Employment Rights Bill

Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 14th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to support the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe. This gives me an opportunity to pay tribute to him and his public service as police commissioner and in the Merseyside Police. It also gives me the opportunity to mention the service of my colleague, my noble friend Lord Sharpe, in the Hong Kong police back in the day.

I declare that I was a special constable in the 1980s. In those days we had a number one uniform and that was it, so it was rather hot on a hot sunny day. We also used to have capes, which we used to put around us and which were quite handy. Nobody quite knew what we had our hands on: it could be a torch, it could be a truncheon or it could be fish and chips. We used to run towards danger with nothing more than a truncheon down our trouser legs. So I pay tribute to special constables, past and present.

As the noble Lord said, it was as a contingency of war that special constables came into being, in the First World War, as many police officers joined the Army to fight over in France and elsewhere. But they have all the legal powers. I remember the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984—the old salts were really quite upset with that new Act, because it meant that they could not carry on doing what they had been doing previously. But, for us new boys and girls, it was quite interesting, and I thought we embraced the change in the spirit that it was meant.

We were all unpaid volunteers serving local communities, including our local community in Macclesfield, serving in the Cheshire Constabulary. I worked at an aircraft factory, working on the nuclear deterrent at the time. I used to work during the day and go out at night to do a full shift, from 6 pm until 10 pm, and perhaps even later: if there was a road traffic accident or if somebody went missing, it could end up going into the early hours. I got up the next day to go to work, and I was proud to do that—I was a very young man and was fit and healthy enough to do it.

The strategic defence review Making Britain Safer: Secure at Home, Strong Abroad mentions the importance of:

“Home defence and resilience: a whole-of-society approach”.


My noble friend made the excellent point that now is the time to consider the threats to our country and the role of civil defence, and indeed of special constables. A “whole-of-society approach” includes “protecting critical national infrastructure”. But the wider point is that we are reliant on reservists more than ever. If you are in the Army, the Navy or the Royal Air Force, there is provision, from your employer, for you to go and serve the nation, but that does not apply to special constables. So I agree with the noble Lord: this is the right place and the right time to give the same treatment to special constables that we give to our Armed Forces reservists.

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

My Lords, I say briefly that the principle in the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, is absolutely right. He has made a cogent case for why special constables are indeed special, and for their contribution. Some 25 years ago, when I chaired the Metropolitan Police Authority in London, we reversed a situation in which the number of special constables was declining, and we started to increase the number—both because of the ability to put more people on the street but also in terms of public engagement with the process.

I will pick up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Evans of Rainow, although I will probably use it in a slightly different direction. He referred to the strategic defence review. That document, the national security strategy and the resilience action plan published last week all talk about a new mechanism of homeland defence and security, and the importance of using more people—more civil resources—to protect the community.

It is quite clear that we are facing a world in which we are confronted with more and more perils—some of them organised by hostile states and others simply the result of the nature of the world in which we live. Therefore, although the principle that the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, sets out here is extremely laudable—people should be encouraged and given the opportunity for time off if they are doing this sort of public service—I would like to understand the context in which this will happen. Will we be able to say, in a year or two, that we have identified how we will use volunteers and the public in the defence of our nation, in terms of supporting the police and our armed services, in a much more proactive way? I suspect that that should be done holistically, rather than simply in terms of this single amendment to the Bill. Having said that, the principle is absolutely right: those people who give that service should be encouraged to do so and should be given the opportunity of time off.

[Lord Paddick (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I draw noble Lords’ attention to my registered interest as a paid non-executive director of the Metropolitan Police Service. I fully support the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe. Special constables have all the powers of regular officers, and some are even trained in public order, able to engage in policing marches and demonstrations where violence is feared, reducing abstractions of regular community officers from their beats, to give one example.

In answer to the comment of the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, about whether this should be part of a broader look at the issues, I say that, at a time when there is cross-party consensus that there should be more visible community policing—and cross-party consensus that there is not enough money to fund the number of police officers we should ideally have—placing special constables’ time off from their employment on a statutory footing, at a cost of only expenses, deserves cross-party support.