required a higher level of training? That is a fundamental question and if I were a police officer driving a vehicle that was not a response vehicle, I would want to know whether I was protected by law in the way that we seek to protect other drivers.

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, I think the answer to the noble Lord’s question is that, if the police officer is driving more aggressively than he is trained to do and he has an accident, he is in trouble because he is driving outside of what he is trained to do.

[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

May I speak? Sorry, I do not know what the rules are. That is the point that I was making, and I am asking the Minister: what is the answer? The public’s perception of that would be, frankly, dreadful from the police point of view. There is an issue here for the Minister to resolve and to clarify for the police forces and the people driving.

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

I have two points: one is that we are in Committee, so we can speak as many times as we like, and the other is that the public may have to be disappointed, because the police officer may not be able to do everything that the public expect. The public could complain; there is a complaints procedure, so the police could explain why they could not respond in the way that the public would expect.

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

Thank you, my Lords—I have enjoyed this debate. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, for setting out the rationale for his amendments and I thank all other noble Lords who made a contribution. I was particularly delighted to hear that the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, is such a supporter of the traffic police, although I found her relish for car crashes a little upsetting.