Police: Restoring Public Confidence

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd May 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, it is an honour and a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Lexden. I congratulate him on an excellent opening speech for this debate and agree with almost every word he said. I pay tribute to him for once again affording us the opportunity to examine the current state of the relationship between the police and the public in our country and, more generally, for his indefatigable work on, and commitment to, this area of policy.

This relationship is fundamental: a nation state in which trust between the police and the public has broken down is itself broken. Max Weber suggested that the defining feature of the modern state is its possession of the monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and in that definition “legitimate” does a lot of heavy lifting. If we are to continue to operate according to the nine Peelian principles that underlie our model of policing, power is legitimate only where it is perceived by the public so to be. Public trust is not merely desirable but an essential precondition for our policing system to work effectively.

To focus on the Met just for a moment or two, it is evident that across large swathes of London the Metropolitan Police no longer enjoys that trust. To supplement the statistics on polling of the public that the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, shared with the Committee, a recent YouGov survey commissioned by the BBC found that 42% of those surveyed either somewhat or strongly distrust the Met as an organisation, that 43% thought more negatively of it compared with the same time last year—so this is a deteriorating relationship —and that 73% felt that some groups were treated differently from others. Perhaps most worrying, however, is the absence of surprise that has greeted those alarming statistics. They were a dismal confirmation of what we already knew rather than an unwelcome surprise.

Some of the reasons for this are obvious and rightly have received extensive media attention. They are the tragedy of Sarah Everard’s kidnap, rape and murder by a serving police officer; the verdict of an inquest that failures by the Met contributed to three of the four murders by Stephen Port; and the complete absence of appropriate vetting and oversight that allowed David Carrick to rape and sexually assault multiple women while continuing to serve as a police officer. But the Baroness Casey Review, published six weeks ago, makes it clear that there are deeply embedded structural issues that compromise both the ethical standing and the operational effectiveness of the Metropolitan Police.

Reading through the noble Baroness’s findings, one paragraph seems to exemplify these failings. It is rather extensive but I make no apology for reading it:

“There is currently no plan for the workforce beyond bringing people in, and no sense of how the thousands of new recruits will breathe fresh life into the force after years of austerity. The vetting system is broken, there is minimal supervision, training and development is not taken seriously, there are no training records and the Met do not know what their workforce needs. People are doing jobs they are not trained to do. Initiative after initiative keeps everyone busy, creating … teams and moving people around but ultimately gets in the way of the core job of keeping Londoners safe and prevents the development of fully developed plans for change”.


The noble Baroness, Lady Casey, goes on to conclude that, when we measure the Met against the Peelian principles that continue to guide its operation “Public consent is broken”, a finding that speaks directly to the Motion we are debating in the name of the noble Lord.

It is important to widen our focus beyond the Met, to the situation across the country. Police are currently solving the lowest proportion of crimes on record, with, according to the latest Home Office figures, only 5.4% of crimes resulting in a charge. That is equivalent to just over one in 20 offences being solved. As my right honourable friend Yvette Cooper pointed out in a recent debate in the other place, nearly 70% of the public now believe, as a direct consequence of this parlous record, that the police have given up on trying to solve crimes such as burglary or shoplifting altogether. In fact, given that we now know that fraud accounts for 41% of crime on the person and that only 1% of police resources are devoted to it, the Government themselves have even given up on referring to these statistics regarding the amount of crime in the country.

What of crimes that disproportionately affect women? A recent report compiled by the charity Victim Support found that over half of women lack confidence that the police will properly investigate their reports of domestic abuse. This is not merely a measure of confidence but of the lived experience of dealing with the police, with four in 10 women who had reported a crime in the last two years saying they had felt “let down” by the police investigation into their case.

I prepared this speech when the time allotted to us was much shorter than it presently is. I therefore felt forced to adopt a somewhat pointillist approach, adducing specific statistical examples rather than going into this issue more comprehensively. I am even more pleased that I follow the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, because he did that for us, so I will not extemporise on that, but these individual data points, taken together, create a truly sobering image of a police service that is losing trust across all sections of the population.

Disappointingly, the Government’s response to this has been to focus on the recruitment of 20,000 new police officers, to replace a comparable number of officers that they themselves—although they were in coalition—previously dismissed on the grounds of economic necessity. Ironically, quite apart from the fact that the fiscal situation in which we find ourselves currently is, to put it mildly, not appreciably better than that which apparently compelled the Government to institute these mass dismissals, there are also deeper structural implications. This extraordinary staff churn has not only compromised the institutional memory of the police force but exposed the weaknesses of the vetting process which has contributed to the stories of misconduct among serving officers.

Last week, the Policing Minister proudly announced that the College of Policing had just finished consulting on a new statutory code of practice for vetting which “will be adopted shortly”. This should be juxtaposed with the verdict of Matt Parr, His Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary, who said that, owing to weak vetting procedures, there are police officers numbered

“in the hundreds, if not low thousands”

who should have been disbarred but are now serving officers. Instituting a new vetting procedure after one of the most rapid recruitment drives in police history is patently absurd. It is rather like watching a gang of thieves load the last of your possessions into the getaway vehicle and only then deciding to put a lock on your door and investigate the idea of installing a burglar alarm.

While I understand the underlying principle of operational independence, it seems that, in the interests of devolving accountability, the current structure of policing is deliberately fragmented. It is this that has led to so many of the challenges that we are debating. I remind your Lordships that, when first establishing the Met Police, Robert Peel reflected on this issue, candidly admitting that his legislation was driven by his

“despair of being able to place our police upon a general footing of uniformity”.—[Official Report, Commons, 28/2/1828; col. 793.]

I support entirely the call for a specific action plan, and support even more that it be in plain English so that, in terms of accountability for Parliament, we know exactly what to expect of it. However, to conclude, I pose three specific short questions on which it would be helpful to hear from the Minister. First, what work is his department doing to ensure that the structural weaknesses identified by the Casey review are not reflected in other forces across the country that have not have the same level of scrutiny as the Met? Secondly, does he feel that the frenetic drive to meet the recruitment target of 20,000 new police officers is a tacit admission that the earlier austerity-driven wave of dismissals was just a mistake? Lastly, what reflections does he or, more importantly, his department have as to the ability of current nationwide policing structures, including PCCs—I am quite sceptical of them—to ensure uniformity and coherence in policing across this country?