Police Federation Reform (Normington Report)

Debate between Keith Vaz and David Lammy

Thursday 13th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) on an excellent speech. I thank him and the other sponsors of this Backbench Business Committee debate for ensuring that the House can discuss the recommendations of the Normington report at an early stage. This is our first opportunity in many years to have such a discussion, although we often discuss policing issues in the House; we discussed the police grant here only yesterday.

I begin by paying tribute to the hard-working police officers in the police service, including those such as PC Craig Smith. With an off-duty paramedic, David King, he struggled to free the driver of a burning car in Leicestershire and saved the person at risk. He was a runner-up in the police bravery awards, which I, with Ministers and others, attend annually to pay tribute to the marvellous work being done throughout the country by individual police officers.

I have to say that, following a proposal from the hon. Member for Northampton North (Michael Ellis), the Select Committee on Home Affairs has unanimously agreed to hold an inquiry into the Police Federation. The terms of reference will be announced next week, and I hope that they will provide an opportunity for a full-scale inquiry into the matters that have been raised. I shall return to this point at the end of my short speech.

Morale in the police service is at an all-time low, as the Stevens report recognised. Indeed, if Members talk to any police officer stationed here in the Palace of Westminster, they will hear that people are deciding to leave the force because of the current state of affairs in policing. That is regrettable. There is an obligation on all of us to ensure that we have the best police service in the world—which I think it is—and we also need to ensure that the concerns of Police Federation members are met.

I want to mention the case of the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell). It is not the subject of the debate—we are talking about the Police Federation—but the right hon. Gentleman and his family have gone through a terrible ordeal. I believe that he has now been vindicated, given that 11 of those involved have now become the subject of misconduct hearings and one has gone to prison. The cases of three witnesses who appeared before the Home Affairs Committee are still outstanding and are the subject of an Independent Police Complaints Commission inquiry that has been held in abeyance because of a judicial review application.

Those of us who have been around for a long time have asked ourselves: if this could happen to a serving Cabinet Minister, what hope would there be if it happened to one of our constituents? The right hon. Gentleman has done the House and the public a great service, from his position of power as an elected Member of the House, but his situation is quite different from those of people in Leicester and elsewhere in the country. He has been vindicated, and it is important that a line should now be drawn and that people should move on, for the sake of him and his family, and of the reputation of the police as a whole.

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

My right hon. Friend makes his point very effectively. Does he agree that in cases such as these, continuing litigation could eventually bankrupt someone, and that the organisation is capable of going way too far? What would that mean for our ordinary constituents, who simply would not have the means to defend themselves in similar circumstances?

[Keith Vaz]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his intervention. I am a little concerned at the number of cases in which someone criticises a serving police officer and ends up being served with a legal notice or threatened with legal proceedings as a result of raising issues of legitimate concern. The Select Committee inquiry will want to look at such cases.

The right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield and his family must have been through a terrible ordeal. It is time to draw a line and move on, and to think about how we can reform the structure, now that the personal issues have been resolved and people have gone to jail or faced misconduct hearings.

Immigration Bill

Debate between Keith Vaz and David Lammy

Tuesday 22nd October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Keith Vaz]

It worries me if that is happening; it is certainly not the best way to enforce immigration policy. The best way is to go through the proper process of making an application. If the result is negative, the person should leave the country. I have just had figures from Capita and the Home Office for the number of people who have left the country as a result of the £2.8 million contract that the Home Office gave Capita—although I cannot understand why it was not possible for Home Office officials to write the letters and send the e-mails instead of giving the job to a private company. According to those figures, 20,000 cases have been closed as a result of Capita’s activities.

I will come to my second bit of praise for the Home Secretary at the end of my speech, but I first wish to highlight a couple of issues that cause me concern. The first is the issue of landlords checking people’s passports, which will cause huge problems. The shadow Home Secretary said that people might have to look at 400 different European identity cards and documents. I am concerned that ordinary landlords who are not trained in immigration policy will simply not know the difference between leave to remain, indefinite leave and other Home Office statuses placed on non-British passports. Most landlords, when they grant tenancies, already ask for copies of people’s passports. The risk is that the only people who will be able to get accommodation are those with British passports. That means that a lot of people with a perfect right to remain here will not be able to get accommodation because landlords are too scared or do not understand the law.

I recently visited Calais to look at the border and I asked our excellent border officials how they were able to test whether certain passports and documents were forgeries. They brought out this very big, expensive machine. It was about 10 years old and not the most sophisticated piece of equipment, but they told me, “We use this to find out whether a document is a forgery.” We cannot expect landlords to have such machines—they would not be able to afford them—but if we do not train them or have regular inspections, which we could not afford, it is difficult to know how the provisions will work in practice. In theory, it is a brilliant idea, but it is totally unworkable in practice.

