Policing and Crime Bill

Earl of Lytton Excerpts

Monday 18th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Lytton (CB)]

My Lords, I declare such interests as I have outside the work of this House only in respect of the fact that I hold a firearms licence, although your Lordships will be glad to know that it is not on firearms that I intend to speak today. I welcome the chance to debate the Bill, despite the number of trees that appear to have been felled in order to print it and its associated documentation. It is the next, if not the final, stage in a process set in place by our new Prime Minister when she was Home Secretary, which she undertook with great courage, if I may say so, but it remains unfinished business.

I echo what others have said: our police forces are a vital resource. I pay tribute to the courage of those who serve in them and their willingness to put themselves in danger for the protection of the public, as the noble Lord, Lord Wasserman, said. Their record of interrupting criminal activities is a fine one and I do not believe that the majority of officers are anything other than thoroughly decent, diligent and honest.

The Minister outlined the Government’s intentions, to which I add my broad support. The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, identified a number of undeniably good bits in the Bill. But the fact remains—and this is why I may appear relentlessly critical of a service that I consider so very important—that there are still far too many shortcomings and I do not believe that their causes or frequency have reduced materially. Indeed, I believe it is a cultural matter.

On crime figures, the Office for National Statistics has downgraded police crime records to what I can describe only as near-junk status. On what government Ministers will now base claims in relation to crime trends I know not, when it is clear that whole areas of activity are imperfectly recorded, if at all. I do not regard the misrecording of crime as a trivial matter; rather, as the police themselves might say, I tend to the view that apparently small infractions could be indicators of more serious activity. It certainly has terrible consequences, as illustrated in the Rotherham and Jacqueline Oakes cases. Criminologist Dr Rodger Patrick, to whom I spoke recently, has labelled the latter as a “Nelson’s eye” approach to known issues.

I have been tracking since 2012 the case of a one-time senior parliamentary researcher to a now-deceased member of your Lordships’ House. It involves the South Wales Police area. I have identified a number of elements that I regard as questionable. First, there appears to have been the inclusion without proof of names on a database of persons whom the police—on their own whim—thought might be troublesome, and unregulated sharing of those data with other agencies. The standard force wording, which appears without evidence or caution, reads:

“You should be aware that these details will be placed on an anti-social behaviour database which holds information relating to those involved in such behaviour. This information will be held in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998 and may be shared with partner agencies if this is necessary to prevent crime and disorder, as permitted by the Crime and Disorder Act 1998”.

This seems to bypass the oversight of the data commissioner and is outside the subject data access system.

Secondly, there appear to have been attempts to coerce a neighbour into a deal that was intended to be prejudicial to another claimant party. I quote from an August 2007 neighbour witness statement in connection with a child constantly kicking balls into the adjoining garden. It says:

“At the time of my meeting with the Police in November 2006 we were advised by the Police that the Claimant was well known to them and that they had had many dealings with him. The Police also advised us that should the Claimant’s accusations continue, his next step would be to contact the local Police’s regional superiors and inform them that he had made several complaints regarding balls going into his garden, and that nothing had been done about it. As a consequence, The Police attempted to pre-empt the Claimant’s next step by offering us a kind of ‘deal’ whereby our eldest son”—

I will not give the name—

“(fourteen years old at the time) would accept a Level 1 ASBO for playing football in our back garden in order that the Police could issue the Claimant with a Level 2 or 3 ASBO. I and my wife were very apprehensive about this ‘deal’ at the time and the whole affair”.

Well they might be. I shared those comments with Dr Patrick and he said:

“This may appear to be a minor incident but I suspect it represents the tip of a very large iceberg; it involves the clearest abuse of non-judicial disposals which is blighting the prospects of citizens and risks the criminalisation of childhood”.

It is also an example of what might be termed in the trade “stitching”.

Next, there was conflation of what was and should have been treated as a civil property boundary matter into a criminal harassment case. There was the unjustified alteration of a charge sheet without the accused’s knowledge, apparently to beef up the case. Here the amendment was to introduce a false reference to violence—highly significant when one realises that the accused was a keen target shooter and that the amended wording would be fatal to his continued holding of a firearms licence. Then there was interference with witness statements and the use of redacted witness evidence. A piece of information that came to me—indeed, I identified it as false—was a bit of photographic evidence used in the criminal proceedings, which had been doctored. There was the manipulation of process, including defying the order of a judge in relation to disclosure, to the material detriment of a defendant’s case. In addition to all this, important documents mysteriously went missing from the court files so that they could not be brought before the judge.

