Angiolini Inquiry

Lord Bellingham Excerpts

Monday 8th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bellingham (Con)]

My Lords, will the Minister reflect on Wayne Couzens’s application to become an authorised firearms officer? Those assessing and processing his application were not able to assess the information about the alleged 2015 indecent exposure allegation. If they had been able to do that, his application would obviously have been rejected. All in all, the assessment of the suitability of Wayne Couzens was a lot more lax than had he been a member of the public applying for either a shotgun licence or a firearms licence. Will the Minister reflect on this and see whether lessons can be learned from this part of what was a very long-running investigation and a saga that caused an enormous amount of stress and distress? The Minister was quite right to underline that. I compliment him on how he handled this matter and how his department expedited this inquiry. It is an object lesson to other departments, which have put in place non-statutory investigations and inquiries, that this was done thoroughly and at speed and that it commanded a great deal of public confidence.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for his comments on how the department handled this inquiry that was initially commissioned by the previous Government. As the sponsoring Minister in the Home Office for inquiries, I have been clear that we need to ensure that we have recommendations, that the inquiry is kept to a budget and that those recommendations come as speedily as possible, so that, as the noble Baroness indicated, they can be implemented as a matter of urgency once the Government have had a chance to assess them. I have met Lady Elish on a number of occasions to discuss the progress of the inquiry—to hear not what she is going to say but how the inquiry has reached its conclusions. I am pleased to say that it is proving an effective way of managing the inquiry.

In the case of Wayne Couzens, vetting clearly failed. It is clear that there are lessons to learn about how police officers are vetted. The Government have brought forward proposals already, and we will continue to work with the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the College of Policing to look at how we can improve vetting, to ensure that the police officers who serve the public have the confidence of the public. We can do that by ensuring that there is a proper vetting system to weed out individuals who have potentially committed offences—in the case of the police officer, Wayne Couzens, that self-evidently happened.

There are lessons to be learned, and we will look at them. We are already working on vetting. It is important that we put the strongest mechanism in place to maintain the integrity of the police force. Quite simply, what happened in the abhorrent case of the murder of Sarah Everard is unacceptable. I do not wish to have a situation whereby other police officers in the force, or joining the force, engage in that type of activity.