Police: Restoring Public Confidence

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd May 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, it is a real privilege to follow the noble Baroness’s thought-provoking speech. I first had the pleasure of knowing her when, as chairman of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee in the other place, I visited Northern Ireland on a frequent and regular basis for some five years. I developed admiration for the way in which she operated with real impartiality. During most of my time there, she was helped a great deal by the fact that there was an admirable chief police officer in Northern Ireland, Sir Hugh Orde, from whom a lot of people could learn a very great deal.

As the noble Baroness spoke, I felt that we really have a solution here, because we ought to have a police ombudsman in England. It is not a difficult thing to do but we need a respected figure—not, as my noble friend Lord Hunt put it, people from the police marking their own homework. To have somebody of real distinction, with a real knowledge of the law and of how policing works, could be very helpful indeed. I ask my noble friend the Minister to discuss that with the Home Secretary and his colleagues. It is an initiative that could come out of this debate, which was so admirably introduced by my noble friend Lord Lexden, for whom we all have great admiration because of his tenacity and persistence, particularly on the area on which my noble friend Lord Hunt of Wirral spoke. If ever there were something that besmirched—I use the word very deliberately—the reputation of the police in this country, it was the way in which the basic presumption that a man or woman is innocent until proven guilty was completely swept aside.

A number of great public servants—three in particular —were themselves besmirched. The first was the great Lord Bramall, whose memorial service was held only a few days ago in Winchester Cathedral; I gather that it was a most moving occasion.

The second was Leon Brittan—Lord Brittan—a colleague of mine and of my noble friend Lord Hunt in the other place. He was the personification of integrity. That does not mean that he was always right, but he was a man of absolute honour. His last days were made miserable, not just by his grave illness but by the way his reputation was traduced. What is more, and in a sense even sadder, was that his wife—now his widow—had to live with it.

The third was, of course, Sir Edward Heath, about whom my noble friend Lord Hunt spoke movingly. He was an extraordinary man. I was one of those elected to the 1970 Parliament when he became Prime Minister. Since then we have had a number of Prime Ministers, but none more honourable than Edward Heath, or more determined to serve his country by doing what he thought was the right thing for it.

I have to say that it is an absolute scandal that this has been so badly handled by successive Home Secretaries. I make a plea, endorsing that made by my noble friend Lord Hunt of Wirral: the Government must now pull their finger out and establish a time-limited inquiry under a lawyer of real eminence—possibly a former member of the Supreme Court—given 12 months in which to report back to the Government and Parliament. I hope that my noble friend Lord Sharpe of Epsom will take that request away from this debate and make a positive report.

We have talked about the Met. I read something in the Times the other day that encapsulated what we are dealing with. We have referred to the appalling Wayne Couzens and the ghastly crime that he committed against an innocent woman, Sarah Everard. We have talked of other police officers who have transgressed. I pay tribute to Sir Mark Rowley, who is clearly trying his best to re-establish the Met, in effect, so that it again becomes a respected institution. But the other day the Times reported about a woman, a property owner, who was disturbed about some threats to the square in which she lived and put up a handful of little notices. The police told her that she should not have done that, but they also said:

“Next time it ends in handcuffs”.


Is that really the way you treat people for a minor transgression?

In recent years, the police have gone right over the top when pursuing so-called hate crimes—not just in London; we had a notorious case in Lincolnshire just a couple of years ago. What people want from a police force is the knowledge that they are a body people they can respect who will help to ensure that their property is safe and, if it is broken into, the crime will be thoroughly investigated. That is what people want. They also want to know that their women can walk safely on the streets. For example, just a few weeks ago a London taxi driver told me he was upset because various road closures and diversions at the end of a street in one of the London boroughs—I think it was Hackney—meant that he had to drop people off at a corner to walk 100 yards or so. He told me, “That’s inconvenient enough in the rain, but the other night I had a young lady, and I stayed in my cab and watched that she got to her door”.

That is not the atmosphere in which we wish to see the police operating. We wish to see them bringing structure by their presence; my noble friend Lord Lexden referred to the bobby on the beat. He, like me, probably remembers “Dixon of Dock Green”—as surely we all do—and the local police station, which gave real comfort and encouragement to people.

Of course, one of the problems that we in this place have to face up to is that there has been a very real sea- change in society. When I was brought up, we accepted that certain things were right and certain things were wrong, and they were really moulded on Judeo-Christian civilisation. We all committed sins. We all did wrong, but at least we knew we had done it. It is not like that today. “You have your truth, I have my truth”; what nonsense. There ought to be certain accepted standards within which society can operate because, if there are not, society cannot properly operate. That is one of the problems that face the police, because people do not automatically accept that a certain thing is wrong. It is also one of the reasons why we have had all these problems within the police. We have clearly had within the police—especially within the Met, as so graphically illustrated recently in the report by the noble Baroness, Lady Casey—officers who have conceded to your right and my right, your truth and my truth and your wrong and my wrong, and they have not been operating within a consensual society.

What is the answer? Of course there are many but, in the context of today’s debates, one answer is “Dixon of Dock Green”—having units within the Met and in our other towns and cities where it is accepted that there are people there who will bring a sense of cohesion. Remember the cry some years ago in the NHS, “Bring back matron”? We want to bring back the superintendent in the regional or borough office. We want to bring back people who have a degree of real authority, answerable to somebody with supreme authority.

I come back to where I began. I am sorry for speaking my mind in this way. I have thought a lot about this, but I did not prepare a speech for this debate because I wanted to reflect on what others have said. I come back to where I began: I believe that one of the answers could lie, in England—it is for the other nations of the UK to determine how they go forward—with a police ombudsman who would be able to give a degree of confidence to the general public that, where there were real complaints against the police, those would be thoroughly, impartially and scrupulously investigated and fearlessly reported on. I commend that suggestion especially to your Lordships this afternoon.