By all these means there was the procurement of a conviction and the imposition of a restraint order of such severity that it prevented the accused defending himself against subsequent opportunistic incursions by the neighbour with whom the original dispute had started. There was a deliberate failure by the police to investigate or prevent such actions; a refusal to investigate instances of potential sabotage of a motor vehicle; and apparent collusion involving bodies such as the City of Cardiff Council and Welsh Water in a manner prejudicial to proper public administration and, in my view, obstructive of investigations by independent professionals and the reasonable interests of a private householder.

I can only speculate on why things were taken to such spectacularly questionable lengths but I suppose it might be connected with the accused’s knowledge of firearms and his detailed research into police corruption, coupled with his publicly challenging some influential local interests through the local police and communities together—PACT—committee. There was certainly motive and opportunity for certain vested interests to want him silenced, and from a police point of view, in the light of the Lynette White, “Newsagent Three” and Sean Wall cases, there was every reason for an interested parliamentarian and his researcher to seek to expose the truth about police actions.

Sadly, this case is not isolated; nor does it affect only small fry or little local neighbourhood spats. I will not reel off my list of previous failings up and down the country, but will point to the further information we now have in respect of Hillsborough and Rotherham; the deliberate attempt by the Metropolitan Police Service to prevent scrutiny which involved shedding documents, as noted in the Ellison inquiry; and the multiagency failings which had fatal outcomes in the Kayleigh-Anne Palmer case. Jacqueline Oakes might still be alive had proper attention been paid to known circumstances and instances of violent abuse. Therefore, ongoing gaming activities in the West Midlands force, which Dr Patrick refers to, cannot be regarded as entirely innocent. Then there was the aptly named “Nick”, the supposedly reliable informant whose allegations—inadequately checked, it appears, by the police—caused several notable people with outstanding records of public service to be implicated in some very serious offences. Indeed, one Member of your Lordships’ House went to his grave with the finger of suspicion still pointing at him, when the police already knew some time prior that there was no credible evidence against him. Therefore, a revised pre-charge bail provision would perhaps make some difference to such matters.

Your Lordships will recall the police raid on a celebrity’s home in which the media had been tipped off previously so that their helicopter was overhead as the police arrived, and that subsequently the chief constable in question appeared before the Home Affairs Select Committee but dodged the question of how the press had known about it before the police arrived, claiming that it was an “operational matter”. This was just one of several celebrities to be poorly treated. As serious as child sexual exploitation and similar crimes may be, they do not justify the methods of a witch-hunt.

This is all totally unacceptable. I note the Committee on Standards in Public Life report by my noble friend Lord Bew, who I think may be lurking behind me somewhere, entitled Tone from the Top, in which it was mentioned that around a third of police forces are under some sort of investigation. That is far too many. It boils down to this: the police have been given non-recourse powers to decide on their own initiative who is the party at fault. In the context of anti-social behaviour and harassment, their powers are near absolute. However, the police are currently ill-suited for such a task. When challenged, there is often cover-up, and obfuscation and blocking measures are put in place; when cornered, their get-out-of-jail card is to claim it is an “operational matter”; and if it involves one of their own or an associate, they quite literally close ranks. These things are not in any way unique to the police, but cultural matters in all sorts of organisations. However, in the police this happens to be of particular importance.

I would therefore welcome the strengthening of police regulation and oversight through the Bill, were I convinced that it was not just rearranging the deckchairs or rebranding. I have long considered that both HMIC and the IPCC are too close to policing themselves, too imbued with police culture and too narrow in their focus. I hope the Bill will put that right and I am glad to see that police-on-police investigation may be set to reduce, because procedurally this fails the standards of independence, objectivity and necessary vigour on behalf of the public. However, I am doubtful whether the proposed complaints handling by police and crime commissioners is the answer, and some PCCs seem to be far too close to their chief constables. Scrutiny across multiagency working seems to be addressed in the Bill, but only by creating multiple scrutineers who must work together. This should long since have been the case but it is precisely what has not been working, so I hope noble Lords will forgive my doubts about that. I therefore advocate tighter measures.

The question of what constitutes “operations” needs to be clarified and updated. While I accept that there should be no political interference in front-line and especially necessarily covert activities, there should none the less be accountability and proper independent scrutiny, even if some of it is behind closed doors. There is also a need to address political influence over police activity through the target culture, which was identified as long ago as 1999, in an HMIC report. Political convenience cannot come before performance of public duty.

This is no time for half measures or tinkering at the edges. So long as public policy does not force effective performance and integrity across the piece, each player will operate to the rules and agendas it makes up for itself. That has to stop. If there is political will, we can fix many of these things in the Bill, and I hope there will be some consensus in seeking to amend it.