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

Does my right hon. Friend know that up to 40% of the British population do not have a passport and do not travel abroad? Many of those people are poor, and they will not be able to get housing because landlords will not take the risk.

[Keith Vaz]

I did not know that and I thank my right hon. Friend for that information, which suggests an even greater problem with what the Government propose. Those Members who are lucky enough to serve on the Bill Committee—not me, I should inform the Whips—will need to look at this issue very carefully.

My second concern is the removal of rights of appeal. This is a crazy idea. The one way in which people can be sure of whether they can stay in the country or have to leave is the appeals process, whereby someone with the authority of a judge looks at the case. There is nothing wrong with the appeals process. I know that the Minister for Immigration recently said that immigration lawyers get too much money and that one of the purposes of the Bill is to cut their income. I declare an interest, as my wife is an immigration lawyer, although she does no legal aid work. If the decision making is right in the beginning, cases would not have to go to appeal.

The Minister for Immigration is prepared to listen to points made by Members of Parliament. Whenever we have put points to him, he has listened carefully, and I think that he should listen seriously to the idea of creating a hub in London. He has talked about the need for administrative reviews. The problem with those reviews is that unqualified people have to look at legal issues. I am not sure whether the same immigration officials who said no at the first stage are the right people to say no at the second stage, but that is what happens with the entry clearance operation. If someone is knocked back on a visa, but has a right of appeal, they go to the same post and talk to the senior immigration officer who has to make the decision. It would be a much better idea—and I am sorry that the Labour Government did not do it—to create a hub in the UK for cases that have been knocked back. People could go to a senior official at the hub and put arguments for people to come into the UK.

Independent Police Complaints Commission

Debate between Keith Vaz and David Lammy

Tuesday 15th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for giving me the opportunity to debate the Independent Police Complaints Commission, an organisation that has taken on increasing importance in recent months. It is right in such a debate to begin by thanking all local officers in Tottenham for the work that they do day in, day out. The vast majority of them serve us very well indeed. Some of those brave men and women serve their own community, and it is clear that they put others ahead of their own needs. All of them put their lives on the line to keep Tottenham safe, and I thank them for that.

However, for all the bravery of those officers, things very occasionally go wrong, and when they do individual officers must be held to account for their decisions and actions. There is no way of escaping Tottenham’s recent history: there is a history of people in Tottenham dying during or following police contact. I wish to God that this were not true, but anyone who has lived in Tottenham knows just how those deaths have strained the relationship between some of our residents and the police. With the death of Cynthia Jarrett in 1985, Roger Sylvester in 1999, and Mark Duggan this August, Tottenham’s history has been punctuated and measured by these tragic events.

Of course, deaths in police custody or following police contact are not only a Tottenham issue, as, for example, the unexplained death of Christopher Alder in Hull more than a decade ago shows us, and they are not just an issue for the black community. Recent years have seen the deaths of Ian Tomlinson and Jean Charles de Menezes due to police actions. But in Tottenham we do seem to bear our share of these tragic events.

It takes years—decades—of effort to build community relations and to foster a two-way sense of trust between residents and the people who should be their police. Despite a lot of good work, it is the list of deaths that everyone remembers. It is not just the fact that a person has died following contact with the police that is important; how the death is investigated and who carries out the investigation are just as important. That is what I want to discuss this evening.

Before describing how I think the IPCC can be improved, it is important to recognise that the journey to the creation of an independent complaints authority has not been short or without controversy and resistance, because we have come a long way indeed. In 1985 Lord Scarman produced his groundbreaking report on the Brixton riots four years previously. He was deeply concerned about the total breakdown of trust between the police and some of the communities they were supposed to serve. His report called for an independent body to be set up to investigate police complaints as a means of restoring trust.

Unforgivably, it would be another 19 years before the IPCC opened for business. Instead of the Government agreeing to what was so obviously needed, deckchairs were duly rearranged and the old Police Complaints Authority was set up to replace the Police Complaints Board, but it proved just as hapless. Changing a word in the title proved easier than changing the way of working, because in those days it did not matter whether it was the Police Complaints Authority or the Police Complaints Board that conducted the investigation. They were not investigations for the victim, their family or the concerned community; they were investigations by the police and for the police.

