Policing and Crime Act 2017 (Consequential Amendments) Regulations 2018

Lord Paddick Excerpts

Wednesday 7th February 2018 Lords Chamber

The Policing and Crime Act is transformational legislation helping to drive improved efficiency, effectiveness and accountability of policing and the fire service. As I have said, many of its provisions are already in force and we are on course to implement further provisions this spring. The draft regulations support the implementation of the Act already approved by your Lordships’ House in the previous Parliament, and I commend them to the House.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing the statutory instrument. The House will forgive me, but my body has decided to go sick two days early, so if I do not make much sense, that probably accounts for it.

The complexity involved in the instrument is staggering. It involves 12 pieces of primary legislation and has 32 footnotes. As far as I can see, the instrument is reasonably innocuous, but I am concerned that people will find it impenetrable. I engaged my noble friend Lady Hamwee to help me to interpret it, and she assured me that if she had eight hours uninterrupted, she could probably be more certain about the impact. With the Brexit legislation to come, when similar statutory instruments may come in a blizzard to this House, the House will be concerned about its ability properly to scrutinise them.

I do not want to go over the discussions we had during the passing of the Act, but I will refer to what the honourable Member for Sheffield, Heeley, said yesterday when these matters were discussed in the other place around the limitations on pre-charge bail. The concern, which we share, is that now that a suspect is likely to be released pending further investigation but not on bail, the suspicion hangs over that individual and they never know whether they will be arrested again, whereas when they were released on pre-charge bail, there was a specific time when that person would come back to the police station. There was a limit to the uncertainty.

We not only argued from my professional experience but quoted evidence from the Police Superintendents’ Association and from the professional bodies in policing that the 28-day limit was not sufficient, bearing in mind the sorts of inquiries that have to be done now in terms of investigating computers, mobile phones and so forth. Can the Minister give us some reassurance about whether, contrary to what the law change was supposed to achieve—that is, to bring investigations quickly to a conclusion—this change may have the opposite effect?