The opening of the Stephen Lawrence murder trial yesterday again brings the failures of the Police Complaints Authority into sharp public view. The Macpherson report on Stephen’s death highlighted these failures perfectly. It noted that the authority’s report on the Metropolitan police’s handling of the death was known as the Kent report, principally because the Kent police handled the inquiry into the Metropolitan police. The Kent report began making excuses for the Metropolitan police in its preface:

“The depth of detailed scrutiny applied in the complaints investigation could have found fault in most police criminal investigations. The reader of this report should bear in mind that the benefit of hindsight and the luxury of having time to assess all of the information that was available to the MPS is bound to reveal errors, omissions and flawed judgement.”

The Macpherson report highlighted the shocking extent to which the Police Complaints Authority examined whether racism impacted on the Met’s investigation, stating:

‘Many officers were asked directly whether racism had an impact upon their activities in the case. Predictably they replied in strong terms denying such impact. The result was the finding by Kent that: “Kent Police have found no evidence to support the allegation of racist conduct by any MPS officer involved in the investigation of the murder of Stephen Lawrence.”’

Scarman’s warning in 1985 about the lack of independent oversight of the police had become, 12 years later, the whitewash of the Kent police’s so-called investigation of racism in the Met. Like the Scarman report, the Macpherson report called for an independent body to investigate police complaints.

Thankfully, one Home Affairs Committee report later, the Government listened that time and the IPCC was set up in 2004. Make no mistake: the IPCC is certainly an improvement on what went before, as the police are not investigating themselves. We are pleased about that, but not very pleased, and certainly not content. The death of Mark Duggan tells us why we should not be content with what we have, because it is not yet good enough.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on securing this important and timely debate. Does he share my concern, and that of members of the Home Affairs Committee, that several months after the current chair of the IPPC announced that he was leaving, there is still no replacement? We now understand that the job is to be advertised again. Does he agree that there needs to be a permanent chair to provide that organisation with good leadership?

[Mr Lammy]

I totally agree with my right hon. Friend. I was surprised when I found out that that important role in our country had been vacant for so long. I hope that when he comes to the Dispatch Box to reply to the debate, the Minister will explain that.

The IPCC has two roles, police scrutiny and public guardianship. It is charged with investigating complaints independently, and with the fullest scrutiny, but its role does not stop there. Given that it investigates on behalf of all of us, it must communicate and work with the public.

In the case of the death of Mark Duggan, it remains to be seen whether the IPCC fulfilled its primary duty to scrutinise the actions of the police on 4 August, but it is vital that the commission does all within its power to convince the Duggan family and the wider Tottenham community that its investigation is thorough, impartial and independent. Without that, we will be back to the bad old days of the Kent report and the police investigating police, and I hope that the IPCC do not take us there.

We wait to see whether the IPCC will fulfil its primary duty, but even in the days immediately after Mark Duggan’s death it was clear that it had failed completely and utterly in its secondary duty—that of guardianship. Mark Duggan’s family were forced to learn of the death of their son and father from watching television. That is beyond unacceptable. Why did nobody from the IPCC contact the family on the day of his death, when it had opened its investigation? Despite warnings from people throughout the community, the IPCC failed to communicate with the family until two days after the shooting, and even then it was unable to communicate anything of substance to them. That is not good enough.

Despite employing 15 media officers, the IPCC failed to make an appearance in the media to reassure a sceptical public—certainly in my community—that it would investigate Mark Duggan’s death thoroughly, impartially and independently. Its inability to fulfil that responsibility is difficult to explain. There was no direct communication by the IPCC to the affected communities in Tottenham in the hours and days after Mark Duggan’s death. Would it have been too difficult to hand-deliver a letter to residents of the affected areas, reassuring them of the investigation, explaining the known facts and appealing for calm and co-operation? No, it would not—but yet again, that did not happen.

In the absence of any word from the IPPC, a dangerous vacuum was allowed to open up, and rumours were allowed to take hold in the place of hard facts. That is not good enough. When the supposed facts were released to the media, they were quickly retracted. It was put out that there had been an exchange of fire in the incident that led to Mark Duggan’s death, but that turned out not to be true. Why did that happen? Again, that is far from what we would expect of an organisation with the role of public guardianship.

To this day, communication between the IPCC and Tottenham residents, as well as with the wider black community, appears sparse at best and unthinking at worst. That has to change. The magnitude of the IPCC’s task is immense, and some of the signs leave little hope in the strained community that I represent. Two thirds of people have heard of the IPCC, a number that has barely budged since the body was founded seven years ago, but one third of those think that it is part of the police—again, a figure that has barely budged. Ethnic minorities are even less likely to have heard of the IPCC, and they are more likely to believe that it is part of the police. That is the scale of the challenge awaiting us.